Date: 2011-02-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Paranormal; Horror; Dark; Romance; Erotica; Science Fiction; Adult; Monsters; Menage
Description: Olivia Blake has been taken. Out of the bed where she slept. Out of the nice, safe apartment filled with all her ordinary things. Out of the quiet, Northwestern town where no monsters could possibly exist. Out of her whole human world. But the worst thing about monsters is, they don’t always want to kill you. Sometimes, they want to keep you. OLIVIA is the uncut, uncensored edition of R. Lee Smith’s first full-length erotic horror novel—the tale of one young woman’s descent into a dark, savage new world she must not only embrace, but ultimately fight to save.
Publisher: A Red Hot Romance Erotic Novel

OLIVIA

R. Lee Smith

To my loving sisters, my best editors and my best friends.

Copyright © 2009 by Robin Smith

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

Purplhouse@yahoo.com

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.

Cover designed by Sarah-Jane Lehoux

BOOK I

HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER ONE

HORROR

1

Olivia Blake stood half-naked in the rain and tried to think that she was dreaming.  She wasn’t.  She brought her watch up and tilted it to catch the light from the overhanging lamp in the parking lot.  It was half past three in the morning.  She turned her head to the right and saw the overpass, empty and silent.  She turned her head to the left and saw the sprawling apartment complex where she had been living for not quite four months.  She looked up and saw dark clouds dropping warm summer rain on top of them, still thin enough to show the pale blur of the moon over the mountains.  All around her, women she half-knew clutched each other and cried, babbled pleas at the creatures surrounding them, or stood in their own stupors with terror making caricatures of their own almost-familiar faces, but Olivia could feel no fear.

It was a hot night.  The rain fell and fell onto her upturned face, warm as tears as it slid over her cheeks.  Her nightshirt, she supposed, was soaked, exposing every inch of the body beneath.  She couldn’t care.  Her mind felt syrupy and drugged.  She closed her eyes and wished everything away, but when she opened them again, nothing had changed.

Let me tell you about horror, she thought serenely, studying the row of silent creatures looking back at her.  Horror is nothing you find in the movies, or in the latest Stephen King novel, or even on the news.  Horror is coming home from work one night and waking up to a monster.  Real horror doesn’t scare you.  It’s the stuff that can’t exist and still does, the stuff you have to live with.

The woman on her right was growing louder, more hysterical.  She seized Olivia’s sleeve, babbling, “I won’t let it touch me!  I won’t let it!”

Olivia could only look at her.  The declaration seemed utterly nonsensical.  They were already caught, weren’t they?  It didn’t matter that there was still pavement under her feet and halogen bulbs shining over their heads, they were as caught as caught could be.  The monsters could do whatever they wanted with them now.  That was how these things worked.

As if she had spoken out loud, the woman backed away from her, shaking her head over and over, her eyes round and brilliant with terror.  “How can you be so calm?  How can you just stand there?”

“I have to,” Olivia replied.  “I’m caught.”

The hysterical woman shook her head, first slowly, then violently, and then she lunged around and sprinted for the road.

Olivia watched.  Watched the woman break away from the rest of the herd.  Watched one of the hulking, dark figures detach from the rest of their guards and swoop after her.  Watched black leathery wings unfurl and catch the air like sails as he leapt low into the sky and flew to her. He stooped like a hawk, his feet smacking into her back and knocking her sprawling over the parking lot.  He hopped landed gracefully next to her head, then picked her up by one arm and half-carried, half-dragged her back to the others.  It wasn’t the least bit scary.  It was horror and Olivia was calm.

The monster dropped his recovered captive next to Olivia and stood over her as she wept, watching cars come and go on the overpass.  His bestial face moved in unreadable expressions as he looked from the road to the women to the light overhead.  He shuffled his wings, refolding them, and glanced at Olivia.  She said nothing, did nothing, felt nothing.  The glance lingered.  One of his fellows muttered something in their unintelligible language, and he uttered a coughing sound that silenced all of them.  It wasn’t a glance anymore but a stare; Olivia stared back at him.

She could not think of him as hideous.  He was too strange to be ugly, but he was formidable.  He towered over her by at least a foot, but the broad, black horns that swept back from his brow added at least another foot, and the high, sharp claw that crowned his wings gave the illusion of even greater height.  It made her think of the woman sobbing beside her and of her strange defiance; ‘I won’t let it touch me,’ she’d said, she’d actually said that.  ‘I won’t let it,’ just like there was anything any of them could do to stop it.  How could anyone stop something this big?

When she realized she had been staring at the vast expanse of his chest for several seconds in stoned silence, she made an effort to look him in the eye.  His were oversized and oddly slanted, black and fathomless as the sky, emotionless as he gazed back at her.  Olivia’s chin began to drop again until she was back to staring at his chest, at the ridiculously unreal size of him, at the hard slabs of muscle dimly outlined beneath a pelt of sleek, dark fur.  Then his wings moved and his wings fascinated her.  She stared, seeing nothing else in this whole wide world as he half-unfolded them and gave them a little shake to knock the rain off.  He rolled his shoulders a little when he did it, but otherwise, the wings almost seemed to be a separate entity, unfixed to this reality.  They didn’t even flutter when the wind picked up, but just folded up tight again and hung there in there in two stiff, black wedges.

Olivia reached out and touched one.

She sensed the ripple of silent movement as the other creatures watching her reacted, but the one whose warm wing she explored did nothing.  He held very still, moving nothing but his eyes as she traced the complicated folds of this unfathomable appendage.  The skin of his wing was surprisingly soft and warm and alive.  “Show me,” she said, stroking.  “Show me, okay?”

He was quiet for so long, she wasn’t even sure she’d actually said it aloud, but then he shifted his weight slightly and opened the wing under her hand.  It unfurled, a matador’s cape in brilliant slow motion, and swept outward and upward until it was all there.  It had not occurred to her until now how much like an arm a wing really was.  Backlit as he was against the parking lot’s lamps, she could see the narrow bones coursing down each wing, and dark veins like rivers that pulsed with the rhythm of his alien heart.  Together, they watched her hand travel across his naked skin, until her arm became too heavy to hold up anymore, and she let it drop.

He folded his wing away again with effortless origami and she tried to watch, but her head was getting heavier and heavier.  As her head began to droop, her eyes continued to trail down the length of him until she was sleepily focused on his feet.  He had oddly handsome feet, outrageously oversized, roped with tendon and muscle, with long, thick toes that ended in huge talons.  Like the claws tipping his fingers, they were not sharp, but blunt and worn and black.  He had, she observed clinically, a dewclaw on his ankle, and it was very small, hardly a nubbin, but looked very, very sharp.

And then she couldn’t see anything because her eyes had closed.

Another engine roared by on the overpass, a big one, going fast.  One of the creatures growled out words in their own creaturish language and Olivia heaved the weight of her head back to watch this creature—her creature—think about them.  Their eyes met again, and again the stare caught and held him.

He raised his hand, glanced at it, and curled the fingers as if to hide the short claws that peeked from their tips.  Olivia did not look at his hand.  His eyes were whole oceans, whole skies.  They stood that way, frozen in place, frozen in time.  Then he touched her.

He didn’t stroke, didn’t grip and squeeze, didn’t do anything except touch.  She could feel the leathery pad of his palm, the soft scratch of fur, the smooth curve of one claw pressed to her cheek.  His eyes were endless.

He spoke now, not in the growling, mud-deep words of their language, but in unexpected, awkward English:  “What do you want?”

His voice was thunder in Olivia’s bones, impossibly deep.  It was voice made for growling, she thought, or howling at the moon.  She tipped her head back to look for the moon and blinked rain out of her leaden eyes.

But the crying woman beside her had seized on the creature’s words.  She staggered suddenly to her feet.  “I want to go home!” she cried, and the creature immediately dropped his hand and stepped back to look at her.  “I want to go home!  Let me go, let me go!”

A few of the other women echoed her, but not many.  Some were beginning to look around, as Olivia had, with confusion instead of fear.  Some were nodding off on their feet.

The creature considered the woman as she fell again, sobbing, to the pavement.  At last, he half-turned and motioned at another of the creatures, one considerably smaller, who stepped up at once and lifted the screaming, struggling woman off the ground.  The two creatures conferred in their inhuman rumbles, and then the one holding the hysterical woman led her back towards the apartments, making Olivia wonder if they were going to let her go after all.

“You.”

Olivia looked up at him.

“What do you want?” he asked.  “To…To take?”

She thought about it.

“I want a shower and a clean set of clothes,” she said.

The creature looked over his shoulder and grumbled a question to the others.  There was some discussion, and then he looked back at her.  “What is a shower?” he asked.

“A bath, then,” she said.

He considered this, then nodded and took her by the arm.  It was a cautious grip, a gentle grip, but it was not a human hand.  Olivia looked at it, then at him.  The pavement under her bare feet felt warm and rough and wet.  The rain ran down her hair and dripped off her nose.  It was too much to believe in, too much to not be real.  Olivia took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and started walking.

2

She took him back to her apartment, moving like one in a dream, thinking only how nice the moon looked through the sullen rain clouds.  When they reached the narrow stairway, he released her and let her lead him.  It never occurred to her to run.  Her door was still open.  The knob was loose, hanging away from its fitting, broken.  She knew she’d locked it.  She always locked it.  A single woman in a cheap apartment complex, even in a small town like this one, learns early to always lock the door.  So the monsters don’t get in.

Her monster reached to touch her, hesitated, and tapped at the door jamb instead.  Olivia looked around and saw maybe three other doors, open like hers.  She looked over the banister and saw the knot of captives growing steadily smaller as others were led away back into their apartments for whatever they could think to bring with them.  They were only taking women, she saw.  Only young women.

The creature did not nudge her, only waited patiently, and at last she moved inside.  The apartment was a mess, which was vaguely embarrassing to her.  She didn’t do much housework except on the weekends.  There didn’t seem to be much point in picking up now.  The creature watched as she collected some clean clothes, then followed her into the bathroom.  He looked at himself in the mirror as she sat on the side of the tub to draw herself a bath.

“May I ask you questions?” she said.  It took tremendous effort to speak clearly.

He took a long time to answer.  She had shut the water off and begun to remove her nightshirt when he said, “Yes.”

“What did you do with the others?”

He wrinkled his brow as he translated this.  “Outside,” he said at last.

She shook her head, then stepped out of her panties and into the tub.  The water was too cool to be comfortable, but she lowered herself into it, and reached for the soap. “The others…that live here.  The other people.”

He watched her, unmoving, then answered, “We took no man.  We took no…mother with milking young.”  He frowned as he spoke, watching her closely as if for clues that his words were correct.  When she did nothing except lather up her bar of soap, he glanced away at the open door of the apartment and added, “There are no dead.”

It relieved her.  She hoped it was true.  She glanced up, another question on her lips, and felt it die there.  The indifferent scrutiny in his eyes as he studied her naked body made her want to curl up under the water and live there forever.  She drew up her knees and tried to cover herself with the bath sponge.  “Will you tell me what you want with us?” she whispered.

He thought about it a very long time, but she waited without moving, certain that she could still choose.  That she could always fall back into the water and take a quick snort, if she had to.

At length, he shook his head, more with dry frustration than cruelty.  “I do not have the words,” he said, but she did not quite believe him. He spoke English slowly, carefully, but well.  His only accent was due, she was sure, to the snoutish shape of his mouth.  There might be some things he didn’t know how to say…but she thought he could make his point if he really wanted to.  And looking into his dark, wary gaze, it was clear to Olivia that he meant not to.

She felt her chin tremble and looked down at her reflection in the water.  It was distorted, monstrous.  She didn’t know what else to do, so she continued to bathe.

He watched in silence a little while longer, and then asked, “May I touch you?”

What a baffling question.  He had caught her.  She was taken.  She was his.

That sunk in a little past the pleasant numbness which had gripped her ever since she had first opened her eyes and seen his monstrous face above her in the dark bedroom, felt the points of his claws as he lifted her out of bed.  “Are you taking us away?” she asked, and her voice shook for the first time.

He stood there in her bathroom, this winged, horned, fur-covered creature next to nice, sane white tiles and a tube of toothpaste.  “Yes,” he said.

She waited again to be afraid, but there was only horror inside her, horror and sadness.

“May I touch you?” he asked again, this creature who had caught her, who owned her, who was taking her away.

“Yes,” she replied, and tensed.

He knelt next to the bathtub, plucked the bath sponge out of her hands, hesitated, then picked a spot on her back and scrubbed her.  The only part of his flesh that came into contact with hers was the ball of this thumb.

She forced calm into her limbs, forced her breath to slow and her body to relax.  She closed her eyes and opened her fists, and concentrated on breathing in and out.  He had a smell, not entirely unpleasant, of musk and dark places.  She breathed it, trying to convince herself that she was dreaming.

He dipped water out of the tub with his hands and poured it over her back.  “It is cold,” he observed.

“Do you have baths?” she asked, feeling ludicrous.

“Yes.  They are warm.”  She felt him handling her hair, which hung limp and damp between her shoulder blades.  “Does this need washing?”

She pulled out of his grasp.  “No.”  She stood up, and he stood also and stepped back as she came out of the tub.  She dried herself briskly and climbed into her clothes.  She hadn’t noticed which they were while she was picking them out, but now realized she was wearing a pair of her black office slacks with the tie-dyed T-shirt she wore to wash the car.

She felt like laughing, but knew that if she started, she might never stop.  Instead, she padded back into the bedroom for a clean pair of socks and put them on.  She sat on the bed, put on her running shoes, and tied the laces in a double knot, extra safe, extra secure.  The creature watched her from the doorway.  She looked at him and dug her fingers into the sheets where she had been sleeping just one hour ago, and it was still real and still happening to her.

He moved to the door and stopped, waiting.  “Is there more?” he asked.

She looked around despairingly and saw artifacts out of time, objects without meaning.  The computer which had been the center of her universe all of her adult life sat in front of her with her tropical fish screen saver swimming contentedly back and forth across the monitor, now junk.  Her grandmother’s hand-sewn quilt, an embarrassing ragtag bundle she kept packed away under the bed unless temperatures dropped below the level of her pride, suddenly brimmed with sentiment.  The porcelain tea set treasure she hadn’t been able to live without when she’d spied it at the flea market last summer never crossed her mind; the outrageously tacky oversized coffee cup with the octopus painted on the side became a priceless relic of the last family vacation she would ever take.  Is there more?  Toothbrushes and pop cans and her mix CDs and books and little plastic panda bears and her state quarter collection and that stupid English Lit textbook which she’d been meaning for four stupid years to send back and how was she supposed to know what would hurt the most to leave behind when she had to leave it all?

Olivia went to the closet.  On the top shelf, in the far back, was a box with her photo album in it.  She fished it out and turned back towards him.  “May I have this?” she asked.

He studied it from the doorway.  “What is it?”

“A book.”

He held out his hand.  She gave it to him, certain he would either tear it apart or put it firmly to one side in refusal.  Instead, he turned it over, then opened it up and flipped through it, fingering the plastic pages and peering at the photos.  “Yes,” he said at last, putting the book under his arm.  “Is there more?”

“No.”  Again, she fought tears and won.

He took her arm again and put her before him, following her out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the parking lot.  They were being paired up out there, the women holding whatever souvenirs they had chosen from the tattered shreds of their lives, the creatures shadowing them and growling back and forth at each other.

The woman who had tried to run away was standing and shivering, clutching a saucepan in both hands.  Another had nothing but a teddy bear.  Others had packed paper bags or backpacks.

The rain was coming down harder now, and the moon was entirely hidden by the clouds.  Olivia’s captor patted her arm, then went to talk with another group of creatures.  Olivia stood and waited, watching the overpass.  A cop car drove by, lights flashing, but it was alone.  It didn’t stop and come back to save them.  It didn’t do anything and then it was gone.

Olivia’s creature came back, and took her arm.  He led her out of the parking lot, around the buildings, and over to the steep embankment that dropped away behind the complex.  It stank when it rained because the dumpster was over here and people had a way of throwing their garbage down the embankment when the dumpster was full and the apartment manager refused to clean it up.  There was a fence, but it had mostly fallen in.  The monster took her right to the edge of a good fifty-foot drop into a fetid pit and stopped.  “Turn around,” he said.

Olivia looked down at the rocky, trash-strewn swamp below them.  I could jump, she thought without much conviction.  She was beginning to shiver in the rain, or maybe she hadn’t dried off enough after her bath.  Being cold and uncomfortable reminded her that she was alive.  Her story, whatever that story was, wasn’t going to end here.  As awful as it was to think that all the nice, normal things that had come before—hamburgers and Christmases and trips to the store and oil changes for the car—were over, she was going on.

The creature’s inhuman hand gave her arm a careful squeeze.  “Turn around, please,” he said again.

She turned and faced him.  He tucked the photo album into the broad belt of his loincloth and looked at her, fanning his wings. He beat them twice, stretched them fully, then glanced back at the parking lot where every eye, captor and captive, was on him.  He looked back at her.

“Please, don’t,” she said.  She only said it once.

He put his hands around her waist and lifted her off the ground.  “Hold on to me,” he said.

She did, her arms trembling as they slid around his neck.

He bent his head.  She could feel the breath heaving in his body, the soft spikes of his fur everywhere it touched her skin, his claws digging at her back and the edges of the photo album pressing at her chest.

She was not dreaming.

He jumped.

3

She didn’t scream.  They didn’t fall.  She felt the strangest sensation (she had been on an airplane twice before, so it wasn’t exactly unknown) of the precise moment when gravity lost its grip and the sky took them.  The wind of their passage howled into her ears.  The rain pelted her back like stones. They were flying.

She peered around his arm and saw only the dark shape of his wings beating against the air.  She tried to tell herself it couldn’t be.  Scientifically speaking, there was no way he could be lifting himself off the ground, much less be carrying her added weight.  Of course, the same could be said of bumblebees, too large to fly, but who flew all the same.

This is horror, she thought.  When something impossible exists and refuses to explain itself.

She tried to squirm up enough to see over his shoulder, but he dipped his head in close to her ear and murmured, “Do not move.”

She turned to see the ground and found herself several hundred feet up, soaring away from the still sleeping town and into the foothills.

She heard a scream and turned to see another creature on their left, struggling to hold onto his hysterical woman.  She could see his mouth moving, but couldn’t make out what he said to her.  In any event, it wasn’t helping to calm his captive, so he pulled back as far as he could and butted her in the head.  She went instantly limp and he gathered her up, tossing Olivia’s captor a wincing sort of glance before he dropped back in the formation, out of sight.

Olivia suddenly felt very loosely confined, and tried to scramble further into her captor’s grip, at the same time looking back over her shoulder at the distant ground.

“Do not move,” he murmured again.

“You’ll drop me,” she whimpered.

“Never,” he promised, and flexed his claws.  The tiny pricks of pain steadied her nerves, but she clung to him all the same, locking her ankles and her thighs around his waist.  He lifted his wings and swooped higher, heading towards the peaks of the mountains that had stayed safely on the horizon all the years of Olivia’s life.

“Where?” she stammered.  “Where are we going?”

“Soon,” he said soothingly.  It was not exactly the correct answer, but she found it strangely reassuring nonetheless.

It wasn’t soon, not really.  She couldn’t hold on to her fear enough to keep her awake for the whole flight, and every time she opened her eyes, the shock of the nightmare slapped home.  High Hill Apartments was gone.  So were the lights of town, not just her town, but Sugartree, Poho, Sanctum…every town.  The roads went next, or maybe there just weren’t any cars moving on them for her to see.  She dozed and woke over snapshots of trees and lakes and mountains, and it was a very long time before she realized there was a destination at the end of this journey after all.  There was a single mountain, no different from any other, all dark rock and jagged pines, growing bigger with every passing moment.  If it had a name, she didn’t know it, but the sight of it filled her with drugged dread.

Olivia pulled on the creature’s neck until he ducked his head closer to her.  “Is that it?” she asked, her heart hammering.  “Is that the place?  Is it alive like you are?  Is it…Is it real?”

“Do not move,” he told her.  “Soon, this is ended.  Do not move.”

They were right over the top of the mountain now, not even a hundred feet off the ground, close enough to hear the treetops whistling by beneath them.  The creature carrying her banked suddenly, then performed an aerial feat that nearly stopped her heart in her chest: executing a loop and flying upside-down over the lip of a craggy mountain top and underneath a ledge, into a narrow cavern.  Without slowing, he maneuvered through rocky outcroppings she could scarcely see, aiming for what appeared to be a flat wall dead ahead.  In the last instant before impact, he snapped his wings fully open, then eased his grip on Olivia’s waist and put one arm and both legs straight out.

He struck the wall, his blunt claws sinking into the stone like a warm knife into butter.  His limbs bent to absorb the shock, but Olivia’s back smacked into the stone, and the full length of his hard body crashed into her, pressing the air from her lungs in a harsh, hacking cough.

He immediately drew back, folding his wings small and passing his hand over her several times, less to console her than to check for injuries, she thought.

While he did this, two other creatures landed on the wall, slamming their captives into stone.  Sobbing wails and the leathery slap of wings surrounded her until the fear came back and she had to clap her hands over her ears to keep from screaming herself.  Olivia’s captor tucked his arm back around her waist at once, pressing his strange mouth against her neck.  It was comforting; she wanted to think that was just the drug they’d used, but didn’t quite believe it.

“Hold on to me,” he murmured, close against her ear.  “Do not move.”

And then he started moving again, hand over hand, climbing down.  What she had first taken for a wall was in fact the mouth of a wide shaft dropping deep into the mountain.  At first, she could see the holes made by the passage of many claws, but what little light there was didn’t last.  In seconds, she could see nothing, and hear only her captor’s breath in her ear, the wails and moans of women, and the scraping sounds as the creatures hunted out handholds in the dark.

She only knew when they were coming to the bottom because the echoes changed, and because he gave her another of his distracted little pats.  Then he hopped off the wall, pulled her all the way up into his arms like a small child, and set off down a passage.  He did not move as though he could see, but rather like a man so familiar with his surroundings that he did not need to see.  It was very cold down here, and her damp skin crawled so that she pressed herself further into his fur in a vain effort to share his warmth.

Miserable, shivering, Olivia listened as the sounds of other captives being carried away dwindled into the distance.  Soon, they were alone, moving rapidly through a maze of passages, climbing up and down walls as he encountered them, until he came to a short tunnel with a low ceiling.  He crouched, walking along the brief length of it until he came to the end, then straightened.  There was a narrow passage straight up, like a chimney.  He climbed it, sucking in his breath to avoid scraping her against the sides.

At the top, he put her down.  “Stay,” he said, patting her arm, then moved away.

She waited, hugging herself, fighting back hysteria and tears.  I want to wake up, she thought wretchedly.

A soft light bloomed in a corner, outlining the shape of the creature who had brought her here.  He turned towards her with a blunt, pallid lump of a candle held in a bowl.  He looked at her.  She looked away.

It was a small chamber, not a natural cavern, whose walls and low ceiling had been shored up with cut timber.  The floor, fairly smooth and fairly level, had a roundish mat in the middle of it made of woven reeds.  Behind her, the chimney they’d just climbed out of opened in the center of a sort of abstract mosaic which covered that entire wall, made from clay shards, cracked stones, broken bricks, glass, metal pieces, even animal teeth and bones. There were a few openings to lead out, but apart from the lit candle and a few low, cut-stone benches, she could see no other furnishings.

“Take the light,” he instructed.

She did.  It was smoking heavily, and smelled foul, like burnt bacon.

“Come with me,” he said, already passing through one of the doorways and out of sight.

She followed him, numb to her surroundings, until they came out in a wide, tall chamber with a glow of embers burning in a small fireplace.  He stopped in front of the hearth, pulling the photo album from his belt.

“Please, don’t!” she cried, rushing forward.  “Don’t burn it!”

He held the book out to her at once.  “It is yours,” he said.  “Yours.”

She took it from him and cradled it, feeling the urge to weep rising steadily inside her, billowing out like smoke.

Perhaps he sensed it.  He took the candle from her and placed it on a low table beside a small alcove along one wall.  “This is a place for you,” he said slowly, making curious patterns in the air over the alcove, as if he were smoothing out invisible sheets.

She looked at the fire pit, which put out a surprising amount of heat despite its small size.  The smoke was drawn up through a narrow chimney.  Presumably, it was being funneled out through the top of the mountain, where it would be utterly disregarded.  Mountains always had steam coming off them, didn’t they?

The thought took away what lingering shreds of rescue remained, and she turned away, as though removing the fire from sight would magically restore her hope, but all she could see was the reality of this room.  Because that’s what it was…not a monster’s cave, but a room.  Someone had carved it out, carefully shored up the walls and ceiling, padded the hard, cold stone of the floor.  There were two low tables on either side of the fire, and one rather high table a little further back in the room.  All three held unlit candles and nothing else.  The walls, what she could see of them in the flickering light, had weird markings painted on them in certain places where the rock had been made flat.  In the middle of the room, centered before the fireplace, was a wide pit full of sleeping bags, animal skins and fleeces, even an old canvas tent.  A bed.  His bed.

Frightened all over again, she looked back at her captor.  “Where am I?” she asked, shivering.

He glanced at her arms, then bent and put a few greasy, black lumps on the old red coals, waking up sparks and new heat.  He straightened, reaching for her, but lowered his hand when she backed rapidly away.  “This is a place for you.  For you to be,” he amplified, gesturing again to the alcove.  He spoke slowly, as though unsure of his words.

She crept towards him, then around him, and placed her photo album inside her alcove.

He seemed to relax.  “Good,” he said, patting her arm.

“Can I go back to sleep now?” she asked, her voice breaking a little on the last two words.

His brow furrowed as he translated her request, then furrowed further as he contemplated its meaning.  “Sleep there,” he commanded, pointing at the pit.

She started to obey, but he stopped her with an upraised hand, then pointed at her clothes.  “Remove those things you wear,” he said.

Olivia started crying, reaching up with shaky hands to obey him.  She wept in shuddering, gasping breaths, head bowed and face turned away in a mixture of submission and shame.

When there is no choice, she thought, there is no fear. No fear!  Stop crying this instant!

Fear had nothing to do with it though, and deep down she knew it.  She was tired, she had been uprooted and taken to a horrible place by a horrible person, and she had no hope of ever leaving or finding her way home, but she was not afraid.  Depressed, despairing, repulsed, and exhausted, she succumbed to tears, but not to hysterics or panic.  She knew she was his.

Naked, she stepped into the pit, dropped to her knees, wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and rolled over, sobbing.  She heard him move, heard the low rustle of her clothing being moved to one of the tables.  He put out the candle, poked listlessly at the coals in his fireplace, then came to the side of the pit.  She could feel his eyes upon her, and it made her feel worse.

She heard another sound then—the low whisper of leather on leather as he removed his loincloth and set it with her clothing.  He stepped into the pit, knelt next to her, and unpeeled the sleeping bag.

She moaned and twisted deeper into the hodgepodge of bedding.

He did not move at once, only watched her, then lay down on his side, clumsily pushing one wing out behind him and stretching the other over the both of them like a blanket.

She felt its weight, feather-light, on her hip and thigh, and it was real.  The animal smell of him permeated the bedding underneath her and it was real, too.  She lay, shuddering with the effort of repressing her sobs, and at last, the inner storm began to abate.  She took several gulping breaths, and finally quieted, her hands balled into fists.

She could feel him watching her, hear him listening.  After a while, his hand brushed her waist and rested there.  His palm was at once rough and soft, like well-worn leather. When she didn’t throw it off or fall into weeping again, he slid closer.  She felt his breath on her neck and shoulder.  He moved up against her, and his fur was soft as an otter’s, hard with the muscle and sheer mass of him.  He was real.  It was all real.

A tear slipped out of her eye, over her cheek, and into the pit, but it was alone.  She tucked her head into the crook of her arm and closed her mind away from thought.

Horror is a creature that should not be and refuses to leave.

Horror is being cut from your own life like a tumor.

Horror is having no explanation.

Horror is, and it doesn’t care.

CHAPTER TWO

CAPTIVE

1

Olivia dreamt she was in the front office of the advertising company where she worked.  She was dressed in the tie-dyed T-shirt she used to wash the car, but no one seemed to notice.  Her boss was wearing a leather loincloth and black socks.  Susan Greely from sales walked by with her price list and a saucepan.  There were bats hanging from the ceiling in profusion, flapping their wings.  It was a horrible sound, all of them flapping and flapping.

Olivia twitched and the dream receded.  She struggled to find it again, because the reality that waited for her, she knew, was somehow even more horrible.  She reached out as though to seize her dream and pull it back into her head, and encountered the slithery topside of a nylon sleeping bag.

She opened her eyes, and the first thing she focused on was the edge of a wing draped over her.

The wing, she decided, was quite beautiful.  If it was just the wing, she supposed she could get used to it.  As long as she didn’t think about the creature whose hand rested comfortably around her middle and whose sleeping breaths puffed against her shoulder, she would be fine.

She moved her head just enough to see her watch, tilting it to catch the light thrown by the dying coals in the fireplace.  It was nearly four-thirty in the afternoon.  She hadn’t slept in so late since college.

College.  How could somebody who went to college, who still had eight thousand dollars in unpaid student loans, end up here?  It wasn’t right.  It wasn’t fair.  It didn’t even seem legal.

Olivia settled back into the bedding, letting her eyelids droop heavily.  She watched the wing through her lashes, drowsing.

Far away through the caverns, a woman’s high-pitched terrified scream suddenly jarred both of them to full wakefulness.

Olivia’s captor bolted upright, wings fanning out so swiftly that one struck Olivia in the head and knocked her sprawling in the pit.  He immediately folded them flat against his body, crawling forward to peer at her.

He lifted her hair out of the way to check the side of her head, then turned her face this way and that, frowning as he stared intently into her eyes.  He started to grumble something, then stopped himself, and began again in cautious English.  “Do your eyes hurt?”

“Do my…?”  Olivia lifted one hand in confusion towards her face, then she realized what he must be talking about.  “I’ve been crying,” she said bleakly.

The very tip of his thumb carefully pried her left eyelid a little further open and he leaned even closer, close enough to kiss if she were so inclined.  The thought worked a shudder through her and he growled low, as if in answer, as he searched her eyes.  “Red eyes,” he said, slowly and carefully, either mistrusting his English or to prevent her from panicking.  “Red and…swollen.”

“Yes,” she whispered.  “It’s fine.”

His gaze seemed to pull back somehow, no longer staring at her eyes but into them.  His nostrils flared once, as though he were trying to smell the truth.  He withdrew his hands and stood, backing out of the pit and watching her.  When she didn’t move, he grunted to himself and turned away to retrieve his scant clothing.  He dressed quickly, his ears pricked at the caves beyond and his attention elsewhere as he knotted his loincloth expertly through its wide buckle and fastened the deep, pouch-like belt around his waist.

Olivia suspected she might still be a little stoned; she realized that she had just been staring at the process of donning a loincloth but had not even seen the nakedness it now concealed.  Never mind, she thought.  You’ll see it soon enough.

Her captor made a final adjustment to his coverings and directed a deep, rumbling grunt at her, then tipped his head back with an almost human expression of self-directed irritation.  When he spoke again, it was in his guttural English.  “Stay here,” he told her, and left.

Olivia climbed out of the pit and into her clothes.  She felt painfully alert, as though sensations were screaming at her from every side.  She listened so hard she fancied she could hear the blood rushing over her eardrums, and waited for the scream to be repeated.  Last night, tucked naked beneath the creature’s broad black wing, she thought she knew the reason why she and the others had been captured.  Now, straining for the echoes of that scream, she wondered if she had been very much mistaken—if they had, in fact, been intended as food.

Of course, one did not necessarily negate the other.

Olivia shuddered and scrambled into her clothing, then crawled under the table.  She sat there as long as she could endure the cramped position, but succeeded only in freezing her butt numb on the stone ground.  Gradually, she unlocked her limbs and finally crawled back into the pit long enough to fish out a sleeping bag.  This she carried to ‘her’ alcove, where she curled herself up in warmth and opened her photo album.

There was dust on the binding; she hadn’t looked at this in years.  It had been a present from her father on her sixteenth birthday, but she hadn’t added much.  It bothered her now to know how easily she’d been able to dismiss those memories, just like she thought she’d always have them.

The first page had pictures of her mother and father when they were younger, their wedding picture, and a family photo from both sides, showing all the aunts and uncles and spouses.  Her father’s neat printing named all the faces and dated each event.  On the next few pages were mostly baby photos.  She had no brothers and sisters; it seemed every milestone of childhood, however trivial or insignificant, had been captured here on film in a triumphant parade.  There were pictures of her in Christmas ruffles of cranberry red and holiday gold.  A baby Valentine on a heart-shaped satin pillow with a toy bow and arrows.  A Halloween pumpkin, her chubby face surrounded with green leaves.   First fishing trip.  First Girl Scout recital.  First attempt to ride a bicycle.  Olivia with Dad at a school-sponsored picnic.  Olivia with Mom at the county fair.  Olivia as the Goddess Athena in the school play, holding up an olive branch that was actually a cunningly disguised twig culled from the apple tree in the backyard.  Olivia the teenager, captured in a series of school photos and class pictures, birthdays and field trips.  Then, Olivia’s only two contributions—high school graduation and college graduation—and that was it.

Olivia brushed at her eyes, but found them dry.  The rest of the pages were empty, ready for her to fill.  She knew she never would.  She closed the book, drew up her knees and buried her face in her arms.

How long she sat like that, she didn’t know.  Her body got used to it, stopped trying to focus in on funny sounds or stray thoughts, and just settled, not relaxed, but only numb.  Numb was good enough for her.  But it didn’t last forever.  Eventually, she heard a scrape of toe-claws on stone, and in the next moment, her captor was there, coming around the side of the pit to peer at her uncertainly.  He had a canvas backpack in one hand.  It looked heavy.

“My name is Olivia,” she said.

That stopped him.  He tipped his head back a little, running her words through his mind.  “Olivia,” he said slowly, and again, “Olivia.”  He murmured the sound over and over, drawing it out, committing it to memory.  Her name in his mouth was a travesty, garbled and grumbled and strange.  Then he raised one hand, placed it to his chest, opened his mouth…and said nothing.  His gaze drifted back behind him.  He stared into the darkness, his hand motionless over his heart, and finally looked back at her.  He lowered his hand.

“Olivia,” she said again, patting herself a little desperately.  “Now you, okay?  Now you!”

He came to her, hunkered down beside her alcove, and caught her wrist, stilling her urgent motions.  “Olivia,” he said, looking troubled.

“Now you,” she whispered, feeling the sting of tears in her eyes.

He released her, and then just crouched there and searched her eyes in that dark and troubled way.  One minute.  Two.  At last, he sighed and opened up the backpack, drawing out a small, cloth-wrapped bundle.  “It is for eating,” he explained, gesturing towards his own mouth.

She looked at it, then at him.  She was hungry, but she had also been awake long enough to realize that her bladder was insistently full.  All at once, she realized that she was never going to see another clean white-tiled bathroom with soap and a sink and toilet paper again.

She started crying.

The creature recoiled slightly, his strange, snouted face buckling into an expression of alarm, concern, and profound shame.  He put the bundle of food on the bench in her alcove and started to leave her.

“I need to pee,” she said, sobbing.

He hesitated, looking back at her.

“I have to pee,” she repeated unhappily, heat crawling in her cheeks. She had always been a solitary person, and to speak aloud of such a private function was more humiliating than being naked with him in the pit.  The pleasant numbness of the previous night had utterly abandoned her.  She thought she would die of embarrassment if he insisted on watching her urinate.

He was still trying to translate, and apparently coming up short, and she was dangerously close to wetting herself, so she reached down and grabbed her crotch, writhing a bit in shame and desperation.  “I need to pee!” she pleaded.

Recognition lit up in his eyes.  He took her firmly by the arm and led her through a short maze of dark rooms and passageways until they came to a very small room, really nothing more than a wide place at the end of the tunnel, where water flowed out of the ceiling into a shallow channel, and away through a small hole in the floor.  The creature pointed, then put the candle deliberately on the floor, and withdrew to give her privacy.

Olivia stood and stared in the direction he had gone, shivering.  She couldn’t see anything, but then, the candle only gave out so much light.  He could be back there somewhere, watching her.  There were no walls to put between them, no curtain, not even a corner she could squeeze herself into.  Just the tunnel, the water, and the hole.

She guessed it wasn’t so bad.  It could be a lot worse.  He could have just given her a bucket and made her use it right there in front of him in the sleeping room.  The hole in the floor did smell strongly of dank cave minerals, but nothing worse, and that was certainly better than she could have hoped for, living in a cave.  The water pouring out of the ceiling fell into a shallow, bowl-shaped impression half-way up the wall before it spilled over and dropped into the canal, so there actually was a sink of sorts, and even if there weren’t white tiles, there did appear to be soap.  There was a waxy lump of something anyway, and it lathered up a little when she swished it through the water.  It wasn’t so bad.  It really wasn’t.

Olivia unzipped her slacks and bunched them out of the way, squatting and straddling the canal.  For a moment, nothing happened, and then her bladder released with a sensation that was very nearly orgasm.  Olivia uttered a shuddering sigh of relief, then cried a little more, did up her slacks again, and went to wash.  The soap stung at her eyes some, but did take away the oily feel of her face and the streaks of ash on her hands.  She felt better when she picked up her candle and made her way back through the tunnel, and felt much better still when it opened up into a room and she saw her captor sitting on a bench, waiting for her.

They looked at each other for a long time.

“Thank you,” Olivia said at last, and tried to smile at him.

He looked away.

She held her candle, watched its light flicker with her breath, and concentrated on not bursting out into fresh tears.

He stood up, started to take her arm, then changed her mind and merely gestured for her to follow him.  They went, not back to the sleeping room, but down another passage and to another room.  The one with the chimney in it, she realized, seeing the impressive mosaic.  The way out.

The creature pointed at the dark opening of the chimney.  “No,” he said.  “Olivia does not go there.”

She nodded to show she understood, took a small step back.

“This is my place to be,” he went on, frowning as he picked out his words.  “All place…places…Olivia may go.  All but this.”  He pointed at the chimney again, his eyes narrowing as he watched her face.

“Okay.”

He frowned, but uncertainly rather than with severity.  “Yes?”

“Yes.”

He leaned back, his wings shifting and refolding, then motioned at one of the benches and sat.  He waited, his eyes on the tempting black of the chimney’s opening, until she had settled herself uneasily at his side, glanced once at her white knuckles where she gripped her candle, and then took it away and set it carefully on the floor.  “Olivia,” he said solemnly, “you are…here.”  He raised his hand and gestured at the enclosing rock, grunting out a few alien words before adding, “Mountain.  Empty…inside mountain.”  His hand dropped, rubbing at his jaw with what seemed frustration.  He said the same grunting words, and then fell silent.

“Who are you?” she asked.

His frown grew on him slowly, like the trouble in his eyes.  He did not answer.

“What do you want with me?”

He growled under his breath, saw her shiver back, and quieted again.  After a moment, he said, “You will stay.”  He let that sink in for a few seconds, then added, “We will keep you here.  With us.”  He looked towards the sleeping pit and his expression both tightened and darkened.  Without looking at her, he said, “You are mine.”

She burst into those stupid tears again, and even though she tried not to say it, the words came spilling out: “Are you going to eat us?”

He had no trouble translating that.  He stared at her, then looked down at his empty hands and flexed the claws.  “No,” he said, very quietly.

She hitched in her breath, fighting back towards calm, and heard herself whimper, “Are you going to eat us?  You’re not, are you?”

He sighed.  “No, Olivia.  Olivia is not for eating.  The others are not for eating.  You are…You are mine,” he said again, stressing each word, and shaping his face into an expression of uncomfortable resolve.

Sensing where the conversation was limping towards, Olivia summoned the courage to ask, “Aren’t there any women like you?”

She held her breath while he translated this.

“There are,” he said guardedly.  It seemed that he wanted to say more about this, but at last, he shook his head and said, “I do not have the words.”

Olivia swallowed the dread that had been slowly creeping up on her ever since her capture, and asked, very calmly, “Am I going to die here?”

He answered quickly, as though to reassure her, “You will live here, Olivia.”  He gauged her reaction, then added, “You will never leave.”  He continued to study her face, concerned, but when she didn’t break out into hysterics, he seemed encouraged enough to continue.  “I will teach you to speak.  I will take you out from here.  You will be my…my…”  He patted once at his chest, then scowled at the candle, stymied.  After a while, he dragged in a breath and said, “I am not…bad, Olivia.”

She nodded mutely.  Her fears had not been allayed, but at least she had some foundation to build on.  She would learn his language, and that was at least something to anchor to.

“Good.  You stay, Olivia.  I will come back, not soon.  Please, do not leave this place.”  He began to withdraw, then visibly braced himself and faced her again, his face tight with strain.  “If you leave, I will find you.  If I must find you, Olivia must be made to stay.  I do not want this,” he said, staring intently into her eyes.  “Olivia…does not want this.”  With that, he stood and left her.

2

She cried.

3

After a while, Olivia came to the unpleasant conclusion that hearts don’t really break, homesickness and despair can’t kill you, and she was hungry.  It wasn’t hard to find her way back to the sleeping room, to the bench where he’d left her breakfast.  She had been vaguely expecting mushrooms or roots, so it was a surprise to see a heavy, round loaf of bread and an apple.  The bread was a mix of different tastes and textures, none of them particularly good.  Dense, bitter, and nearly too tough to chew, it came packed with unpleasant surprises: onions, herbs, nuts, seeds, and God knew what else.  She ate it all, threw the apple core into the fire, and peeked inside the backpack to see if there was more.  There wasn’t, but there was a plastic 2-liter pop bottle filled with an ominous, brownish liquid.  The smell was at once earthy and herbal, but the taste was of sweet, cool tea and she drank almost half of it right away.

There was still no sign of the creature’s return, so the next thing she did, once she decided she had to do something, was take the bed apart.  She put the tents in one pile, sleeping bags in another, and furs in a third, then sat in the center of the empty pit for a long time.  The naked rock put her legs and her butt to painful sleep almost at once, but she didn’t try to move. She sat and stared into the glowing coals, running her fingers over the tool marks left in the pit when it had been hacked out of the rock.  The reality of those scars had a calming effect on her, as much in its way as seeing the soap in the bathroom.  Animals may use blankets—the gorillas at the zoo dragged some around, and a dog might fluff up his favorite pillow before he lay down—but they didn’t build beds, not like this.  She put it back together with the tents on the bottom, the furs on ‘his’ side and the sleeping bags on ‘hers’.

She felt better, looking at that, just as though she thought he would see those boundaries and respect them.

Olivia stepped out of the pit and walked around the sleeping room slowly, really looking at it this time.  It was amazing how much it looked like a real bedroom.  Maybe it shouldn’t have been, but it was.  He kept the stack of his spare loincloths and buckles just where she would have expected to find them—in a cardboard box under a bench close to the pit—and he’d incorporated pieces of human life into his primitive and alien one with surprising ease.  A weathered flashlight had been tucked away in a box of unburned candles and lighters on the carved rock shelf above the fireplace.  An ancient-looking leather boot, a tennis racket, and a rusted old hubcap had all been very deliberately arranged on separate shelves, apparently for decorative purposes alone.  A handful of magazines and catalogues—Mountain Living, Fish and Field, L.L. Bean, that sort of thing—going back more than twenty years, occupied a corner of the sleeping room, many of them earmarked at pictures of humans to indicate a closer than casual study, and he’d made sure they were all in easy reach of her alcove.  Her ‘place to be’.

Maybe he thought seeing them would comfort her.

The weird thing was…seeing them did.

Olivia picked up her candle and went hesitantly out to see the other rooms, reasoning that they were hers now, whether she liked it or not, and she’d ought to know her way around.  It took longer than she ever would have imagined to memorize the layout of the creature’s lair; she’d never realized how completely she depended on windows and other landmarks to find her way around.  None of the rooms opened directly on each other, and in the sickly light of the smoky candle, all the narrow passageways that connected them looked the same.  She couldn’t exactly get lost in only four rooms and half a dozen tunnels, but she did manage to turn herself around once or twice.

Four rooms, the smallest of them the entry chamber with the chimney where Olivia had been forbidden to go.  It seemed excessive for a monster’s lair.  Perhaps it seemed so to him too, because he didn’t seem to know what to do with them all.  One of them seemed to be nothing but storage—empty camping coolers pushed under stone benches, cardboard boxes and backpacks stacked on top, shelves and shelves and shelves cut into the walls holding only a few tins and jars stuffed with dried roots or leaves.  His hunting tools were there as well: an Okuma rod and reel mounted on a wall between two wooden spears with very sharp metal points and an assortment of chipped-stone and modern steel knives.

But what she found herself returning to again and again were not his sparse furnishings, but the symbols which marked each room, either painted onto flattened patches of the wall, or pressed into rough mortar to make more of those abstract mosaics.  They had no kind of symmetry or identifiable ethnicity; they were neither Aztec nor African nor Chinese nor any other kind of art.  If the little human touches she encountered brought her towards calm, these symbols were the force that pushed her violently away.  She could touch them and feel the paints flake up under her fingernails, she could even smell some of them (the blue paint was particularly pungent and unpleasant), but looking at them filled her with a sense of dread.  They were everything the creatures were: monstrous and inexplicable.

So she sat in her alcove and cried and looked at her photo album.  When she couldn’t do that anymore, she went to the entry room and cried where she could torture herself with the dark hole of the chimney at her feet, knowing she didn’t dare to crawl down.  What would it bring, but only the first stumbling step into a subterranean labyrinth filled with monsters she would have to evade until her candle burned out and plunged her into blackness?  There was no escape.  She could remember last night well enough to recall that the only way in came with a seemingly endless climb down that sheer vertical shaft, and she could remember gym class well enough to know she couldn’t even do a damn chin-up, so no, there was no escape.

She left the entry room before her owner could come back and find her there and wandered the twisting halls and echoing rooms of her new home, crying when she thought of it, but mostly just staring into space.  She read one or two of the magazines.  She polished the hubcap with the loose sleeve of her t-shirt.  She added a log to the fire when the coals began to die out (it wasn’t a wooden log, but a very heavy, densely-compacted mass that seemed more like dried muddy moss, maybe peat, she didn’t know). In a dark corner of the storeroom, she discovered a host of curious treasures packed away in a Coleman cooler: a ball of string, a Rubik’s cube, an empty whisky bottle, an Etch-a-sketch, and several primitive toys, including a wooden board carved into a rounded triangle-shape, into which fifteen shallow holes had been bored in a pyramid arrangement.  A small leather bag next to this board held fourteen dull river rocks, just the perfect size to sit in those holes.

Olivia sat down by the cooler and puzzled the game out in a fugue of unhappiness. She began at one corner, using one stone to jump over another into the hole, removing the stones as she jumped them, attempting to leave only a single stone on the board.  When, eventually, she managed to accomplish this, she tried to jump stones so as to leave one in each corner.  She was still working at solving this when she heard her name being called.

“I’m in here,” she called, resetting the game.

He came in, carrying an old wine jug. He set it down and hunkered beside her, watching her play.  After a moment, he placed one finger deliberately on the board and spoke in his language.

She repeated his words, but distractedly, slurring them together.

He corrected her, tapping at the board to draw her attention, and when that earned him another half-hearted effort, he took the game away.

He looked at her, the wooden board in his clawed hand, and waited.

She tried.  The low, rumbling speech of the monsters did not want to work in her mouth, but she tried, and he very patiently and implacably corrected her again and again until she got it right.  At last, he nodded.  His lips moved on his snout in a small but clearly recognizable smile, but it had very little true humor or happiness in it.  He gave the game back and left her.

She didn’t want to play anymore, but after several minutes of sitting there, she found herself looking at the stones anyway, picking them up, moving them.  The world just kept turning and there was nothing else to do.

4

Her watch kept faithful track of time.  It was just past ten at night when her captor returned.  He found her in the sleeping room, sitting in her alcove with the last of the sweet tea and the Rubik’s cube.  She’d had one once, years ago, and had never been able to solve it.  She didn’t think she was going to solve this one either, but it passed the time.  The monster with no name stood in the doorway, watching her twist blocks of color this way and that without expression.  He looked tired.

“Olivia,” he said at last.

She pretended not to hear him, working harder at her toy.

“Olivia.”  He gave her a command in his language, pointing at the Rubik’s cube. Playtime was over.

Olivia set it down reluctantly, there in her alcove.  She pondered briefly what had happened to its owner, but decided to save the asking of that question until she thought she could live with the answer.  This was her toy now, and that had to be good enough.

He took a seat on the stone bench nearest to her alcove, unwrapping dinner and laying the food—more bread, a handful of mushrooms, and a hunk of cooked meat—out beside him.  He glanced at her, hesitated, then made a little room and beckoned to her.

She didn’t want to sit with him, and he must have seen it in her eyes, because he beckoned again and this time, pointed.  His shadow on the wall behind him flickered with the coals, almost seeming a separate, breathing entity.  His horns spiked out, devilish and menacing.

“Olivia,” he said again.  His arm lowered.  He looked at her as she fought not to tremble, and then said, softly but firmly, “You are mine.”

She was, wasn’t she?

Olivia sat on the bench and picked up a mushroom.

He said a word.

She repeated it dully and took a bite.

He said another word, exaggerating the eating motions.

She repeated it around a mouthful of mushroom, wondering if he was going to teach her all the way through the meal.

He did indeed intend to.

Olivia repeated what he said, although she had no idea what she was saying.  But she was his, and if this was what he wanted to do with her…well, it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

When the meal was finished, he sat back and just looked at her for a while.  The firelight turned his dark eyes red.  He got up and went to the place where he kept his spare loincloths, digging through them to retrieve a small and much-used terrycloth towel.  He held it out, said a word, then mimed scrubbing his face, and held it out again.

She took it and a candle and went to wash. She found her way down the right tunnel, relieved herself into the canal, then cleaned as much of her body as she could reach with his stinging soap.  When she was done, she smelled a great deal like he did, earthy and strange.

She started to dress again, realized the futility of that action, and felt her dinner immediately congeal into a hard, greasy lump in her stomach.  She bunched up her clothes, picked up her candle, and made herself walk back into the sleeping room and stand naked before him.

He looked at her, then away.  His head bent.

Time stretched and stretched and would not break.

In silence, he began to undress.

5

Olivia put the candle out and set it on the bench.  She put her clothes in her alcove, fussing with and folding them, anything to delay what was coming.  At last, unable to put it off any longer, she stood and turned around.

He straightened up and faced her.  Red light from the coals burned on his black hide, caught the angles of his leathery wings, and turned his gleaming claws and talons to flame.  His pelt rippled down over suggestions of muscle, thicker at his forearms and shins, thickest of all at his groin.  His penis, a long, thick hairless organ dangling from the heaviest thatch of fur, stirred in her such a swelling of horror and despair that for a moment, she thought she would faint.

Olivia jerked her eyes away, biting back useless pleas, and saw him studying her body with the same trepidation and unease.

Startled, she looked down at herself.  She didn’t work out as often as she should, but she took pretty good care of herself and had always been proud of her slender waist and soft curves.  Her breasts were not small and jutted out like they should.  Her hips were lean, but not boyish.  She had naturally smooth, almost hairless skin, although she didn’t tan worth a damn and was in fact white enough that she almost seemed to be glowing in the darkness.

She wondered how she must appear to him—a small, bald, wingless woman.  Flat-faced, defenseless, and utterly unsuited for the life he led.  Ugly.

She looked up at about the same time he finished his contemplation of her body, and their eyes met.

“Come here,” he said quietly.

She told her feet to move.  They simply stood there, rooted to the spot.

He tried diplomacy.  “Come here, please.”

She unlocked her knees and stumbled forward, stepping into the pit to join him.  They stood spare inches apart, looking at each other.

He reached up, put a hand on her arm and rested it there, studying her.  She smiled timidly, trying to quiet her leaping stomach.  He brought up the other hand and caressed her hip.

Olivia began to cry again.

The hand that was not exploring the lower curves of her body came up to brush at the tears.  He seemed almost embarrassed for her, fanning out his folded wings slightly as though to shield her.

It took less than a minute to get herself under control.  She wiped her eyes dry, unable to meet his gaze, shivering.  She looked down, saw his club-like penis half-erect, and looked away, cold with panic.

“Olivia,” he said, not with desire, but gentle all the same.  “Come here, please.”  He said something more, in his deep, grumbling language, but she couldn’t understand.

Anyway, it didn’t matter.  It wasn’t as though he were giving her a choice.  She inched another step closer.  He closed the distance with a step of his own.  She felt heat and hardness pressed against her thigh.

He touched the tip of one finger to her breast, brushing almost curiously over one fear-hard nipple.  He traced the line of her jaw, her lips, her nose, her brow.  He combed his claws through her hair.  He outlined the contours of her back and buttocks, explored her ribs and the jumping muscles of her abdomen.

He hesitated, then knelt and pulled her down with him.  She rolled instantly onto her belly, but he didn’t try to turn her.  He just kept stroking her back.  She could feel the weight of his stare.

He’s not going to do anything, she thought, and never mind his erection.  Nothing was going to happen here.  Nothing.

He made a humming sound, very low, right at the edge of her ability to hear it, and she felt him combing her hair over one shoulder.  He bent, his breath hot on the back of her neck, and hummed again, toneless and so deep. She locked up like a fist, expecting him to lick at her, but he just moved a littler lower down, humming at the space between her shoulderblades.  His hand, petting her in those long passes, moved lower, over her bottom, to cup her sex.

She jumped.  Her legs were already together; tightening them up only trapped his hand against her.  He hummed again, rubbing his fingers up and down along her folds.  Up and down, nothing more, and she couldn’t stay tense forever.  As her thighs unlocked, the creature hummed louder, shifted again, and finally touched his mouth to the back of her neck.

He didn’t do anything then, not even hum.  He was motionless except for his hand.  His breath was steady, hot, and shallow.  After a moment, he opened his lips a little and grazed his teeth across her, humming once, raggedly.

This was going to happen and she didn’t want it to happen like that, feeling fur on her back and teeth on her neck.  Olivia, trembling, rolled over and made herself lie flat, her hands digging at the bedding.

He waited until she had settled herself, content to watch her.  His eyes had taken on that smoky, unfocused look of arousal, strangely comforting in its familiarity.  When she was quiet again, he slipped his hand back down between her thighs and found her sex.  He stroked once, twice, and then probed between the lips of her labia.  Her thighs clenched once, instinctively, and he hummed at her and waited, not moving, while she tried to relax.  As soon as her muscles unlocked, he penetrated her with his finger, slowly but deeply.  She could feel the blunt pebble of his claw pushing at her, cooler and smoother than the rest of him, as he worked his finger back and forth and finally withdrew.

His face was a mask of determination and unhappiness, but there was heat there too, and that heat increased as he brought up his hand and breathed in her scent.  He looked at her in the firelight for a long time as she shivered, and then he reached for her.

Again she bit back a strangled wail of fear and misery, but again, his hands on her stroked and petted until she relaxed to him.  She jumped when he touched her breasts and after a slight hesitation, he touched them again, rubbing his palms slowly across her until the friction raised her nipples painfully erect.  There was a warmth kindling in her belly, familiar and wholly unwanted.  She did not desire this creature, but discovered to her horror that the body doesn’t always need desire.  She thought nothing could be worse than being taken by force, but that was before she realized that he would not have to force her.

She moaned, and it seemed to her ears that the sound held more of arousal than of dismay.  He heard it too, and his voice rose with hers in a powerful thrumm.  He moved his hand between her thighs and she parted without conscious thought, feeling only the hot throb of physical want.  His wings snapped out above her and then the hard/soft weight of his furred body was on her and the hot, slick steel of him was pressed hard against her.

He braced himself on one powerful arm, lightly cupped her hip in his other hand, and cautiously pushed inside her.  Olivia locked her jaws on a scream of pure panic, and made no sound as she felt every slow inch of his cock filling her until she thought she would split open.  Back and forth, he moved, testing her as he had with his finger, forcing himself in deeper and deeper until at last, their hips met.  He lay sheathed and, for a moment, that was all.  She was not a virgin, but nothing in her limited sexual life could have prepared her for the sheer size of him, or for the sensation of his powerful body and soft pelt rubbing over her breasts and belly as he began to move.

Warily, he thrust at her, working the full length of his cock slowly in and out with growing confidence until her body rocked with him.  When he seemed satisfied that she would neither struggle nor start crying, he lowered himself from the rigid position he’d held above her, letting her take his weight.  She didn’t fight it, and soon he lay tensely atop her, all his body clenching and flexing with the force of his movements.  The strange bulge and soft down of his bestial cheek pressed against hers; his breath came in thick, thrumming pants against her ear and shoulder.  His hand on her hip never moved.

Olivia lay rocking, hearing only the blood rushing in her ears and the low, growling hums of the thing that mated with her.  It took a long time, long enough for her to feel the heat of her traitor body as his thick, hard organ stroked relentlessly inside her.  It was physical, purely physical, but it was impossible not to feel, like the friction of his pelt lightly rubbing at her nipples, like the muscular flex and heave of his body crushing against hers.  She could feel, as if from a great distance, her own muscles gripping and shuddering as she came, milking an immediate spastic jet out of him.  He groaned in her ear, pumping at her just a little harder, a little faster, as her climax receded, and then he arched and came for real, filling her with the hot splash of his cum.

He lay on her, breathing hard, not speaking.  Finally, he pulled free of her and to one side, his gaze brooding on the wall above her head, looking pensive and a little relieved, as if he were thinking, Well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

Olivia rolled onto her side and buried her face in a sleeping bag, breathing in torturously slow breaths until she was positive she wouldn’t cry.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked.  His voice was dull, emotionless.

She shook her head, her throat too tight to speak.

He reached out to touch her arm, and when she didn’t throw him off, he rolled close against her and wrapped her in a wing.  “I am…not bad, Olivia,” he said quietly.

And maybe it was even true, but it didn’t matter, really.  She was his.  And this was just the way it was.

CHAPTER THREE

REFLECTIONS

1

Once, in another life, when Olivia had lived in the real world without monsters, she had gone to college and taken a sociology class because word was the teacher was a flaky old hippie who gave easy credits.  The teacher was indeed something of a soft touch, and a flake, and a hippie, and to illustrate his various points, he liked to use the characters of Gilligan’s Island as the ideal working model of sociology in action.

“This show,” he used to say, “is a completely accurate depiction of the reformation of civilization.  Note the importance of class in social structure.  Note the use of gender roles.  From a sociological and psychological viewpoint, this is pretty much we could expect to see if seven people were isolated from culturally-enforced standards of behavior.”  Whereupon some jackass would invariably ask if that meant that seven people stranded on a tropical island would build a working radio out of coconuts and meet the Globetrotters, and the class would bust out in a more or less serious debate on whether or not the Professor was having it off with Ginger or Mary Ann or both or, heck, Gilligan.

Olivia found herself thinking back on that class quite often in the first days after her capture.  Not about Gilligan’s Island (even the slaves of cave-dwelling bat-monsters had some standards), but rather on the subject of what her teacher had called ‘instinctive sociological reversion’.  Essentially, he had put forth the idea that when separated from the security of the familiar, any individual will fall back on the same behaviors which were instinctive to his or her primitive ancestors and which lie more or less dormant in civilized society.

Example: A front-office receptionist named Olivia Blake, twenty-four years old, college-educated and reasonably independent, has been essentially removed from the planet Earth and set down in a cave with a monster.  There’s no phone, no lights, no motorcar; not a single luxury.  Like Robinson Caruso, it is as primitive as can be…and this time, there are no coconuts.

In the movies, this would be young Olivia’s cue to devise some sort of daring escape, probably killing her captor in the process, although he would keeping popping up sporadically like some demonic Billy Bop’em doll, until she finally, what?  Dropped a giant satellite dish on him?  Shot a rusty cannon at him?  And then she would stand triumphant on the side of the mountain with the wind in her hair and utter some unbelievably bad-tasting joke (“He had to catch a call,” in the case of the dropping satellite dish, and maybe that old tried-and-true, “He’s fired,” in the event that she went along with the cannon).  Ideally, she should also have a good-looking guy under her arm, but in any case, she would definitely have all the other captive women in some state of undress scrambling for their freedom down the mountainside before her as the music swelled and the end credits began to roll.

This was not the movies.

Olivia was caught and most of the time, she didn’t even care.  She knew she should.  She even wanted to.  But when she did care, the feeling came with such a splintering sense of anguish and loss that some vital part of her simply couldn’t bear it, overloading like an emotional circuit breaker and switching her off into disconnected darkness once more.  It was better to just go along and make the best of things.  It wasn’t a heroic way to think and she knew it, but it was the only way she had to cope.

And now and then, Olivia would look up and around the rough rock walls and think, I’m coping really rather well with all this, in a vaguely satisfied way and either laugh or cry and then go back to whatever she was doing.  She wasn’t going to escape and she wasn’t ever going to meet the Globetrotters, but she was coping nicely and that was fine.

Sometimes Olivia thought she was losing her mind.  Sometimes, sitting in the light of the gently popping fire and toying with the items in the cooler, she could actually hear the voice of her World History teacher addressing some invisible classroom.  ‘Here we see Olivia idling away her free hours with a device called a Rubik’s Cube.  Olivia has quite a lot of spare time.  As the lone female of the bat-man, she has no responsibilities apart from sexual submission.’

When the creature brought her food, the invisible teacher might say, ‘Olivia’s captor is demonstrating his fitness as a mate by providing her with nourishment.  Olivia’s most basic nutritional needs are adequately met by the foods he has hunted and gathered for her.’

When he commanded her to undress and come into the sleeping pit, that cheerful academic would observe, ‘Olivia’s captor is asserting his dominance through the use of sexual behavior, and as Olivia submits to this, she re-enforces his position both as her mate and as her master.’

It was nice to hear this voice, even if the things it chose to say humiliated and angered her, because at least it was companionship of a sort.  The creature ate with her and slept with her, but left her alone in his lair the rest of the time; even when he was with her, he often just watched her, usually from a considerable distance and with a brooding expression.  While a part of her knew that hearing voices, no matter how interesting and academic their narrative might be, was not sane behavior, insanity had a way of looking better and better as the days crawled by and the monster who imprisoned her remained real.

But the human mind can be stubbornly resilient, and at last, wearily, she had to accept the fact that people could not simply choose to go crazy.  Gradually, the voice of her World History teacher faded into nothing.  Now she was utterly alone.

The days took on a numbing monotony.  As night fell, the creature would wake, dress, and disappear, leaving Olivia behind to entertain herself.  He came and went throughout the day, bringing her food and water, making sure she had enough of that strange, not-wood fuel for the fire, and often just sitting and staring at her.  Sometimes he brought her things: a comb whose delicate teeth appeared to be carved from bone, a different magazine after he saw her flipping despondently through the pages of the others, a chew toy in the shape of a frog that croaked when she squeezed it.  If she spoke to him, he seemed to listen, even if he didn’t answer; if she pointed at anything, he named it in the growling, guttural language he spoke; if she broke down into one of her not-infrequent crying jags, he left her alone.  Now and then, he renewed his warning not to leave his lair, and Olivia obeyed, although her feet had a way of taking her to that front room so that she could stand and stare miserably at the dark hole that promised egress, if not escape.  And so her nights passed.

Around dawn, according to the faithful face of her wristwatch, he would return with the last meal of the day and sit with her to share it.  Always, patiently, he would speak the words of the food he gave her until she began to glean their meanings.  Then he would take her into the washroom and speak the words for water, for clean, and on one awkward day, for her various bodily functions. When she came to bed, he told her the words for sleep, for bedding, for undress.  Then he would take her, and when he took her he did not speak.

She saw no one else but him.  He never told her his name.

Olivia had begun to keep a calendar, using her finger dipped in ash to make surreptitious marks near the hearth, but on the fifth day she stopped because the futility of it depressed her.  The days were all the same, anyway, and if it were not for the fact that her watch kept track of such things, she would not know what day it was at all.  The creature manufactured a routine for her, and Olivia fell into it with all the numb-eyed enthusiasm of complete instinctive sociological reversion.

And one day, that routine changed.

2

Olivia was sitting in her alcove playing the triangular game with stones when her captor appeared with the mid-night meal.  He set it down on the bench by the fire, turned to go back to whatever it was he did all night, then stopped.  After a while, it sunk in that he hadn’t moved or spoke, and Olivia lifted her head cautiously and looked at him.

He was staring at her, his eyes blazing, his nostrils flaring as he tasted the air.  She heard him growl once, raggedly, and then again, a little louder.

Olivia’s hands clenched on her game, shaking stones loose.  A return of that first, gut-wrenching irrational fear that he would eat her, pounce on her and rip her open with his fangs, clawed its way so deep into her brain that, for a moment, she was in danger of wetting herself in terror.

“Olivia,” he growled, and all his voice was a thrumm of raging lust.  “Olivia, I am going to hurt you.”  He began to move towards her, hooking his blunt claws into his belt and snapping the fishing line stays with a single pull.

Her scream was completely involuntary, but not loud, issuing as it did through a throat frozen by fear.  She scrambled away in a confusion of limbs, trying simultaneously both to stand and to run on all fours.  Where she thought she would go, she did not even consider.  Like a calf in the sights of a lion, she thought only to run from him.

And like a lion, he sprang.  His arm hit her like an iron bar, and then she was flying backwards through the air.  She struck the tangled bedding on the sleeping pit, and immediately ensnared herself in folds of blankets and furs.  He loomed over her; she kicked at him wildly, and he caught her ankle and pulled it out from her body, filling his lungs with the scent of her spread legs, exhaling a roar before he fell on her.

His hands were weapons for the first time in all the days she had known him, shredding her clothes when he could not pull them from her fast enough.  He didn’t even bother to uncover her completely, but just ripped her slacks away, leaving faint scratches over her belly and thighs.  The sight of that, and of the thin ribbons of blood that welled there, undid what was left of Olivia’s control.  She began to scream and kick and thrash at him.

His strength, scarcely hinted at before now, was brutal, mindless, and utterly without emotion as he yanked her legs wide and reared between her thighs.  In a last, desperate act of fear, Olivia sent her fist smashing into the center of his face.

He rocked back, unfazed, then seized her arm as she struck again.  She had the disorientating sensation of spinning bonelessly through the air before she landed face down in a suffocating pile of sleeping bags.  His claws dug into her hips.  He yanked her up, and knocked her thighs apart with his knees.

Then she was shoved violently forward with the awesome splitting force of his penetration.  He had never been what she would call skilled, but had always been gentle, always.  Olivia’s mind reeled with panic and fear as he fucked hard into her, driving at her like a piston in increasingly short and brutal thrusts, his flanks thudding against her, spreading her wider and wider until she could feel her bones screaming out in protest.  She clawed madly to escape him, gaining inches only to be slammed back against him, harder, faster, until his roars reached feverish pitch and he came convulsively and fell atop her.

She lay, arms sprawled out, sobbing, while he continued to grip her hips and snarl his panting breath hot on her back.  Then, without warning, she felt him begin to swell hard and hot inside her.  He reared back, dragging her with him as she struggled, and then he was fucking her again, fucking her in curt shuddering bursts until his cock was a weapon once more and he could stab her with it again and again.

Olivia scrabbled for purchase in the bedding and managed to brace her hands on the stone rim of the pit.  The sudden resistance only allowed him to thrust harder, baying pleasure like a bull and ramming into her until she felt the furious spray of his seed and it was over.

This time he dropped back and out of her.  She was able to gain her feet and make a clumsy bolt for the doorway, but he was on her before she had gone five steps  He fought her all the way to the ground, pinning her arms over her head and grinding his hips against her until he hardened.  Grunting and growling, he drove himself at her until his blind thrusts brought the head of his cock against her sex, made slick and ready by his first attacks; he was in her easily, so easily, even as she bucked and struggled.  Every muscle stood out in sharp relief, even through his pelt, as he rocked and pitched and heaved and finally came, only to continue thrusting and thrusting until he was hard again.

Olivia, her throat raw with screaming, her face a sticky mask of tears and terror, finally reached the limit of her lucid mind and snapped over into blind hysterics where she knew no more.

3

She came around to the sound of her name, called over and over in strained, inhuman tones.  She flinched, her eyes snapping open, and saw that she lay safely swaddled in the sleeping pit and that her captor was bent over her, cradling her head.  She tried to get away, but the pain was so immediate and overwhelming that she collapsed back into his lap and burst into tears.

“Why?” she wailed, forgetting even to attempt his speech.  “Why?  What did I do?  I’ll never do it again!  I’ll never—”

His hand clapped hard over her mouth and pressed down, forcing her silent.  She could feel him shaking through his palm, could feel the pulse of his heart beating just as she had felt it through his monstrous cock when it was deep inside her.  She lay and breathed and gradually wound down from the heights of terror and confusion, but he wept on.  Finally, she reached her shaking hands up and tugged timidly at his wrist.

He released her, crawled backwards out of the pit and huddled, not looking at her.

Olivia sat up woodenly and rolled onto her side.  There was an awful moment when she feared she might have dislocated her hips and then it took her weight.  She stood and backed away from him onto the solid surface of cool rock.  He let her go.  She thought of running then, but running was beyond her.  Walking with the slow, ragged dignity of great pain, Olivia moved her aching body into the washroom.  He did not watch her go.

She hadn’t thought to bring a candle and after a moment’s tentative exploration of her body, she thought that best.  She had no desire to catch even a  glimpse of herself in the surface of the running water.  She ran her fingers over herself and felt raised welts, slashes, and the rubbery crust of dried semen nearly everywhere she touched.  It was as vivid a picture as she ever wanted to see.

Olivia found her little towel in the dark and wet it.  She scrubbed her face and that felt good.  She lifted her hair to wipe at the back of her neck, and that felt good too.  Beginning to cry, quietly and without tears, she wet it again and pressed it to her throbbing sex.

Her sobs became a terrible moan, one she knew he’d have to hear and still she could not contain it. She could not bear to rub, even a little, but just held it there, bleeding agony into its coolness until it had no more comfort to give her.  How long had she been unconscious beneath him?  How many times had he forced his way back inside her while she lay limp and bleeding on the floor?  She didn’t want to think about it, but the thoughts were there and so was the dark, and between the two of them, Olivia wept and wept.

After a long time, she finally wet her rags again, found the soap, and tried to wash up, hunting out sticky clots of semen by touch and scrubbing them away.  How many times was a drumbeat in her mind, but in due course even that lost its meaning.  She’d live, wouldn’t she?  As bad as it was…she’d live.  Eventually, she become conscious of the fact that she was still wearing the legs of her slacks in pools around her ankles, so she stepped out of them and stooped to scrub at the dried patches of blood and cum that had trickled down her legs.

Then she realized that she had seen the remains of her slacks because there was light in the washroom.  She turned and saw him standing in the doorway with a candle in both hands.

She thought she could be brave, but at the sight of him, her eyes welled up again and she blurted, “Why did you do that?”

He did not answer.

“I would have…I would have…”  She broke off and hid from him behind her hands, braying hoarse and ugly sobs.

He set the candle on the ground in the doorway and left her.

4

He was gone more than ten hours, and when he returned with his ancient canvas backpack, she was hunched in her alcove, wrapped in a sleeping bag.  He inched towards her as if fearing she would try to flee from him, but she only watched him come with glazed, pain-dulled eyes.  He set the backpack on the stone ground before her and retreated to the doorway, where he hunkered down and looked at her with helpless remorse.

Olivia stared at the backpack expressionlessly.

The fire hissed and snapped.

She saw one of her hands reaching out to unzip the pack.  There was a skirt in there, a stiffish leather skirt to replace her office slacks, and under that, a good-sized bundle of food:  Bread, mushrooms, a haunch of something that might be rabbit or dog or whatever came little and blunt-legged like that, a handful of smushy blackberries, and an unopened bottle of apple juice.  Real apple juice.  Treetop, even.

She peeled back the plastic tie that kept it safety-sealed for her protection, unscrewed the top, and sniffed it.  Smelled applely.  She took a sip.  Sweetness burst in her mouth; tartness stung it.  She held the juice in her mouth, closing her eyes to savor it.  Swallowed.  Capped the juice and looked back at her captor.  She could see the whites around his eyes.

She looked down at the food again, selected the haunch of meat, thought a moment, and held it out to him.

His face clouded in wretchedness.  He crept towards her, still hunkered low to the ground, low enough that his folded wings dragged behind him.  He stopped just beyond her arm’s reach, tentatively stretched out and took her offering.  Then he just sat, holding it in his hands and gazing at her unhappily.

“Food,” Olivia said, in his language.

He closed his eyes as if in pain.

“Meat,” she amplified.  “For eating.”

He said something she did not know; it sounded like he pulled it from his throat with razors.

Olivia looked up, watched their shadows flicker over the ceiling, and then looked back at him.  He hadn’t moved.  She said, “Are you hurt?”

He groaned, twisted his face away, said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her breath beginning to catch in her chest.  “For… whatever…I did.”

“Please, stop.”  He breathed raggedly for a long time.  “You did nothing.  You were—”  And he said something else she did not know.

She shook her head, too tired to puzzle out the meaning of it.

“I am sorry,” he said heavily.  “I am very sorry.”

Olivia picked up a berry and ate it.  Sweet and just a little tart, very juicy.  She did not know how to tell him that she thought she was all right.  She did not know the words for forgiving.  She didn’t know if it was true, but she knew she couldn’t live here with him with all this awful hurt and unhappiness between them.  When she finished her blackberries, she ate a few mushrooms.  When she was done with that, she started in on the bread.  Halfway through that, he also began to eat.

They finished the meal in silence and Olivia stood up.

He flinched back, as though expecting her to strike at him, but she just moved past him and took a candle to the washroom.  She washed her hands, her face, the blood-scabbed marks he had left on her flesh, and dabbed again at the aching bruise of her vagina just for the gratification of the cool, damp rag on that place of pain.

He was still crouched by her alcove, looking at his hands, when she returned to the pit room.  She contemplated the black outline of his body, backlit by the dying embers and tried to feel something for him that she could live with for the rest of her life.  At last she went to him and touched his back between his great, spreading wings.

He glanced at her and she stepped around him to touch his arm, tug him gently towards the pit.  He resisted minutely, then gave in with a sigh and followed her to the pit.  She faced him, holding his gaze, trying to tell him with her eyes alone that she didn’t understand, but she could cope, and that was all right.  Slowly, deliberately, she removed her shirt and stood naked.

They looked at each other in the firelight.

Olivia lay down and turned on her side.  She heard him remove his loincloth, felt the bedding shift as he lay awkwardly beside her.  She looked at her watch, counted out thirteen minutes before his hand brushed lightly over the claw marks on her hip.

She lay her hand over his, sighed, and placed his arm around her waist.

He pulled her slowly back against him and draped his wing around her.

He owned her.  She was his.  It wasn’t horror anymore.

It was despair.

5

How long did it take to come back from that to some semblance of normalcy?  For days, Olivia stayed in the pit and indulged her sore muscles and self-pity.  Her captor brought some thick, white paste wrapped in leather to daub onto the worst of her wounds and they healed up okay.  The mental hurts took longer, but what were her options?  She couldn’t be just be afraid all the time, not of the only other person she ever saw.

So she lived with him.  She came naked to his bed at the end of the day, not easily or happily, but she went there.  They were back to that first night in both their minds, to that same nervous, untrusting truce.  They lay beside each other without speaking, without touching, and the days somehow passed.

Somehow.

And one day, lying there pretending to be asleep while he got up and quietly left her, she decided things had to change and it had to be her that did it.  She made her way stiffly into the washroom, voided for an eternity, washed her face and upper body, wet her towel in the cold running water and pressed it to her sex, thinking of ways to try to bring the two of them back together.  When she took the towel away, there were dark stains upon it.

Her first baffled thought was that she must have missed some gash and gotten it infected, an idea that in these circumstances surely meant a horrible, horrible death.  Already breathing hard, biting back panic, she probed inside herself and inspected the blood that coated her finger.

It took another thirty seconds for the meaning of this to sink in.

“Oh ugh, now what?” she muttered and glared around the small washroom as though a box of tampons would appear by magic.  Of course, it didn’t.  She had always been a private person when it came to the unmentionable workings of her body; she had thought nothing could be worse than begging for a place to pee, but now she was going to have to have her damn period right out in the open.

She stood there in the middle of the room and cried for a while, then cried harder because she didn’t know if she could sit down and cry without leaking all over.  She thought of home for the first time in what seemed like a long time, and then cried even harder because she realized it couldn’t possibly still be home, not after all this time.  Her handy box of tampons would not be sitting under her bathroom sink anymore, but would be packed away with all her other personal effects in a storage unit somewhere, or in her parents’ garage, or maybe in an evidence locker, but it wouldn’t be at home.  This was home.

And she was just going to have to cope.

Olivia cleaned herself as best she could and went back to the sleeping pit.  There, she ripped a number of wide, long strips from a canvas army tent mixed in with the bedding and fashioned a sort of sanitary belt to which she tied some wadded up rags.  When she had paced the room long enough to work all the kinks out of the fitting of the belt and be sure it wouldn’t untie itself or drop a rag, she dried her uselessly leaking eyes and got dressed.  There was a noticeable bulge where the rags were tied up, an even bigger bulge between her thighs.

There would be no hiding this.

Olivia got one of her sleeping bags out of the pit and wrapped herself up in it.  She went to her alcove and sat down there, miserable and alone and too hot in the quilted folds of sleeping bag.  Her eye fell on the little triangular gameboard, sent flying all those days ago when he had attacked her.  She could only find five of the stones.  She put what she could find back into the cooler.  There was a chance she would eventually recover the whole game.  It wasn’t as though there were a couch the stones could roll under, after all…and there were plenty of hours in the lonely night to look for them.

That thought made her future stretch out interminably in front of her.  Olivia turned her back on it, on everything.

She was still there, staring without thought into empty space, when her captor came home.  Seeing her in the alcove with her sleeping bag seemed to throw him.  He stood for a long time on the other side of the pit, then finally showed her the backpack he carried.

“Food?” Olivia guessed.

“Yes.”

He didn’t bring it to her, just stood there and held it out.  His eyes, even in the demon-glow of the firelight, were pained.

This couldn’t go on.  It just couldn’t.

“Share?  With me?”  She wasn’t as certain of those words.

But he didn’t correct her.  He took two steps forward, set the backpack on the floor, and retreated to the other side of the pit.  He looked at the bedding, his face tight with shame, then up at the markings on the wall.  He waited.

The pack was too far away to just lean out and get.  She huddled in the security of her sleeping bag instead.

The food sat there, unopened.

He stood up suddenly, keeping his eyes averted, and left her.

Olivia ate alone.  In addition to the bread and bottled tea, the pack contained a flannel shirt, heavily patched and threadbare but cleaner than her t-shirt, and a leather belt to go with her leather skirt.  The belt’s buckle was a ring of what she ultimately decided was indeed solid gold.  It touched her.  She supposed it shouldn’t.  Why would these creatures attach any special value to gold, after all?  Then again…she didn’t really need a belt.  And what could make a more romantic gift than a shiny, frivolous ornament?

He was trying.

After she ate, she had nothing to do but wander around and wait for the creature that imprisoned her to come home, which according to her watch was around midnight these days.  So at half-past eleven, she washed out her rags, scrubbed herself raw from the navel down to her ankles, bound herself back up and got into the pit, trying to look as though she had fallen asleep fully clothed.

He did not appear for another hour and when he did, he only stood in the doorway and watched her for a long time.  Very quietly, as though fearing to wake her, he moved about the cave, laying in fuel for the next day’s fire, gathering up her discarded t-shirt, and replacing empty bottles of tea with full ones.  He had more food with him too, a lot more, and she watched from under her lashes as he unpacked bread, dried meat, and other things more difficult to identify at this distance onto his empty shelves.  Then he came back to undress while she listened, breathing deep, I’m-asleep breaths, and finally he lay down in the pit beside her.  He did not touch her, made no effort to wake her, and soon his own breathing evened and deepened.

When she dared to roll over and look at him, she found his eyes darting beneath their lids in dream-sleep.  Satisfied, she eased out of their shared bed, snuck into the washroom to check her rags, then crawled back into the pit.  She wrapped herself in her sleeping bag, took a breath for a soft sigh of relief, and heard him say, “Olivia.”

She stiffened.  She couldn’t help it.  Was he going to want her?  She couldn’t hide it if he did.  She’d have to lie there…leaking, and just let him do it.

The quiet was stifling.  His hand came up to her hip, just touching at first, ultimately settling.  She said nothing, did nothing, waited.

He took his hand away.  “I cannot make this easy,” he said.

She rolled over and looked at him, uncomfortably taken aback.

“I should have prepared you.  You were—”  That word again.  He spoke it twice, shook his head, and clenched his hand into an empty fist.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I won’t do it again.”

He flinched and looked at her, then pushed himself suddenly up and out of the pit.  “Do you think that I would punish you that way?” he asked, his deep voice pulled thin by pain.  “You were…ready.  It was your…time!  It was your…”  He gestured awkwardly towards his nose, then snarled something in his language and stalked away from her.  He reached the fire, scraped his talons across the hearth, and then leaned against the wall and just breathed for a while.

“It’s all right,” Olivia said softly.  “You didn’t…didn’t mean it.”

“I did.  And it will happen again,” he said.  He didn’t look at her.

Her heart sank a little.  Only a little.  She said, “I’m yours.”  And heard herself laugh.  “I’ll cope.”

She saw the glint of one eye as he glanced at her.  He shook his head and stared at the symbols on the wall over the fireplace.

“I just need some time, okay?  A few days.  Please.”  Her thighs tightened around her ungainly menstrual belt.  “Please.”

“I will give time,” he said.  He turned away from the markings on the wall as he would from accusing eyes and came back to her.  He lay down as far from her as the confines of the pit allowed and did not look at her.  It was hard to look at him, harder still to look away.  “But it will happen again.  I will try to…give you words.  I will try to make you ready.  It will happen again and I…will hurt you again.”

“I don’t hate you,” she blurted, and was a little surprised to realize she meant it.

He opened his eyes and looked at her for a long time without expression.  Then something in him seemed to let go; he did not soften, exactly, but something about him relaxed, the way that exhaustion can slump a man’s shoulders or a good old-fashioned crying jag can loosen up a lady’s proud back.  It wasn’t a good look.  In many ways, it was the worst, worse even than waking up in her bed and seeing him leaning over her for the first time.  It was his own, ‘Horror is,’ and his own hopelessness.  It was naked and awful and she supposed she was as responsible for putting it there as he was for her own.

CHAPTER FOUR

PEOPLE

1

Olivia’s watch battery died a few weeks later.  She wasn’t sure exactly when.  She had looked at it once while waiting for lunch, and it had been just after two a.m.  When she’d looked at it again shortly after her captor (still nameless after all this time) came home, its digital face was empty and dark.

“Oh damn!” she cried in utter dismay.

The hulking figure of her captor looked up sharply, realized she was not addressing him, and returned to the task at hand—laying out the last meal before bed.  “Olivia,” he said disapprovingly.  “Speak in a civilized fashion, please.”

By civilized, he meant to speak in his language, not hers.  English had become one of those things, like television and sunrises, that belonged to the past.  He would allow a brief relapse now and then, but his tolerance was thin and she really didn’t want to know what he’d do if he decided he had to punish her.  No, he’d never laid a hand on her (unless one counted the day of the attack, which Olivia tried not to think about at all), and he’d never raised his voice at her, but there was a hardness in him and not too deeply buried, a coldness in his eye when he sat and stared into the embers at the close of his day.  Maybe it was the Stockholm’s talking, but she’d come to think of him as someone who might possibly be a good man…just a good man who wouldn’t hesitate to put her in a hard gag if she persisted in speaking English.

But it helped.  Even on the most frustrating days, she had to admit that not having any alternatives sure sped up the process of speaking bat-ese.  His patience was tireless when it came to helping her find names for things, and it seemed that nothing embarrassed him (although she was certainly seven shades of mortified when he’d followed her into the bathroom and turned that into a language lesson), but he had so far refused to teach her any swears, so she didn’t have much of a choice when it came to repeating her mild but heartfelt expletive.

“It’s not important,” she said instead, her standard catchall phrase for things too impolite to repeat.  And it was true, wasn’t it?  Time was like English; it belonged to her old life and may as well be dead.

“Then come and eat,” he instructed.

She came and sat on the other side of the bench.  Dinner was bread, mushrooms, and rubbery strips of boiled meat that came from a beast her captor had called rua—a great beast, he’d said, as heavy as two men, with horns as long as a man’s arms and hooves as large as an open hand, which sounded very fierce right up until he imitated the sound of its calls and she realized he’d been describing a common cow.  And why not?  Many of the farmers in the foothills released their cattle to free-range, leaving them to their own devices until it came time either to calve or slaughter them.  Her captor had remarked once that they didn’t prey too heavily on the cattle, even though it made an easy hunt, because the only thing more dangerous than a drunk human was a suspicious one.

He was usually full of interesting asides like that.  Knowing how lonely she was wont to become during her empty hours, he always made an effort to engage her during their few moments together, and he seemed to think there was no better way to immerse her in his language than to lecture her on whatever she happened to be looking at or touching at the time.  But not tonight.  He stayed subdued throughout the meal, heavy in thought, intently studying her as she ate.

“Is something wrong?” she asked at last.

“Olivia,” he said, then frowned and did not continue.

She waited, her meal consumed, her hands folded in her lap.

At last, he shook his head, and said, “Wash yourself, please, and come to the pit.”

The words rang in her mind, but not with the same impact they once had.  All the while she had been menstruating, she had slept fully dressed and he had accepted that, lying close beside her and making no demands.  But she sensed a watchfulness in him and when she was through bleeding, she had gone to the pit naked and did not resist him when he rose over her.  When he was done, he had touched his brow to hers (his short-faced snout pressing uncomfortably against her and the tips of his horns scraping on the rim of the pit behind her) in a gesture that was almost an apology, except for the hard, cold look in his eyes when he did it.  And then he’d rolled off and lay there like he always did, with his hand on her hip and his wing blanketing them both.

“I did not want to hurt you,” he’d said.

“I know.”

“You don’t know,” he’d argued, sounding faintly irritated with her.  “But it is true.  It was your time.”

She’d known a few more of his words then, but his meaning still eluded her.  He must have seen her confusion, because he’d growled under his breath and got up.

“It’s okay,” she’d said again, a little timidly.  “You don’t have to—”

“I must explain this!  It will happen again!”  He paced away from the pit to the fire, stared into its dying light, and then swung suddenly back to face her.  “Your moon was new,” he said, just like that meant anything, and he said a few more words she couldn’t grasp.  He paced, growled, then cupped air in his hands and brought it to his face, breathing in deeply, loudly.  “You were ready.  You made me ready.”

She got it then, much as she tried not to.  She’d gone into season, in heat like a dumb bitch-dog, and he, this inhuman beast-faced thing, had smelled it.  Smelled it and reacted.  Rutted with her.

His triumph at seeing her understanding was short-lived as soon as he also saw her horror.  He took half a step back, head cocked, uncertain how to respond.  “It will happen again,” he said finally.

Yes.  Once a month, in fact.  Once a month for the rest of her life.

“But do you have to—”  Tears cracked in her throat, forcing him back another half-step.  She ground her palm into her eyes, pushing all that useless girly hysteria back inside where it could do no harm and tried again.  “Do you have to be there?  Do you have to—”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can’t you leave me alone then?” she pleaded, louder.  “Just for then!  I’ll do whatever you want—”

That hardness, shining out of his eyes, and nothing more.  He folded his arms across his chest and watched her, the way the gods watch mortals scrabbling over the distant Earth, unmoved.

“Damn you, it hurt!” she’d shouted, only very vaguely aware that shouting was not a good idea with this man in any mood, this mood least of all.  “Didn’t you see what you did to me?”

“Yes.”  His voice did not rise.  His gaze did not soften.

And she’d cried, with him standing over her and watching her do it, but that was his final word on the subject.  She’d tried to bring it up once or twice since, and had succeeded only in bringing out that hardness where she had to see it, appeal to it, and feel its cold and pitiless light burning back at her.  She couldn’t live with that.  With everything else, yes, but not with that.  So she let it go and went naked to his bed every night and told herself that she was coping.

Now Olivia stood in the washroom, mentally and physically bracing herself for the act of endurance that awaited her in the next room.  She no longer dreaded it, only regarded it with a faint, tired sort of resentment, the way she’d once felt about doing housework.  Oh, he could make her cum once in a while, but she didn’t attach much significance to that.  It wasn’t like he was trying.

When she came back to the sleeping room, he was standing naked in front of his hearth, red light outlining every muscle, the point of each talon, the curve of his horns.  Nerving himself up, she supposed, for his own housework.

She undressed, stepped into the pit, and lay down to wait for him.

It was a surprisingly long wait, and when he finally joined her, all he did was rest one hand on her stomach.  She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel his breath on her cheek and knew that he was looking at her.  Staring at her.

“Olivia,” he began at last, “You speak very well now.”

“Thank you,” she said, puzzled.  He never spoke to her during sex.  Afterwards, sometimes, but never during.  Even the night he’d spent teaching her all the right words for what he did, what he used to do it, and where he put it when he did, he’d waited until after.  She braced herself for bad news.

“I want to bring you before the others soon.”

Others.  Did that mean others of his kind or of hers?

“How soon?”

“Tomorrow, perhaps.”  He hummed distractedly, moving his hand a little lower, but then stopped.  “Are you happy with me, Olivia?” he asked.

She was too stunned even to laugh.  Was he serious?  He wanted her to be happy?  What was she supposed to say?  He told stories, and taught her riddles and other little plays on words in his language, had even sung to her once or twice in a self-conscious way.  She supposed if laughter was happiness, then she had been happy. Still, the horror of that first night had a way of coming back during all the hours she spent alone with nothing to think about except whether or not her parents believed she was dead yet.  It was there when he moved inside her, his hot breath coming in grunts and growls against her cheek, while she thought in despair of her next season and how it would be when he was roaring and clawing and battering at her.  It was there when she thought that she was all of twenty-four years old…with all the rest of her life ahead of her.

“I’m not unhappy,” she said at last.  “You are patient with me.”

He removed his hand from her belly and regarded her.  “Is that all?”

She looked back at him helplessly.  “I am yours.”

“Mine.”  His teeth glinted in the firelight.  He touched his brow to hers, smiling against her cheek, where she could feel it.

Pleased with her.  Proud of her.

“Surely I was led to you,” he murmured, stroking his hand once down her hair.  His short, blunt claws tugged at the snarls that always seemed to be there, no matter how many times she combed it out.  “Surely you were meant for me.  My Olivia.”

She tried to smile for him.  He didn’t see it.  She reached up and rubbed at his shoulder instead, and he thrummed softly against her skin.  “Are you happy with me?” she asked.  It seemed like a far more important question.

“Yes,” he said at once, and nuzzled at her again.  “I didn’t think I would be.  I had never been so close to a human before that night…that first night.”

He’d never once mentioned that night.  Neither had she, she realized.  To her surprise, he went on.

“I tried to think of it as a hunt for as long as I could.  When we came with the tharo…it was no hunt.”

“Tharo?” she echoed.

He pantomimed pouring something, then rolled away from her.  “We put the tharo into the boxes, the humming boxes.  It went from there into the air you breathed.  So that you would sleep.”

The revelation did not exactly rock her.  Olivia could well remember that feeling of syrupy calm as she’d stood out in the rain that night.  She’d always known she’d been drugged; she’d never given any thought to how.  But yes, okay, it was still July, and High Hill Apartments didn’t come with central air conditioning, and even though the rain that night had brought a welcome dip in the sweltering heat, it had still been oppressively muggy.  She could remember coming home from work, mere hours from waking up in the night to a monster, carelessly aware of all the air conditioners sitting in the windows and humming away.  Staring up at the cave ceiling, she saw it again, at night this time, as these shadowy creatures crept along the balconies and walkways, pouring glowing liquid into the window units out of wine jugs and pop bottles, and then retreating to the parking lot below to watch the lights go out.  Just waiting.

“I did not choose you to be mine when I took you from your room,” he said, looking down at her again.  “I chose you because you saw me when we stood together outside.  You saw me,” he insisted, and stroked her hair again.  “And you were mine.  Yes, you make me happy, as much as holding you here in this evil way ever can.”

It was the first time he’d admitted, even obliquely, any wrongdoing in her captivity.  It was a real night for firsts.

“I know you wonder why you are here.”  He slipped his hand between her thighs and stroked her slowly.  “I know when I do this, you think you know the answer.  When we couple, I see it shining in your eyes with your tears.”

She reached up and caught his wrist, stilling both the motion and the words at once.  “I know you didn’t want to take me,” she said.

He took his hand away. “I am not a bad person.”

“I know.”

He brushed that off like an insect.  “You don’t know, but you accept it because I say it is so.  I choose to believe that means something.”

Maybe it did.  Like the gold buckle on her belt.  Maybe everything meant something, if you looked at it close enough.

“But I did want to take you, my Olivia.  I won’t lie beside you now and tell you otherwise.  Even when I first looked at you and saw you sleeping…”  He trailed off and studied her in the dimming light of the coals, then surprised her with a low laugh.  “When I first saw you, honestly, I thought you were ugly.  You were small, so impossibly frail, and white, like a worm, and slimy, like a frog.  You had no fur, except for this,” he added running his fingers through the strands of brown hair that fanned out on the bedding.  “Which is pretty but not very practical.  But you were so calm, so unafraid.”

So stoned, she thought, but saw no point in saying it.

“Your eyes were the eyes of one with a soul.  When you looked at me with those eyes, I knew you would be my mate.”  He leaned forward to nuzzle at her, losing none of his rare, wry humor.  “Because you looked at me.  And saw, I am certain, an ugly beast.”

The comment came with a tone of expectation, which Olivia could not immediately respond to.  A part of her was still reeling, wondering if all this mess could have been avoided if only she hadn’t looked him in the eyes as they stood in the parking lot that night.  That if she’d only cried, or covered her face, or made her own hysterical and futile run for freedom, maybe his nerve would have failed.  She might have woken up back in her bed the next morning, thinking the whole thing was a dream, and just…just forgotten about it.

He was still waiting, watching her, beginning to frown.

“No,” she said finally.  “I’d never seen anything like you before.  I thought you must be a monster, but even then, you weren’t an ugly monster.”

“No?”  He sounded surprised.  “And am I…am I less a monster now that I am familiar to you?”  He hesitated, then asked, “Am I attractive to you?”

“I think so,” she said at last.  “A little.  I know that I look forward to seeing you.”

“Do you?”  He bent over her, pleased, nuzzling at the hollow of her throat.  “I have come to find you very attractive.  I have seen others of your kind, and I think you are the best of them.  I have seen the females of my kind, and still I want you.  When I think your name, I think of water, and how you flow over my hands at night.  Olivia, my river,” he whispered, and began to hum.

He moved his hand between her thighs, rubbing her slowly and with exquisite effort, but not (she was sure) with the intention of giving her pleasure.  The reaction of her body when his broad thumb occasionally found her clitoris encouraged him to continue his slow massage, but she could see the narrow slits of his nostrils flaring and knew he did it only to saturate his senses with the scent of her musk as her body betrayed her with passion.  He rarely touched her during sex except for this, and once he was hard, he positioned himself atop her and drove himself deep inside her.  She accepted him with a ragged groan that held more pain than pleasure, and he answered it with a thrumm of intense arousal.

This was a routine she knew, and her responses came to her easily.  She arched her neck; he turned his mouth at once and bit at her three times in slow motion, dragging his sharp teeth over her skin without tearing her.  She drew her left leg up slightly; he reached back to catch her thigh, tilting her hips to fit himself deeper.  His free hand groped for the edge of the pit, bracing himself against the solid rock there so that he could thrust harder.  His wings snapped out behind him as his movements became more urgent, suspended above her like a torn umbrella, rustling heavily in the wake he made.

With the exception of the attack, he always took a long time to reach climax, as if penetrating her was as painful and arduous as the act of enfolding him.  She had tried many times to bring him quickly to orgasm so the rock-hard bludgeon of his cock could be removed, but he never responded when she moved her hands over his body, except to give her a distracted nuzzle or a half-hearted pat on the hip.  It took as long as it took, often as much as an hour to cum on his own, but tonight, as occasionally happened, his size and the friction of his movements coaxed a pleasureless and almost incidental orgasm from her.  As always, when she convulsed around him, his movements took on a fevered urgency.  He thrust faster, groaning, into her shuddering grip, and came seconds later.  His weight settled.  His breath, hot and loud against her ear, slowed.  A minute or two to recover himself, a final nudge of his snout against her neck to complete the episode, and then he slipped out and lay down beside her.

And now came the part she’d actually grown to like, when he moved up close and encased her in his arms, spreading his wing out over them.  Funny.  She’d never really been a cuddler, before.

“I will take you before the others tomorrow,” he said again, drowsily now.  Sleep always came so quickly to him, especially after sex.  “You will speak to them, and when they hear how clever you are, they will snap their teeth at me in envy.  They will see you are my mate.”

She lay there, amused, her loins aching with misuse, thinking of which riddles were likeliest to go over well at whatever assembly he thought to parade her before, then asked, “Will you tell me why you captured us?”

“Soon you will know everything,” he mumbled.

“Even your name?”

His reply fuzzed into a snore, and he pressed his face into the nape of her neck and slept.  Olivia rested her hand over his arm and shut her eyes, drowsing to the happy thought of humans, real humans.

2

She dreamed that he brought her out of the caverns and into the living room of her apartment.  Her parents were there, and most of the people from the office, and other people she didn’t really know: the bag boy from the corner market, the water delivery guy from work, the UPS lady, the landscapers who used to cut the grass at High Hill Apartments.  The children from her third-grade class photo was here, dressed in graduation caps and gowns.  Her old Girl Scout troupe.  Her great-uncle Max, who she’d never even met.  So many people.

Olivia dreamed she ran to meet her parents, and they all hugged each other and cooed like pigeons.  She turned to thank her captor and he melted like smoke and became Bobby Gibson, who had strung her along for the better part of a year letting her think there could maybe be marriage in their future, before she broke it off and threw him out.  Funny, she was happy to see even him.

“Mom, Dad,” she said proudly, “This is my mate.  He took me away and now I’m his.”

They cooed over him, patting his arms and welcoming him while Olivia wandered away to see all the other people.  There were people in every corner, hiding under lampshades, sitting on the TV, tucked down between the sofa cushions.  Her apartment was alive with people!

Olivia threw her hands in the air and laughed and laughed.  The faces of strangers peered at her from under chairs, between books in the bookcase, from the tape slot in the VCR, from every crack and crevasse.  Human eyes blinked in the plush heads of teddy bears.  Human features winked and grinned from the shiny surface of her porcelain dishes.  Tiny humans floated in her glass of water, splashing and waving.

Olivia dashed through her apartment, crushing happy humans underfoot.  Cockroaches with human heads called to her gleefully; painted humans in the wallpaper followed her in two dimensions; humans crushed up against the windows, pouring themselves in thick, snotty streams through the vent of the air conditioner.  Bobby and her parents cooed and patted each other, oblivious.  The sound of all their human voices was melting into a single humming sound, the deep mating thrumm that her ears could hardly hear.  All the little third-graders were turning into bats, their black caps and gowns turning into wings.  They flapped and hummed, but they still had human heads.

Human hands clutched at her from the carpet, pulling her down, petting her and touching her.  Their hairless flesh was cold and slimy.  She struggled.  The Girl Scouts came after, drooling and humming, to feast.  Human figures groped and writhed on the walls.  Blood and drool in human mouths and the flapping of their wings.

Olivia screamed and screamed and—

Was shaken awake.

She slapped and struggled and clutched at the hands that held her, mindless with terror.

“Olivia!” he boomed, still shaking her.

She opened her eyes and saw him, her monster, his dark eyes huge with panic.  For a moment, she lay boneless in his grip, panting and trying to separate dream from reality.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice, and burst into tears.  She jumped into his arms, pressing herself into his body, all claws and fur and slabs of muscle, malformed shape and alien heat.  She held him as though she were trying to crawl inside his skin, her blunt fingernails digging moons in his thick hide.

He patted her awkwardly, plainly baffled.

“Bad dream,” she whimpered.  “Bad dream.”

He took that surprisingly seriously, drawing back to frown at her with a narrow and uneasy eye, but didn’t let go of her.  “Can you tell me?” he asked.

She babbled to him, as much as she could remember.  He listened and said nothing until she had finished.

“You belonged to another world,” he said then.  “A world with a sun, and glass and metal and colored lights, and humans that live in vast hives and build walls all around them.  Now you are my Olivia, and there are none of these things here.  I have made a new Olivia in my world of night and stone.  But you cannot be both.”  He said this with great conviction, pulling her off him so that he could meet her eyes.  “Your dream is warning you, Olivia.  It says, ‘Be in one world.’  You are my mate now.”  He searched her face intently, relaxing when she nodded and clutched him again.

“Good, good,” he murmured, laying down again with her trembling body enfolded in his arms.  “Come into my dreams, Olivia.  It is early to be awake.  Come to sleep with me and we will hunt dream-cattle.”  He mumbled the last few words and was asleep soon after.

Olivia had quieted the rampant pounding of her heart, but was content to be with him, under his wing, wrapped in his arms.  She breathed in his scent and combed his coarse fur and finally, finally, followed him into sleep.

There she dreamed she could fly, and she hunted cows with her nameless captor.  There were no more humans, only the open eye and resentful gaze of the woman in the moon.

3

He woke her when he left the pit, and watched in a frowning, distracted manner as she dressed and combed her hair.  She tried to smile at him as she put herself in order, wanting him to see that her nightmare was over and done, that she was ready to go out and meet people, but her efforts did not seem to allay his concern.

She didn’t talk to him, afraid that anything she said would come out sounding like either an argument or a plea.  She just kept smiling and combing her hair, keeping her eyes fixed to the painted symbols above the bed so that none of her anxiety could betray her.  Yes, she was excited, and she wanted to see the other humans and know that they were all safe, or at least, being taken care of the same as she was, but she couldn’t deny a shiver of apprehension at the same time.  It was easy to be a captive when it was just her and him; she didn’t know if she could look those other women in the eye—her neighbors, each and every one of them—knowing what they must be going through, knowing that they would know the same about her.

His hand brushed against her unexpectedly.  Olivia kept combing, stealing glances now and then, but he was staring at the markings on the wall and not at her.

“Do they mean something?” she asked, trying to keep her tone light.

“Once they did,” he answered, his eyes running restlessly over each intricate and enigmatic line.  “But now…I can think of only one who might know what.  Now it’s just something we do when a man takes a mate, to welcome her.”  He frowned, his horns casting impressive shadows across his grim face.  “I was determined that you should be our mates.  I suppose, in that light, I should be as determined to bring you out where all the tribe can see you.”

Her heart sinking, Olivia let the comb drop to her lap.  “Are you afraid to let the others…your kind…see me?”

“You?”  He snapped his wings in what seemed a shrugging, dismissive gesture, still preoccupied with the wall and not looking at her.  “No, not you.  I should not be afraid to show you to anyone.”

“My kind, then.  The other women.”

He didn’t answer right away, but eventually said, “So long as we keep you in our pits, you are like any other goods that we have stolen from humans.  The others know that you are here, but they don’t have to think about what you mean.  When I bring you out, you will be tribe.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Olivia asked tentatively.

“No,” he said without hesitation and with great conviction.  “It is a good thing, a necessary thing.  But…the other humans aren’t like you.”

She didn’t have enough words for this conversation, and all the words she’d need the most—abducted, slave, prison—she’d never dare to use.  Olivia bit at her lip and ventured, “It’s difficult for us.”

“It’s difficult for all of us,” he said curtly.  “When you meet with your people, you must make them understand that they are in this world now, and they must learn to be a part of it as you are.  They must, because with every night that passes, I can only say less and less to make my people see you differently.”

Olivia could only stare at him.

He growled under his breath, then finally turned around and faced her.  That hardness was in him, set like stone just beneath the skin.  “I realize that we have done something hateful,” he told her.  “But if hate is all there is to see in a human eye, it would be better if no one was able to see it.  Speak to your humans.  Make them understand.  Or this night’s meet will be their last.”

Numbly, she felt herself nodding.

He looked away, that hardness sloughing off as he looked at the symbols above the bed.  “Such is my comfort to you,” he said.  “These are bad days, Olivia, but I’m doing the best I can.”

And as incredible as it was, with his threat still echoing in her ears, she felt a tiny spark of sympathy go out to him.  Faintly appalled by herself, she gave in to it and crept forward to touch his arm.  He glanced at her, covered her hand briefly with his own, then stepped back and turned away.

“Finish your preparations,” he said, walking out the door.  “I will arrange the meet.”

Alone, Olivia dropped back onto the bench and folded her hands tightly in her lap.

4

Time took on a horrible elasticity with thoughts like those swimming in her mind, but she thought it couldn’t have been more than an hour before he returned.  His jaw set with grim determination, he went to the box of candles and brought out the flashlight.  He thumbed it on, then off again and held it out to her.  Seeing something so banal in the clawed hand of this creature momentarily brought all the dreamlike strangeness rushing back, so that all she could do for several seconds was just stand there and look at him.  But she did take it, and when she did, he cupped her chin and touched his brow gently to hers.

She followed him to the entry room, and across it, to the hole dropping away from the far wall, where he gathered her up in one arm for the descent.  She held on to him as he contracted his wings and found a claw-hold on the rock, and then they were moving down through the tight passage, away from his lair into blackness. “When you learn how to climb,” he grunted, “you may come down alone.  Save the skin on both our backs.”

The implication—that she would one day be allowed to come and go at will—was an encouraging show of trust in her, but she could hear his claws and talons scraping as they hooked into the rock, and if that was what it took to get around on her own, her and her human fingers were sadly out of luck.

He climbed out of the chimney set her on her feet, but kept a grip on her wrist even after she turned her flashlight on, letting go only when she took her first steps down the short, low-ceilinged tunnel to the intersection that lay at its end.  He watched while she aimed the light up and down the wide corridor in which she found herself, noting a number of chimney-like openings and side-passages in both directions, all of them identical to the one in which she stood.  When she finally looked at him again, he showed his teeth in what he no doubt thought was a comforting smile and led her onward.

All she could think as she followed him through the maze of tunnels was how glad she was that she hadn’t tried to escape.  It was all too easy to imagine these twisting caves going on forever, but they did widen into a kind of antechamber after a while, and through a curtain of rock like melting wax, she could see light.

Not candles, not even a fireplace, but white light, daylight, shining down in beams to illuminate a much bigger cavern.  Olivia started walking faster, dry-mouthed with the anticipation of seeing a blue sky above her, seeing sunlight on her skin, but her captor’s hand came down on her shoulder.

“Please,” she said, catching at his wrist.  “Please, I want to see it!”

“You will.  These are the commons,” he said, moving ahead of her to look tensely around the cavern.  “No one will be here tonight save for those of us…with those of you.  And we appear to be the first.”  He hesitated, then looked back at her.  “Would you like a bath?”

Olivia tugged at the neck of her shirt for a self-conscious sniff, saying, “I washed when I woke up.  Am I bad?”

He smiled at her again and came back to take her hand.  “You’ll like the baths,” he promised, and led her back into the tunnels.

It was a much longer walk, and although she thought several times that she could hear voices or even footsteps in the adjoining passages and chambers, they saw no one.  And that was just the way he wanted it, she thought, watching his eyes dart this way and that, his wings fanning out from time to time as though to hide her from view in the empty tunnel.  The floor was not as even here as it was in his personal chambers, and she stumbled several times, catching at his arm until he finally took her hand and held on to her.

“It won’t always be this difficult,” he said.

He wasn’t very convincing, but she let it go without argument because all at once she realized that she could see again, that beyond the beam of her flashlight was more light, illuminating a bend in the tunnel ahead with the promise of sunlight, perhaps an actual opening, perhaps sky!  Olivia began to walk faster.

His hand tightened on hers.  “Take care.”

“I am,” she said, and promptly tripped over a slight rut in the floor and pitched forward.  Her captor’s quick reflexes and powerful grip prevented any serious injury but she still gave one knee a good crack on the wet rock.

Very wet.  Maybe it was raining outside.  Fresh rain, falling out of the open sky.  Olivia righted herself, rubbing her knee and waiting for another patient, parental rebuke.

“Are you hurt?”  He was very good about keeping the laugh out of his voice.

“I want to see the light.”

He nodded and motioned for her to continue on.  “Do not run and watch carefully where you go.   We are near to the depths.”

Olivia picked up her flashlight and limped onward, making sure that she went very carefully and with great dignity.  They came to the bend in the tunnel, turned, and there, brilliant rays of pure sunlight transformed the dank cavern that opened at the end of it into a chapel of magnificent rock formations.  She couldn’t stop the happy cry that flew out of her, any more than she could stop her feet from running forward into the light, those beautiful, beautiful beams of—

She stopped short.

“What are those?” Olivia asked, her chest tight with confusion that was still trying to be wonder.

He said a word, sounding pleased and proud, and the word didn’t really matter because she knew what they were.  All along the walls, high up where the cavern ceiling flowed down like racks of bacon into the walls, ledges had been cut for wide, curved metal plates, polished to a high shine.  Mirrors, bringing light down from other mirrors, out of sight, through God alone knew how many cramped shafts and corners.  When she put out her hand to catch the light, her skin stayed cold and sunless.

Her captor was watching her, frowning.

“I thought it would be real,” she said, and let her hand drop.  “Where are we?”

“The Deep Drop,” he replied, and led her across the cavern.  The name was unnecessary.  The whole of this wide room was nothing but a ledge at the top of a vast chasm, with stalactites dripping down like teeth into the gaping throat at their feet.  Apart from some intermittent dripping, she could hear nothing, and not even the mirrors could show her the bottom.

“Is it safe?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away.  When she gave him a startled sort of stare, he shifted his wings and said, “When I was very small, the older boys said the depths were full of hungry spirits.”

She looked down into the blackness and a cold wind breathed gently back at her.  “Are they?”

“No.”  He shifted again, rubbing at the base of his horns.  “But if any place was, it would be here.”

She stared at him again.

He shrugged, somewhat self-consciously.  “Bad things happened down there once, but all it is now is the place where the baths are.”

“The baths are down there?”  Olivia stepped back from the ledge even as she craned her neck to peer into the depths.  “How are we supposed to get all the way—oh.”  She looked at his wings and her stomach seemed to shiver.  “I don’t think I’m going to like this part.”

He gave her another of his small smiles, touched her cheek with a kind of sympathy, then scooped her up into his arms.

And jumped.

She didn’t mean to scream.  She knew she was perfectly safe in his grip and that they were not plummeting through space to the solid rock floor below even half as fast as they would be if he didn’t have wings.  No, she didn’t mean to, but she did, and right in his ear, too. He landed with a thud that might have been more graceful if her added weight and involuntary scrambling was not putting him off balance, but he didn’t chastise her, only held her gently until her whooping gasps had calmed and her death’s grip on his neck had eased.  At last, she’d recovered enough that she was able to mumble a shame-faced apology, and he set her down, turning her toward the wide mouth of a tunnel.

She saw light ahead, yellow light from candles set all along the walls ahead in unappealing lumps anywhere there was a jut of rock wide enough to hold one.  Now he let her go before him, tapping her shoulder to indicate turns whenever they came to one of the few forks, and soon they had come to a low-roofed cavern pocked with pools of lightly steaming water.  More of those fat, foul-smelling candles were arranged high on the walls, casting flickering eerie light over the otherwise empty room.

“Oh wow,” she blurted, forgetting her English.  “You have hot springs!”

“A bath,” he corrected, watching her with faint pleasure.

Olivia knelt by the side of one of the pools and dipped her hand inside.  The water was white, opaque when she cupped it in her palms, smelling strongly of earthy minerals when she splashed it up against her face.  It wasn’t as warm as she’d liked her baths back in her nice, normal, human days, but it was hell and away warmer than the water that trickled down the wall in her captor’s bathroom.  Eagerly, she stripped off her clothes, slipped her legs over the edge and slid in up to her neck, moaning at the welcome warmth as it enveloped her.

He came in beside her with a low grumble of satisfaction.  He turned to her, the water lapping at his chest, and smiled, showing his teeth.  “My Olivia,” he said huskily.

She closed her eyes, arching back to wet her hair.  “Mmmm,” she replied.

She sensed rather than saw his interest pricking when he heard that.  She heard a low thrumm escape him, a sound which seemed to surprise him some, and then he retreated to the far side of the pool where he could watch her.

“This is so nice,” she murmured, spreading out her arms and legs so that she could float.  Her body bobbed on the surface of the water, her fingers and toes bumping against the walls.  She turned her head and saw him standing, staring at her body as milky bubbles burst against her skin.

He lifted a hand out of the water and brushed it over her thigh.

“Mmm,” she said again, closing her eyes.

He thrummed again and bent to nuzzle her neck.

She twitched, started to sink, and tried to straighten and drop back into a standing position.

He caught her leg as she sank into the water, pulling her closer to him.  He hummed into the thin skin of her throat as his hard shaft brushed her thighs, caressing her in one of his clumsy sweeping strokes just once before he put his hand against her sex and rubbed at her.  “My Olivia,” he murmured.

The heavenly comfort of the hot springs made it impossible for her to resent this.  She hummed again instead, opening her legs a little wider and wrapping them with weightless ease around his hips.  He turned, pushed her back against the wall of the pool and thrust inside her.  In the blissful grip of all this warm water, even that felt surprisingly good.  Buoyant in the bath, Olivia rocked, water lapping in warm sheets over her breasts, splashing at her shoulders, beading on her face.  She slid her arms around his neck, flexing her fingers through his spiky-wet pelt in time with his thrusts, and he bent at once to press his brow to hers.  The mating hum that issued from his throat was hoarse and restrained, blowing in tense puffs against her lips, scarcely audible.

He was afraid someone was going to walk in on them.  For some odd reason, this evidence of modesty struck Olivia as very funny.  She was no exhibitionist herself—she hadn’t even liked kissing in public with either of the men she’d previously taken to her bed—but this hulking, horned, claw-handed creature’s shyness tickled her.  She laughed, not trying to be loud but only laughing, and he sent a swift, worried glance over his shoulder at the empty doorway.  This only made her giggle again, which so unnerved him that he started to back up.

Oh, but she didn’t want to ruin his mood, especially when he was doing something nice for her.  Not the sex, he did that every night, but taking her out, letting her meet people, giving her a warm bath…the nice things that mattered.  Olivia reached down as he drew away, gripping firmly at the base of his shaft and giving him an apologetic little squeeze.

It startled him.  One of his hands slipped from her thigh, but the water held her up.  She tightened her legs, pulling herself down along his length until she was once more snug against his hip.  She wrapped her other arm around his neck and smiled at him.

The smile seemed to startle him, too.  He forgot to hum at her for a few breaths, and when he started again, it was little more than a rasp of sound in the echoing cavern.  Hesitantly, he put his hand back on her thigh, and when she began to move, rolling her hips in the same deep, slow pace he liked to use, he shivered a little.

“Does it feel good?” Olivia whispered.

He touched the side of her face, thrummed huskily, stared.  The water splashed between them in steady waves, sloshed over the lip of the pool, made puddles all around them for the light to dazzle across.

“I think it feels good,” she told him.

It was the first time she’d said anything at all about the sex they shared.  Three startles in one night had an eroding effect on his self-control.  His claws flexed at her, blunt points digging at her thigh, pulling her tighter to him.  She didn’t mind; the water was warm and his hard-swollen shaft even hotter as she swept easily back and forth, up and down, over and around.

He hadn’t checked the doorway in quite a while.

Olivia laughed again, reaching back to catch the lip of the pool for leverage so that she could pump her hips at him a little harder.  It raised her up some, water falling like a black veil away from her breasts, leaving them naked and shiny in the open air, her nipples swelling in the cold, beads of water shaking free at every bounce, and there he was, gazing raptly right past them at her face, only her face, mesmerized.

She started to cum, not in a bright burst of friction, but in a rising wave, like the tide coming in against the shore.  She could feel it starting, feel it cresting, and then it crashed down, driving her under and bearing her up again, propelling her before it until she hit whatever beach there was and it could wash over her for good and all and then recede.  She sagged; he caught her, and he must have cum with her unnoticed in the heat and the wave because she could feel him softening even as he leaned back against the side of the pool, wide-eyed and breathing hard.

He looked at her for a second or two as she found her feet, then showed his teeth in a shocking grin and said, “I can’t believe we did that in a bath!”

She laughed at him.  “You started it.”

He snapped one wing in a shrug and rubbed his face, still grinning, then leapt from the pool in a spray of water.  He shook himself off, beating his wings so fiercely that the two nearest candles went out.  “Stay here, Olivia,” he said good-naturedly, and went into a connecting chamber.

She climbed out of the bath and waited, dipping her legs in the water, leaning back on her hands and humming under her breath.  She could hear him moving around close by and it wasn’t long before he came back to her, dressed in a fresh loincloth and carrying new clothes for her.

‘Clothes’ was perhaps too generous.  Someone had cut apart a blanket and sewn it together as a skirt, and made a quilted tunic of a sort out of an old sleeping bag.  They looked ridiculous, but she knew they must have taken a great deal of time and work on someone’s part.  And really, they were quite soft and comfortable, besides being warm, so she managed to thank him without sounded too sarcastic.

While she dressed, he gathered up their old clothes and gave them the kind of offhand toss toward the other chamber that spoke of a man who never had to wash his own laundry.  He came back to her, gave the hot spring a final smirking glance, and then led Olivia to a nearby bench.  He sat her down before him, brought out a carved wooden comb, and began to brush out her hair.

“A hot bath, new clothes, and my mate tending to me,” she murmured, dozing in his lap while he coaxed the tangles from her hair in long, even strokes.  “Ask me now if I am happy.”

“Are you happy?” he asked seriously.

“I am killed with happiness.”  It was a play of words.  The sounds for ‘killed’ and those for sexual climax were very similar.

He laughed and paused to squeeze her shoulders affectionately.  “My clever Olivia,” he said.  “My clever, beautiful Olivia!  You will see them snap their teeth at me in envy.  I will feast upon their praise.”  He stood her up and had a long look at her.  “They will see the woman who is my mate.”

It was impossible not to feel at least a little flattered when he said it like that, with such vehemence and pride.  She flushed and smiled and posed for him until he took her arm and took her back down the corridor.

She had to be carried up the wall of the chasm he had flown through, then led back through the maze until they came again to the mirror-lit Commons.  They were no longer alone here; in the quiet, she could make out the deep, rumbling voice of one of his kind, although she could not make his words.

Olivia’s captor put her down, patted her arm, and nudged her ahead of him.  It wasn’t as big as the cavern he’d had to fly down to get to the baths, but it was plenty big enough, with passageways leading in and out from all directions.  Stone benches and tables made a number of slightly more intimate spaces out of a cave roughly the size of her high school gymnasium, and there were three or four fireplaces large enough to lie down scattered around, although none of them were lit at the moment.  Cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and a couple plastic coolers occupied the shadows at one end of the room, an impressive amount of fire-fuel had been stacked at the other, while in the center, a large, flat-topped rock rose imperially over everything.  There were two people here, one a creature like her captor, the other a human woman sitting silently on a bench.

Olivia’s captor called to them.  The winged creature looked around at once, but the woman took no notice.  She wore a ragged nightgown and clutched a saucepan in both hands.  She continued to sit and stare at the wall without expression, even when Olivia offered her a tentative smile.  She was faintly familiar.  And then Olivia realized this was the same hysterical woman who had been grabbing on her that night in the parking lot, the one who had tried to run.

“This is my Olivia,” her captor said.

The other creature looked Olivia over with a bleak and disinterested eye.  “She seems lively enough,” he said at last.

“Thank you,” she said, not knowing whether to be amused or annoyed.

The other creature actually jumped back, one hand rising up to smack against his chest just like she’d sprouted a second hand in front of him and sang My Mammy in two-part harmony.  “She speaks!”

Olivia’s captor puffed up, but made a modest waving gesture.  “She learns because she is clever.  My Olivia is a civilized creature.”

The other sighed and glanced back at his woman.  “This one does not speak, not her own tongue much less ours.”

Olivia’s captor growled thoughtfully and moved some of the woman’s hair so that he could better see her face.  The woman did not respond.  “Perhaps when she sees the others of her kind—”

“You think she sees?”  The other creature uttered a breath of singularly bitter laughter and dropped down onto the bench beside his woman.  “She stares, she rocks herself, she spills out her own wastes and sits in it.  She eats when I feed her, walks where I lead her, stands when I clean her.  Nothing else.  Nothing more.”  He started at her morosely as she stared straight ahead, then dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his brow.  “She talked that first night…well, screamed some words at me anyway…but nothing since.  Just this.  What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Be patient,” Olivia’s captor said quietly.

“Easy for you to say.  Yours isn’t pissing in the pit every night.  Yours—”  The other creature glanced up to give Olivia a sour look, and then straightened up with a start, his eyes going past her in a dark and almost fearful way.  “Look there,” he murmured, barely audible.  “Look who comes.”

Olivia’s captor looked, flinched, and actually stepped back.

Olivia turned and what she saw pulled all the questions she had so hopelessly buried flooding right back to the surface.

It was another creature, but not like the others.  This one was female.

5

The female was, at first glance, much like the males.  She had the same general build, and the same broad and vaguely snout-like facial construction, but stood a little shorter and was padded in the kind of soft fat that comes naturally with age and inactivity.  She wore a loincloth, the same as the males, and a kind of deep-pocketed sling across one shoulder.  It wasn’t empty and whatever she carried in it pulled it down to hang nearly at her hips, but she left her breasts bare on either side of the strap.  The breasts themselves were mere suggestions, flat and sagging beneath a mottled, graying pelt.  She had no horns, but this did not soften the features of her terrible face.

And it was terrible.  One eye poached white and bulging from its scarred socket, the other black as jet and cruelly narrowed.  Scars made a death’s head rictus of her left half and pulled her mouth into a jagged sneer.  The flesh of her neck on that side was loose and grey as elephant hide.  Her wings were tattered along the edges, and only one folded up properly; the other hung half-open, withered and ruined.

The female strode up to them in a loping bear-like gait and stopped, breathing hard.  She glared first at the sitting, vacantly-staring woman, then at Olivia.  Her voice was too deep to allow her to cackle, but her low, mocking laughter would have done any storybook witch a great credit.

“So,” she said contemptuously, poking at Olivia’s chest, her arm, her stomach.  “Is this what you call hope?  Slimy white creature, a maggot with legs!  How can anything so ugly live?”

“You live!” Olivia snapped, slapping the female’s blunt finger away.

Her captor swiftly threw a hand around her mouth and pulled her against him, his wings snapping out and curling around as if to shield her.  The other male leaned back and just stared at her, all the dark emotion he’d been indulging mere seconds ago wiped utterly clean by shock.

The female staggered back a step, open-mouthed, but recovered quickly.  She gave Olivia’s captor a withering glare and he unwillingly folded his wings and lowered his arm.  “I see even a maggot can speak a civilized tongue,” she said, turning that same glare on Olivia.  “Though not in a civilized way.”

“I follow your lead,” Olivia countered, wishing furiously she knew even one swear.

“Do you, maggot?  Perhaps I should lead your wingless, bald body right off the Deep Drop!”

“Do it!  I could land on you and bounce all the way back to the top!” Olivia snapped, giving her own flat belly a slap to make her clumsy point absolutely clear.

She heard her captor gasp and saw the other male actually clap both hands over his snouted mouth, but the ugly old hag in front of her merely rocked back a little and looked thoughtful.

Too late, she remembered she was supposed to be the good slave here, the one who was supposed to be convincing all the others to behave.  She ducked her eyes, flushed and disoriented, unable to bring herself to dredge up the apology she knew she’d better make.

Her captor made it for her, clutching both her shoulders and saying, “It is her first day among people,” in what was damned near a stammer.  “She is nervous.”

The female’s pensive gaze turned suddenly, scornfully back on Olivia’s captor.  “You are nervous, whelp.  Get back.  Go!”  She threw a heavy smack to the side of his head and he let go with a yelp. “Go, you frog-hunter!  You maggot-maker!  This is no—”  Here she snarled out some unknown words.  “—to please you!  You go!”

And he went, by God.  Head ducked, shame-faced and anxious, he and the other male backed up fast and watched from a distance as the old female turned back to Olivia.  Her head cocked so that she could run her good eye up and down Olivia’s body, and if her expression wasn’t exactly approving, at least she kept her poking finger to herself.

“So,” the female mused, rubbing at the loose folds of her neck.  “Ugly, you are, but you may yet be as clever a thing as this one claims you are.  Shall we find out together, you and I?”

This did not sound good.  Olivia sent several nervous glances towards her captor, but he was no help at all.

“Oh ho, now you look to him for lead, do you?  Ha!  Nothing lives in Hollow Mountain that does not cower at old Murgull’s command!  You will learn to cower too, if you are truly clever.”

“I am not afraid of you!” Olivia snapped, and immediately wished she’d kept her damned mouth shut.

“Such a brave little frog you are, eh?  Old Murgull has ways of making brave little frogs wish they had never croaked aloud.”  The female uttered another booming peal of monstrous laughter, and took Olivia by the wrist.

Instinct dug her heels in for her, for all the good that did.  One yank of the old witch’s hand and she was flying forward, one arm pinwheeling for balance as she stumbled in the creature’s wake.

“Come with me, repugnant one,” Murgull said, cheerfully dragging Olivia towards one of the outward tunnels.  “We will have some talk between us, eh?  Woman-talk, you and I.”

Olivia looked back in time to see her captor take a step after them, but only one.  He looked distressed and helpless, unwilling or unable to intervene.  With a final tug, Olivia was pulled away and into blackness.

“Woman-talk,” the ugly creature muttered.  “Too little of that for you, I think.  No talk of woman ways from that one, ha!  No talk to female people or even female slugs like you.”  She grunted her resonant cackle.  “But come with old Murgull and I will tell you the things your stag-headed mate does not, I think, dare to speak yet.  Move your naked feet!”

“I can’t see,” stammered Olivia, thinking helplessly of her flashlight, sitting next to the empty-eyed woman on the bench.

“Nor can I, little frog.  In my youth, I could track a bat through a moonless night, but no more, no more.  Time makes humans of us all, they say.  Ha!  But I know this place and all places.  I know the rock and where it lies.  Come with me, lift up your puny feet and run.  What, would I hurl you to your death now?  I have other things to do, I would not waste my time with killing little slugs like you.  By my rotting tooth, what a piece of sludge you are!” she finished merrily.

Olivia made out faint light ahead, enough to pick out shadows on the floor that hid rough ridges and stubs to trip her up.  She went faster, amazed the old crone could keep up with her.

“There you are, faster now.  Even ugly frogs can hop!  If you were as quick as you are clever, you would not be in these caverns to be abused by an ugly old bat like Murgull.”

Murgull, thought Olivia, rolling the word around in her head.  It was the first name she’d heard.  Old Murgull, yet.  Old Murgull, before whom all the mountain cowered.

“Here!  Let me look at you,” Murgull grunted, pulling Olivia to a hard stop before a narrow doorway at the end of the tunnel, one opening into a wide cavern lit by more mirrors, and sealed away by a door of iron bars.  The light that streamed through this medieval barrier wasn’t much, but it was enough to see old Murgull’s good eye narrow as she paced around her.  “Poor little frog.  Captured and caged, as Murgull was.  In her youth, ah.”  She rubbed absently at the scars that warped the right side of her face, then peered down at Olivia.  “You are still ugly,” she said thoughtfully, “but not so much as first I thought.  Strange.  I know enough to see you are a female,” she added, poking Olivia in the chest through her new padded tunic.  “Have you—” she began and added a few questioning words Olivia did not know.

Olivia’s confusion seemed clear.  Old Murgull peered at her, grumbling, then held out her hands before her already thick waist, miming a round, pregnant belly.  She said the words again, slowly, then added, “Have you ever made a child, eh?”

“No.”

“Never?  A poor omen.”  Murgull ambled up to the doorway and rattled the iron door.  “Open, Horumn.  Open to the ugly human if not to me.”

Footsteps dragged on the other side, punctuated by the sound of something heavy striking rhythmically onto stone.  “I have no desire to see either of you,” a sour voice said, but the footsteps just came closer.

And then she was there, lumbering out into the reflected light, a creature at least as old as Murgull, if not as repulsive, and the first of the creatures Olivia had seen wearing a robe and not just a loincloth.  Made of leather, backless by necessity, it covered her body from her withered neck to just above her cracked, worn toeclaws.  She’d belted it with a length of rope, from which hung a thick iron key, but she was in no hurry to reach for it.  She came to the door, rested her hand above the solid iron lockplate, and just sneered at them.

“Open, old fool,” Murgull said, and gave the door another curt rattle.  “I have no time to waste with you.  And you, surely, have no time to waste with me, yet I will keep you wasting it all day unless you open to the horrible human.”

Horumn gave Olivia a baleful glare, then unlocked the door and pulled it open for them to pass into the roundish, mirror-lit cavern on the other side.  There were a lot of tunnels leading out, a fire burning in the wide hearth with a few massive cauldrons cooking over them, but no other sign of life.

“Ugly,” Horumn grunted, and tugged sharply at Olivia’s hair as she edged by.  “What is this?  To keep her brain warm?”

“Leave off, leave off!”  Murgull slapped at Horumn’s hands.  “Would you pinch a toad for having warts?  We have too little time for talk, you beast, you grub-licker.  Show the little worm a child.”

Horumn grunted wordlessly and shuffled off.  She limped badly; there was a knobby branch leaning up against the wall with a lump of a candle stuck to it, and Horumn picked it up as she went by, using it as a crutch.  Long after her she had faded from sight down one of the many tunnels, Olivia could hear the heavy thump of wood on rock and the meaty slide of Horumn’s useless foot.

Murgull wasn’t one to wait in doorways.  She led Olivia to a low bench and sat down.  “What have you been told?” she asked, squinting grimly at her.

“Nothing,” Olivia said.  “Nothing at all.  He only said last night that he would show me to the others.  I’ve been here for days…many days…”  Olivia’s voice broke; she found herself on the verge of tears and could not imagine why, not here, with this old witch.  “He tells me nothing.”

Murgull nodded and patted her arm with the same idle comfort as Olivia’s captor sometimes showed.  She fanned her good wing slowly, deep in thought.  “Old Murgull will tell you something to surprise you, pale one.  He is afraid of you, ha.  He was opposed to bringing your kind to our caverns, opposed to bringing your kind to our troubles.  I am opposed too, but I am not so quiet about it.”  She cackled.  “And I am not afraid, as he is.  Take my name, croak it like a brave frog, see if I tremble!  Ha!  I know I am near to dying, and I do not care who joins me.”

Horumn reappeared, pushing a camping cooler on wheels ahead of her.

Murgull rested a hand on the lid of the cooler and looked grim.  “But we are all dying here, my wingless sister.  We are the last.  And if you are not the hope our sigruum claims you are, then we are truly doomed, and Hollow Mountain will become just as we have named it, hollow and empty and cold.”

“Sigruum?”

“Words,” Murgull said impatiently, then paused and rubbed at her neck again.  “Words,” she murmured, but gravely now.  “Too little of that, I think, for you.  But too much for me to say.  You are human, eh?  Human.  And we are gullan, and that is how we begin.”

It was a slow beginning.  Murgull tolerated Olivia’s questions just as she tolerated Olivia’s many interruptions to puzzle out some unfamiliar word—irritably, but with resolve.  Language was a barrier between them, but they would not let it be a strong one.  Pantomime, repetition and clumsy explanations in simpler terms helped when Olivia stumbled over meanings; if they could not make their point clear enough, she waved them on anyway.  There was too much to say.

“How many of you are there?” Olivia asked.

“Oh, several tribes that Murgull knows,” the old gulla murmured, then looked around sharply.  “But you mean, how many in these caverns, this tribe?  A very few, and that is our doom.  Forty females of breeding age.  Some little more than eighty males.  No children.”

“It has not always been so.  Once we were many more,” Horumn added.  “Once every lair was filled with families.  The tunnels breathed with life.  The mountain groaned.”

“That, too, was our doom,” Murgull interrupted.  “Wing to wing, we were pressed together, and when the White Fever came, half our number took ill.  You will not know the Fever, of course.  It is enough for you to know that it does not kill.  Blinds, yes.  Takes blood and breath and leaves the rest to live, ha, somewhat less than whole.  And then they breed, and what they breed is weak and wasted.  What they breed has foaming fits and soft brains and twisted bones.  Ha, and then they breed!  This was the beginning of our end, little frog,” she said, looking down at the cooler under her hand.

“I do not understand,” Olivia said, horribly afraid that she did.

“Oh, it might have been mended,” Murgull snorted. “If they had been cautious, if they had been wise.  Everyone knows when the White Fever comes, those it takes must be killed.  But no, the tovorak ordered them driven back instead, into the deep reaches of the mountain.  They are still tribe, he said.  We are not beasts, he said.  Ha!  A beast knows better.  A beast knows compassion kills more than it preserves.  He let them live down there.  He let them breed down there.”

“When there were more of the wasted than there were of the whole, who was there to stop them when they crawled up from the Depths?” Horumn added disgustedly.  “The tovorak died.  The tribe fought.  The wasted won.  They stuck their foolish tools into any hole they could find and made all the young they could.  And the young are always worse than the fathers.”  She raised the hem of her heavy robe to reveal a leg, little more than a lump with claws sticking haphazardly out from the ankles.  “So I was born,” she spat.

Olivia’s head spun.  She’d heard that phrase a thousand times without realizing that shock really could swim the world around.  She grabbed at the bench beneath her for an anchor and shook her head hard, but that flushed and fevered sensation remained.  “Tovorak?  What—?”

“Ha, useless!” Horumn spat, throwing up both hands.

“The tovorak,” Murgull said, scowling with the good half of her mouth.  “He who decides.  The strongest, eh?  The tallest.  The wise.  Enough croaking, little frog!  Listen!  Horumn and I and others like us were born at the end of that evil time, and there were those wise enough to know what it meant.  They who saw our doom coming gathered in secret, made the wisest among them tovorak and did what had to be done.”

“They…They killed the Wasted?  All of them?”

“All?  No.  What would that leave but sisters to mate with brothers and fathers, one doom to replace another?  But they did kill, yes, and they killed until he was tovorak to all.”

Horumn dropped her robe back over her leg.  “He did his best to undo the damage.  No good.  Too much damage, too little cure.  The waste was in all of us by then.”

Olivia found herself shaking her head, looking from one to the other of them in confusion.  “Not…not mine?”

The two creatures exchanged glances.

Murgull cocked her good eye at Olivia and said, “One drop of poison in the water may be invisible, eh? Tasteless.  But it can still cramp the belly, eh?  The waste may take a fair form like that of your mate, but it poisons all the same, little frog, and see what is born to us now.”

She lifted the lid of the cooler, reached into the oily dark liquid that filled it, and drew out…something.

A face screwed on sideways on a mottled head.  Blunt, unfinished hands with fingers growing out of the wrists and palms.  One foot, a useless club, the other a spiny monstrosity.  A gaping hole where the sex should be.  Two wings, stunted and sealed to its back with slimy shreds of skin.  The mouth hung dully open, revealing a jaw full of unnatural teeth.

Olivia gagged and recoiled, almost falling off the bench.

“It came at sundown, never took a breath,” Murgull said, gazing at the thing meditatively.  “At first, only one or two were born so.  Then, only one or two were not.  The tovorak died, and a new one came, and we are so few, eh?  So few.  Some told him we should leave Hollow Mountain, find another tribe to join.  We have not heard from others in a hundred years, yet we know where they must be.  But how can we leave this place?  Our ancient ancestors carved these tunnels.  Our whole history is here!  Others said we should take humans and breed out the bad blood by them, as our legends say we may do.  But legends are not always truth, eh?  Stories are not babies to lie whole and healthy at our breasts!  So it raged for several years, and in those years, no young ones but these, vile and dead.

“In the end,” Murgull finished, slipping the thing back into the cooler, “he was convinced to take a small group of males to select human mates—wingless, furless, little maggots like you.  They were not enthusiastic, but desperation brings its own desire.  Now you are here, eh?  Seventeen of your ugly kind to be mates for the best of our males, mates for the strongest, the most whole.  He could find no more than seventeen.”  Murgull glowered at the cooler and rubbed at the loose folds of her neck.  At last, she shook her stubby horns and said, “If even one gulla puts a healthy child in a human belly, it will mean as much hope for my people as horror for yours.  We cannot cure what has happened here with only seventeen humans.”

“You don’t mean he will take more of us!” Olivia said.

“A risk,” Murgull muttered, now actually taking hold of her own loose skin and pulling at it.  “Terrible risk, but necessary.”

Horumn snorted and spat an amazing wad of phlegm on the cave floor.  “Necessary and foolish!  Ha!  Humans are dangerous enough when all we take are their cattle.  Now we will take their women?  Mark me, there is no hope!  None!  If we do not breed with you ugly maggots, we waste away and die!  If we do, the humans will find us in our homes and kill us!”

“Enough.”  Murgull motioned at the cooler, and Horumn took it away.  As Murgull watched the other female drag the coffin with its ghastly secret away, she quietly said, “For all it matters now, I think it was the best of bad choices.  To find another tribe is no promise of welcome, oh no.  Old Murgull thought to leave the caverns once before.  Away to the north, she flew in her youth, to the tribe that had spawned this one, in ancient days.  And did she find them?  Oh yes.  A hunting party high in the mountains, many days’ flight from here.  She pleaded with them for the sake of her people, and did they pity her?”

Murgull lapsed into silence, staring sorrowfully into the candlelight.  “No pity.  Laughter, they threw at her, and stones to strike her down.  Broke her wing to keep her on the ground, and put their pricks in her while she screamed and writhed in blood.  Chained her, yes, and held her for days…baking under the human sun by day…broken under their rutting weight at night.  Until, by the Great Spirit’s favor, she broke free.  Ha, free to scramble home with useless wing, useless eye, all ruin and fever and fear.  Months and months she scrambled, suffered, and no child, either.”  She rubbed at the patch of scar tissue, then seemed to remember Olivia.  “No, you are not so ugly.  Old Murgull knows ugly when she sees it.”

Even if she’d known the words, she couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.  It was hard enough just meeting Murgull’s steady, one-eyed gaze.

Murgull muttered under her breath, then heaved herself up with a groan.  “Come with me, little wingless sister.  We will find your kind in the commons now.  Let us hope together that one of them is sparking.”

6

The common cave was much more crowded when Olivia returned.  Several other captive women were gathered around the empty fireplaces, talking to each other in and out of English, sometimes speaking both tongues at once.  There weren’t as many as seventeen, if Murgull’s count could be trusted, but maybe the others were still coming.

Seeing them, Murgull uttered a disgusted grunt and released her at the doorway, muttering under her breath about maggots and slugs as she slouched off.  Olivia lingered, looking at the creatures—the gullan—grouped together around the raised, flat rock in the middle of the room.  She realized she knew which one was hers, and the realization both pleased and disturbed her.  He saw her, his strange face contorting with relief, and beckoned her to him.  She went, but slowly, looking at all of them together and seeing for the first time the subtle variations between them, wondering if the cracked horns she saw on one or the dull patch of fur on another were marks of age or of the waste.

“Is it wise to let her run loose?” asked a gulla as Olivia joined her captor.

Olivia’s captor tensed slightly.  “Murgull took her,” he said.

“And returned her?”  The gulla came up to look Olivia over, which in turn gave her the chance to study him.  Unremarkable for the most part, he did have one fascinating physical feature that stood him out not just from Olivia’s captor, but from all the others of his kind, at least all those gathered here: Beginning between his wings and ending just above his belt, following the curve of his spine, he’d grown a kind of bristly mane, much thicker and coarser than the rest of his fur, and slightly silvered at the tips.  It was just weird enough to make a girl overlook his lack of stature (still taller than Olivia, perhaps, but shorter than every other gullan here), his lack of strength (fit enough, as far as that went, but very lean, which made him seem positively scrawny compared with Olivia’s own captor), and just his general lack of noteworthy features (even his horns were slender and unprepossessing, although on closer inspection, they had a rougher edge to them, almost serrated). “I wonder why.”

“Who knows why that old bat does anything?” one of them muttered, ruining the surly effect of his words by simultaneously hunching down and looking to see if the bat in question were in evidence.

“When does she do things without reason?” the maned gulla retorted, and looked at Olivia again.  “But there are good reasons, I suppose…and not so good ones.  Old Murgull may have wanted to take a bite, see if humans are any good to eat.”  He gave one of the women behind him a dour sort of glance.  “They have to be good for something.”

Olivia glared at him, stung on behalf of all mankind.  “If eating is all you can think to do with your human, perhaps she would be happier with a less toothsome mate,” she said, then paused as all the gullan gaped at her and added, “Or if your tooth was stronger.”  Her words were clumsy, but the double meaning was not lost on him, nor on the others nearby who, after a short, stunned silence, set up a delighted chorus of howls and tooth-snapping aimed at Olivia’s captor, who looked faintly smug.

“What happened to the others?” Olivia asked, looking towards the women.  “I thought there were more of us.  Did they…?  Are they…?”

“They live,” he assured her, but his gaze drifted toward the madwoman and her pot, and his smile died away.  “All live yet.  These are the humans you must speak with.  You may use human words with them, but they must be made to understand.  They must not fight us.  They must learn to speak properly.  They must become tribe.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she said.  “But I do not command my people…”  She hesitated, then went ahead and said it.  “…as you command yours.”

His eyes snapped back to her.  He frowned, started to speak, then took her arm and led her away from the others.  “Murgull told you this?”

“She didn’t have to tell me.  Is it true?  You are tovorak?”

“Yes,” he said, his gaze troubled but steady on hers.  “I am tallest.  But that is not a name for you to call me.  It is only what I am, and you are my mate.  Or will be,” he said, looking at the women, “if you can make your humans see reason.  I can only make so many commands, my Olivia.”

He released her then, and she felt his stare itching on her back as she went to join ‘her’ humans.

A tallish red-head whose brunette roots were nearly an inch long came to meet her.  “That was my male oppressor you put down,” she said by way of greeting.  “Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to see it happen, but it was still a dumb thing to do.  Of course, he can hardly knock you around, here in front of everyone.”

She stopped, startled, and stared at her.  “He hits you?”

“Not where it shows.  I’m Cheyenne,” she said.  “That big one there, he’s yours, isn’t he?”

Olivia looked over her shoulder and saw her captor at the center of his own small crowd, and yes, he stood over them, all fanned wing and impressive swoop of horn, listening to the low growls of gullan speech in a brooding way.  “Yes,” she said quietly.  It was on the tip of her tongue to say that he was the leader here, but something about Cheyenne’s piercing stare made her think better of it, so instead she said, “That’s mine,” and let it go at that.

“What’s his name?”

Olivia shook her head and faced the others again.  “I don’t know.  I’ve asked him, but he either changes the subject or just doesn’t answer.”

“Yeah, I get that too.  I don’t know.”  Cheyenne contemplated the group of gullan sourly.  “Maybe they don’t have names.  Maybe they sniff each other’s assholes like dogs.”

Olivia felt a hot flare of anger at those words, wondered why she should be offended, then shrugged it off and said, “They have names.  I was with two of their females, Horumn and Murgull.”

Cheyenne gave as violent a start as if she’d been slapped in the face, and all the other humans stopped talking and stared at her.  “Women?  They have women?  I thought…I mean…”  Her face screwed up into outrage.  “What the fuck do they need us for then?”

A number of gullan looked their way.  Cheyenne immediately lowered her voice, but her anger only seemed to grow under their watchful stares.

“What the hell is going on here if it isn’t about women?” she demanded.

“It’s not that simple,” Olivia said.  “They have women, but there’s been some trouble, and now they think they need us to make healthy babies.”

“What in God’s name makes them think they can make babies with us, healthy or otherwise?” another woman asked, eyebrows only very slightly raised.  She got up from the bench where she’d been sitting and came to join their little circle, holding out her hand.  “Hey, Tina Hartwell, how’s it going?”

Olivia shook her hand without thinking and was immediately struck by the absurdity of observing the social formalities in a cave full of bat-people.  “Hi.  I guess…I guess you better all gather ‘round, because this is something you’re all going to want to hear.”  And as the women came to form a close knot around her, she told them as much of Murgull’s story as she bring herself to do, including the baby in the cooler, although she described it as little as possible.

“Are you sure we’re even talking about a disease here?” Cheyenne asked at the end of it.  “I mean, this is a really closed community.  What if they’re all just super hillbilly inbred?”

“Inbreeding doesn’t cause gross deformities out of hand,” Tina remarked, frowning at the wall over Olivia’s head.  “But you’re describing a pretty wide array of physical and neurological defects.  It almost sounds like a, I don’t know, a souped-up version of the measles.”

“Nobody gets the measles anymore,” another woman broke in.  She stood apart from the rest of them, an older woman who had gone to a lot of effort to hide her age, but after a few weeks without cosmetics, probably looked ten years older than she was.  She looked at them, at all of them, with an icy and almost violent dislike, as if she held them responsible for her being here as much as the gullan.  “For God’s sake, this isn’t Africa!”

“Yeah,” drawled Tina, meeting that hot stare with contempt.  “Yeah, I’m thinking these—gullan, did you call them?—these gullan aren’t exactly up on their shots, lady.  And I didn’t say it was the measles, I said it was similar.  There are a lot of bugs out there that can cause high fevers, blindness, muscular atrophy, and birth defects, but what’s bothering me is that little bit about how the kids are always worse.  And they apparently keep right on getting worse.  But I still don’t understand how they think we’re going to make it all better.”

“Weiner dogs,” someone said.

They all turned around to look at her (except for the madwoman with her saucepan, who went on sitting and staring serenely straight ahead).  She was easy to overlook, a very young blonde, slender and small-breasted, with the open, earnest face of a child and simply huge baby-blue eyes.  She blushed at them, but said it again:  “Weiner dogs.  See, my aunt, she raises them for, like, show dogs, and every Christmas when I went to stay with her, I got to help her take care of them, so, like, I got to learn a lot about them.  They have the highest chance of any breed of dog to develop back problems, like, with slipped discs and stuff.  Also dislocated knees and epilepsy and bad ears and eyes.  Like, one dog she had was actually born with no eyes at all, I swear.”

“There’s a point here, right?” Olivia asked, hoping she sounded curious rather than outright rude.

“Yeah, see, weiner dogs get born like that a lot because all the weiner dogs have the same problems, but if you breed them to, I don’t know, a chihuahua, the puppies have a better chance of not having any problems at all.”

“It’s called hybrid vigor,” Tina agreed, frowning at the blonde.  “The theory is, if everyone’s got the same genes, the kids inherit all the problems from both parents, but throw some fresh blood in the mix, and all the nice, healthy dominant genes take over.  Of course, among other things, this assumes that the problems they’re having are actually due to recessive genes in the first place, which we have no way of knowing since we have no idea what this White Fever really is.  More importantly, where do they get the insane idea that they can breed them out with us?”

Olivia shrugged helplessly.  “They apparently have some old legend about humans having babies with them.”

“Bestiality!” hissed Ms. Africa.

“Doubtful,” Tina said, much more calmly.  “Highly doubtful.  Look, a dog can breed with a wolf all right, and grizzlies can mate with polar bears, but these are definitely the exceptions.  And even when two species can make a baby, they can’t always make viable offspring.  Horses and donkeys can make mules, but mules are sterile, just like ligers and zebroids.”

“Zebroids?” another woman echoed.

“Zebra hybrid.  With horses, donkeys, that sort of thing.” Tina explained, and looked back at Olivia.  “And those are very closely related species, which, looking at our situation, I’m thinking we’re not.  There’s not a chance in hell we’re sexually compatible with a bunch of three-toed bat-people, whereas the odds of us transmitting horrible diseases back and forth are pure gold.  You need to talk to these people and try to make them understand a little something called an asymptomatic carrier, because in another month, we could all be dead from this White Fever and they could all be dead from friggin’ polio.  They think they have problems now, just try that shit on for size.”

Olivia nodded, acknowledging this, but in her mind, she could only see her captor’s hard, determined face and cold eyes.  “I don’t see us convincing anyone,” she said.  “And even if we did, I doubt they’d let us go with a handshake and a hearty apology.  These are very desperate people.”

“How much more desperate are they going to be in three years,” Tina demanded, “when it becomes obvious to everyone that we can’t make a baby with a friggin’ horny bat?”

Cheyenne’s mouth twisted up in something that could not fairly be called a smile.  “What makes them think they’ve got three years to try?” she asked.  “I mean, come on, they really think no one’s going to notice we’re missing?  No one’s going to come after us?”

“No one’s showed up yet,” another woman said.  She smiled nervously when heads turned toward her, reaching as if to put her hair in order before standing up to join them.  She was a tall woman, still pretty despite their circumstances and primitive attire; her knee-length dress appeared to have been sewed together from a tent.  “Hi, I’m Ellen.”  Hands were shaken all around.  “That one’s mine,” she added, pointing at the gullan.  One of them waved at her.  “Mr. No-Name.  I call him Bob.”

“One lady goes missing, maybe no one notices,” Cheyenne said impatiently, turning her back on Bob and his buddies.  “A bunch of ladies go missing on the same night from the same apartment complex, even Deputy Dawg from our boondock town is going to sit up and pay attention.  You better believe they’re looking for us.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Olivia said.  “But even if they did, who would look for us here?”

“There had to be clues,” Cheyenne insisted.

“Of what?” Tina shot back, and actually laughed.  “I have a vague memory of some busted doorknobs, but no one, and I mean no one, is going to look at claw marks and see claw marks!  Any fingerprints they find are bound to go down in the books as ‘so smudged they didn’t even look human!’  Think about it!  And honestly?  I kind of hope they don’t find any fur, because if they do, the only newspaper we’re going to be in is the one that says Bigfoot Kidnaps Women!  I’m a bottom-line kind of gal, and I gotta say, the bottom-line here is, the cavalry is not coming!”

“So why not make the best of things?” another woman asked loudly. She walked over to join them, giving them all a broad smile just a little too smug to be friendly.  “Maria Alendez.  I seen most of you before.   You all walk right past me almost every day, in fact, and I bet you don’t even recognize me.”

“You’re the chick behind the espresso counter at the supermarket,” Tina said flatly.  “The one who’s always yapping at her cell phone and painting her nails instead of making me my friggin’ five-dollar latte.”

Maria’s lips pursed.   “When you grow up the way I did,” she went on, not looking at Tina, “you know better than to stand around and wait for rescue when things go bad.  You have to take care of things yourself.”

“Damn straight,” Cheyenne said.

“So when he came to me, I let him come.  I let him, all right, and I let him hear me chanting while he was on top of me.”  Maria brought her hands up fast, her long fingers waggling as she sang, “A guanchilopostle, a huanchiloé!  A ver señorita qué tal baila usted!” in such sinister tones that it should have been ridiculous…and wasn’t.  Maria laughed at all their solemn faces, then shrugged and folded her arms.  “After he was done, I told him I had magical powers and I had trapped his soul in a candle and unless he told me his name, I would blow it out and destroy him forever.”

All of the women were silent and crowded close, listening.  Maria checked to make sure none of the gullan were close enough to hear her, then lowered her voice even further, and said, “His name is Grunn.  God, he was scared.  I was feeling nasty towards him, so I blew out the candle anyway.  He actually fainted.”

Cheyenne laughed, but she was the only one and Olivia noticed that some of the others actually looked upset.  She was probably one of them.

Maria smiled and nodded, basking in whatever admiration she felt she’d received.  “I felt a little bad about it, afterwards.  I mean, he was that scared.  So when he woke up, I told him that I blew out the candle to break the spell and put his soul back into his body.  But he just better treat me right.  After all, you don’t mess with the mojo woman.”

Tina folded her arms with a derisive snort, loudly terminating the little murmurs as the other women discussed this.  “You realize this is why none of the rest of us know anyone’s name?”

Maria shrugged.

Ellen sighed and sat down.  “At least you had a plan,” she said.  “I was so high, I didn’t even know what I was getting.  I just woke up the next morning and found a suitcase full of the most random crap you can imagine.  We’re talking my Halloween cookie cutters, a pair of earmuffs, two boxes of breakfast cereal, the package of crazy straws I keep for my niece, a feather duster…oh, and the thank-you notes I’d been meaning to send ever since my wedding.  And here I’ve been divorced for six years!”

“At least it’s finally off your To-Do list,” Cheyenne said, kicking at the floor.

“It is now.  I’ve been so bored, I went ahead and filled them all out.”  Ellen shifted her gaze to one of the gullan, her Bob, and shook her head.  “I didn’t even have a pen, so he brought me a brush and a little pot of paint.”

“Yeah, that completely makes up for the whole kidnapping thing,” said Cheyenne.

Ellen either didn’t hear or pretended not to.  “I tried to tell him what they were for.  I think it made him uncomfortable when he realized I was married.  I know he felt better when I burned the cards.”

“Burned them?”

Ellen shrugged.  “What else was I going to do, mail them?  It was actually pretty symbolic.  You know, seeing his name and mine and ‘thank you so much for sharing our happy day’, and then watching it go up in smoke.”  She tossed a glance back at the gullan and fetched out a dry laugh.  “My shrink would call that cathartic.  I think it was the first time I really sat down and stared that mistake in the face.  I mostly try to pretend I was never married at all.”

“I’m married.”

Everyone turned as one to see the speaker, a dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties.  She looked embarrassed at their attention, but no amount of casual shrugging could disguise the naked pain in her eyes.  “Just dumb luck that they came the night they did.  He’d left on a fishing trip with his brother.  We had such a fight about it.  We’ve only been married two months.”  She began to cry.  “What did he think when he came home and I was gone?”

“Have you told him?” Ellen asked in a low voice, nodding at the gullan.

“No, what would I tell him?”  The dark-haired woman wiped her eyes and struggled to get herself under control again.  “I cried and cried for about a week.  He’d try and touch me and I’d just lie there and cry, and he’d slink off.  Then I realized he was just as miserable about the whole thing as I was, and I thought he would put me back if he felt he had to, so I asked him to take me home.  He kept saying he couldn’t, there wasn’t any way, and finally he said I was going to die here.  I’d live a long time, but I could never leave.”

The other women murmured, looks of disquiet coming and going across all their faces.  They’d all heard the same thing.

The dark-haired woman wiped her eyes, took a series of deep breaths, and composed herself.  “So then I was afraid that if I didn’t, you know, he’d kill me.  He didn’t seem like the killing type, but I was scared anyway.  So I learned to lie there and not cry.  He…tries to be nice to me.  He talks to me, but I just can’t…can’t listen.  What am I supposed to do?  Read magazines?  Play with their stupid toys? David must be out of his mind, and how am I supposed to eat and sleep and h-have s-seh-hex with these monsters knowing what he came home to?!”  She covered her face and gave in to tears again.

They stood around her, avoiding each other’s eyes while the soft crying sounds hung in the air.  Olivia glanced toward the gullan and saw her captor watching very closely.  They all were.

“And where are the others?” Tina asked at last.  For the first time, her tough, clinical exterior cracked, showing the worry beneath.  “I know there were more of us out in that parking lot.  Are they all right?  Does anyone know?”

And they all turned and looked at Olivia.

“I don’t.  I’m sorry.”  She took a deep breath and plunged ahead.  “But I do know why it’s just us talking here today.  See, the thing is…oh God, this is going to sound horrible.”

“Just spill it,” Cheyenne said bluntly, watching from the shadow of her bangs.  “It can’t be any worse than it already is.”

“The thing is, my…mine wants me to talk to you about…about how important it is to…”  She let them stare at her for a while, then sighed and said, “There’s no good way to say this, so I’ll just be the good slave and spit it out.  You’re here because you’re not playing ball.”

Some of the women looked surprised, but not all of them.  Maria laughed. Cheyenne and the older woman who’d insisted nobody but Africans caught measles both looked furious.  Tina didn’t look like anything at all.

“I guess that’s true enough,” Cheyenne said after a moment.  “Unless you count the balls I kicked when he came at me.  And I’ll kick them again, I can guaran-damn-tee it.”

“That’s a mistake.”

“Oh really, Uncle Tom?  You don’t say!”

“Look, you can call me what you want,” Olivia said.  “But if this is really it, if this is what there is for the rest of my life, I’m not going to spend it shut up in his bedroom.  He wants us to come out and be seen and be one of the tribe, but the only way he is going to allow that is if we are the sort of people he feels good about letting other people see.  If he’s got to worry about us stealing people’s souls or kicking them in the nuts every night, you’re never going to see another human face again.  It’s not easy to stand here and say this,” she said, throwing out her arms to put all her unhappiness and shame on display for them.  “But I have to say it, because if I don’t, then I’m pretty much saying nothing while you’re all locked up for the rest of your lives.  Is that what you want?”

Cheyenne shoved herself off the wall and stalked away, her hands drawn up in fists.

“No,” Tina said, and threw the gullan across the room a black stare.

There followed an awkward silence, broken at last by the young blonde’s forced laughter.

“Well,” she said, “I guess I know what I’m doing here.”

They all immediately looked at her.

She seemed surprised by their attention, tried to shrug it off.  “Oh, it’s nothing serious.  It’s just that I’d been having, like, the worst day of my life…and I guess I went a little crazy that night with, you know, with the booze.”

Maria snorted.  “You picked a helluva night to get ‘faced, amiga.”

“Didn’t I?” The blonde laughed again, less forced but still self-conscious.  “I don’t remember a damn thing after the first few shots, and only a little of what must have been a truly epic hangover.  I mean, I got sick like I don’t think I’ve ever been sick in my life.  I’d open my eyes and see these bat-people hovering around me, and man, I just thought I was hallucinating.  Only the drunk-feeling eventually went away.”  Her brow puckered, just the tiniest bit.  “And he didn’t.  So I sort of freaked out for a while.”

“Well, I’m still completely in the dark,” announced Ellen, also frowning at the gullan.  “What the hell did I do?  Bob?”

Tina put a hand on her shoulder and sat her back on the bench.  “In light of recent statements made by freakin’ idiots among us—”  She gave Maria a pointed glance and the other woman flipped her the finger.  “—I think maybe giving him a name was a bad idea.”

“Oh, you dope,” Ellen said, exasperated.  She jumped up and strode across the cave, grabbed a retreating male by the arm, then reached up and popped him lightly on the forehead while all the other males frowned at her.  “I have to call you something, don’t I?  Look, I’ll go first:  Me, Ellen.  You, idiot!”

“And you need to be making more of an effort to learn their language,” Olivia said, addressing Tina now since she was the only one still looking at her.

“Oh, believe me, I am,” she replied, once more in her calm, steady, bottom-line voice.  “I may not show it, but I am learning.”

“Having them think they can talk in front of us is the only advantage we have,” Cheyenne added furiously.  “Just why the hell should I throw it away?”

“You absolutely cannot treat these people like the enemy,” Olivia said.

“They are the fucking enemy!” shouted Cheyenne, and all the gullan looked at her.

Olivia gave up on her and turned back to Tina, who wasn’t a whole lot less hostile, but who at least made an effort to look like she was listening.  “Whether you like it or not, this is how it is.  These people are a lot stronger than us, and in addition to climbing sheer rock walls with the claws on their bare hands and feet, they can fly!  They also outnumber us by at least five to one, and while math was never my strong suit in school, taking all of that into consideration, I have to say we’re stuck here!”

Tina frowned.  That was all.

Olivia looked around, including the rest of them in her quiet, impassioned speech.  “We treat them like the enemy, and maybe, just maybe, they start treating us like the enemy.  Do you honestly think we’re going to win in that situation?”

“Okay,” Tina said.  “You’ve made your point and it was worth making.  What I want to know is, where’s my carrot?”

Olivia, and quite a few others (including her captor, watching from across the cave), blinked at her.

“Say you want a donkey to pull a cart, and all you have is a stick,” Tina said.  “You can hit the donkey all damn day and he isn’t going to move, but you tie a carrot to the stick and tie that over his head, and he’ll walk to the ends of the earth.  So fine.  These guys have all the sticks, but all they’ve done with them so far is smack us around.  If you want me to hitch up and pull, I want a friggin’ carrot.”  She shifted her steady gaze to include the gullan, although she didn’t raise her voice.  “I want to see the rest of us, all of us.  I want to know they’re safe.  And until I do, I’m not budging.”

One of the gullan murmured something in a questioning tone.  Olivia’s captor answered in a low growl.

Olivia lifted her arms and dropped them.  “I don’t make the rules here.  I can’t make any promises.  All I can say is what I was told, and I was told that this would be our last meeting if I couldn’t convince you all to start behaving.  To me, that implies that more meetings are definitely in our future.”

Tina nodded, looked away, and nodded again.  And then she said, “You need to face a hard reality here, lady.  We’re never going to be one of the tribe, you know that, don’t you?  We can talk like them, we can play nice in the bedroom, we can do everything they ask us to, but none of that changes the fact that it is medically impossible to make them a baby.  And they aren’t going to shrug their shoulders and say aw shucks and go on taking care of us for the next ten or twenty or fifty years.  They’re going to kill us and try something else.”

“That’s not true,” said the young blonde before Olivia could even open her mouth.

“It is.  I’m sorry, but it is.”  Tina looked at them, that same distracted, clinical look.  “When this Murgull person was telling you about the fever, what was it she said?  They knew they were supposed to kill the people who caught it.  Their mistake was letting the wasted ones live.  They’re going to kill us,” she said quietly, without heat, almost without emotion.  “They’ll give us a year.  They may even give us two.  And then they’re going to kill us all.”

7

The words dropped like lead and lay there, uncontestable.  Tina refused to take them back, refused even to look sorry she’d said them.  She stood there with her arms crossed over her solid chest and said nothing more, just daring them to argue, but what argument was there to make?  In the end, it was the young blonde who stepped up, not Olivia.  She raised a shaking, pointing finger and every one of them looked at her (even the madwoman with her pot appeared to be watching, but only because she’d always been staring in this direction), waiting to hear what she had to say that could possibly take away the calm, factual, irrefutable sentence of death.

She burst into tears.

Sudden booming cries of alarm from the gullan made a bizarre harmony to the sound of women gasping and stepping back as the blonde crumpled over and sobbed on her knees on the floor.  She did it like a child, loud and graceless and unpretty, all flushed cheeks and snot bubbles, braying into the open, unfeeling air.

“Good one,” Cheyenne said disgustedly, but she was looking at the blonde, not Tina.

And then they were all shouldered roughly aside by one of the gullan.  He crouched close to the blonde, his wings curling around them both as he nuzzled and crooned at her.  She hugged his neck and cried harder.

“What happened?” Olivia’s captor asked.  “Is she hurt?”

She didn’t like the way he looked at the other women when he said that.

“No, no,” Olivia assured him.  “But these are difficult words for her to hear and the excitement of being with so many humans again after so long has exhausted her.  Perhaps she should go back to her chambers.  Let me go with her.  I think I need to speak with her more.”

The gulla cradling the young blonde looked anxiously from Olivia to her captor.

Olivia’s captor thought about it briefly, then nodded.  “Go.  I will come for you later.”

The gulla bounded to his feet, bearing his female with as little effort as he would carry a toy.  He took off down the dark tunnels with Olivia running at his heels.  Behind her, she could hear the strong voice of her captor ordering the other women back to their chambers.

Olivia ran after him a long time, following the sound of the blonde’s fur-muffled weeping down the candlelit tunnel.  They ended up in a narrow passage with a narrow chute similar to the one outside the chambers she shared with her own captor.  He went up first; she could hear him murmuring at the blonde while she waited below, until finally she coughed into her fist and he came back to get her.

The first thing she noticed about his chambers was how much simpler and smaller they were than the ones she lived in.  The chute opened directly upon the sleeping room, his only room.  His pit, where the blonde sat wet-eyed and curled small, had only a few musty sleeping bags and an old canvas tent in it.  He had no fireplace and no private flow of water to be his bathroom; there were no mosaics on his floors, no relics from the human world on his walls.  If she needed more proof that her captor was the leader, it was here.

Olivia went to the pit and settled herself beside the blonde.  She had stopped crying, for the most part, but just sat there, staring desolately into nothing and sniffling now and then.  Her mate hovered anxiously by the chute, shifting from foot to foot like a small boy who needs a bathroom.  The blonde wasn’t exactly being forthcoming, so, in English, she said, “What’s wrong?”

The blonde rolled her eyes and wiped her nose on her arm.  “I don’t even know how to answer that.”

It was kind of a stupid question.  Olivia picked at the edge of her sleeping bag/tunic and wished she could think of a better one.  “I know how that all sounded,” she said at last.  “I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed, too.  But no one’s going to kill us.”

The blonde pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, drawing herself into an even smaller and more miserable-looking huddle.  “You know, I don’t know what it was like for you guys, but I’m actually a great big nothing.  The week before this all happened, I lost my fry-dipping job and my purse on the same day.  By the time I got home, someone had cleaned out my bank account and maxed all my credit cards.  I was already behind on the rent and I had nowhere else to go!  I was out every day looking for work and the only offers I got was fifty bucks for a blowjob.”  She uttered a high, angry laugh.  “I actually had to think about it before I told him to fuck off, you know?  When I got kidnapped out of that, I was glad!  I mean, I’m aware that I was, like, plastered at the time, but still!”

“Is she all right?” called the gulla in his own language.  “I don’t speak her words.  Tell me what she’s saying!”

“She thinks you’re angry with her,” Olivia improvised.

“Angry?  I’ve never been angry with her, never!  Tell her not to be afraid of me!” he cried, both arms outstretched and pleading.  “She’s my mate!”

Olivia touched the blonde’s knee.  “He’s worried about you.”

“I know.”  The blonde looked at him and swiped at her cheeks.  “Look at him,” she said dully, staring at the gulla staring anxiously back at her.  “He’s been nothing but nice to me.  When I got here and I was, you know, sick…he took care of me.  I could like him, you know?  If that makes me a traitor or whatever, I don’t care!  It’s like you said, if this is it, I don’t want to live the rest of my life just hating someone!”  And then she started crying again, not as hard as before, but hard enough to bring the distressed gulla several steps forward and back again in an anxious dance.  “I’m trying, okay?  I’m trying to figure all this out, I’m trying to fit in, but I can’t have babies!”

“It won’t be so bad as that,” Olivia said in what she hoped was a soothing manner.  “Tina’s wrong.  No one’s going to kill us.  Look at him!  Look how worried he is!”  She tried to gesture back at the male, but the blonde shook her head furiously and pulled Olivia closer.

“I can’t get pregnant,” she insisted.  “I don’t mean I don’t want to or anything, I mean I can’t!  I…I…oh God, I had an abortion!  And not, you know, not by a real doctor. I’m all messed up now.”  She pulled away, looking wetly into Olivia’s stunned eyes.  “What will he do when he realizes I’m no good to him?”  She started crying harder, but Olivia could not think of a single comforting thing to say.

“What did she say?” called the gulla.  “Why is she still crying?  Did she hurt herself when she fell?”

“Listen to me, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself,” Olivia hissed.  “What’s your name?  Talk to me.”

“Beth, Bethie.”  The blonde sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.  “Elizabeth Berpins.”

“Pull yourself together, he’s getting nervous.  I told him you were tired out from all the excitement, but if you keep having hysterics, he’s going to think you hurt yourself.”  Olivia ripped a strip of canvas off a tattered tent to blow her nose into. “Or that one of the others hit you or something,” she added.  “You don’t want to get them in trouble, do you?”

That silenced the blonde.  She held the canvas in trembling hands, her face streaked with tears.

“Clean yourself up,” Olivia commanded.  “Smile at him.”

Beth wiped her face and blew her nose, then peered around Olivia’s shoulders and offered the gulla a watery, quivering smile.

“Is she all right now?” he asked, obviously relieved.  “Does she know I won’t harm her?”

“Did you understand any of that?” Olivia asked.

“No.”  The blonde sat up, wringing her rough handkerchief in her hands.  “Sometimes I can kind of figure him out if he talks slow and points at things, but not much.”  She uttered a shaky laugh.  “I took Spanish for three years, and I can’t even order a taco!  God, I’m so useless!”  She began to fold under again, but Olivia gave her a quick, furtive pinch and Beth straightened up.

“First of all,” Olivia said, “not even they know if it’s possible for us to have kids together.  Secondly, even if it is possible, no one knows if the whole…hybrid vigor thing is actually going to work.  Finally, who’s going to know if it’s you or him having the problem?  Pull yourself together, no one’s in any immediate danger.”

Beth sniffed, thought about it, and relaxed a little.  It wasn’t much, but it was encouraging.  “I guess I don’t have to tell him right away,” she said hesitantly.

“You may not have to tell him at all.”  Olivia gave her a pat on the arm.  “But for God’s sake, they’re not going to kill us!”

“Are you sure?”

Was she sure?  Olivia thought about it and decided that she was.  For a dumb reason, maybe, but it still felt true.  “My…”  It didn’t feel right calling him her captor when she was trying to reassure someone.  “My guy says they won’t hurt us.  I believe him.”

“That’s what he says.”  Beth looked toward the gulla pacing at the foot of the pit.  “And I believe him, too.”  She sniffed some more, wiped her eyes.

“Will she let me over there?” he asked timidly.

Olivia relayed the question and Beth nodded and held out her arms.  He crept cautiously to her and took her up as gently as a child.  She sniffled and clung to him, and he patted her back and folded his wings around her as though walling her off from the big, bad world.

Olivia sat and watched, feeling uneasy and a little lonely. For Beth, the problem was over, but for Olivia, the questions remained.

8

Olivia’s captor came, as promised, later.  Unfortunately, he apparently meant much later.  Olivia passed the day with Beth in the cramped quarters she shared with her gullan guardian trying not to look either impatient or bored, but no one came for her.  She had to share their loaf of hard bread at meal times, share the crude toilet facilities (which amounted to a bucket half-filled with ashes), and eventually, share their sleeping pit, too thinly padded with musty goat-skins and canvas tents to be comfortable.

It wasn’t comfortable for any of them, really.  Very aware of Olivia’s presence, he was careful not to remove his loincloth, although she could imagine how awkward it must be to sleep in.  He and Beth snuggled up together in the warmest sleeping bag, as far from Olivia as possible without physically pushing her out of the pit, while she tried to find a way to fall asleep without the gentle weight and warmth of a gullan wing draped over her.

In the dark of that unrestful night, she finally got up, tripped loudly over a camping cooler, stubbed her toe on a stone bench, and then walked directly into a wall trying to find the bathroom that wasn’t even there.  Her muffled yelp of pain and subsequent curses were relatively restrained, but before the end, light flared in the darkness as Beth’s captor thumbed a Zippo and held it up to peer at her.  Light should have helped, but instead, the sudden reassertion of reality over where she thought she was disorientated her even further; she backed up into the same stupid cooler and fell flailing into the pit.

Beth slept right through it.

“Are you all right?” the gulla asked drowsily, already beginning to slump back into the pit, although he made an effort at holding the lighter higher.

“I keep forgetting where I am.  Can you light a candle for me?  And leave it lit?  Just in case?”

He grunted and rolled over, reaching to hook a taper from its setting on a nearby bench, and Beth murmured and groped for him.  Her little hand found his thigh and clenched on it, very much as a child will do when seeking Teddy in her sleep.  The gulla gave her a pat as he lit the candle, then flicked the Zippo shut and settled himself against his human once more.  “Better?” he mumbled, braiding his limbs through Beth’s with a complete lack of self-consciousness.

“Much.  Thank you.”

She waited uncomfortably as long as she could stand to, then picked up the bucket and moved it to the wall for what little privacy that allotted her.  She thought he was sleeping when she returned, but as she crawled back under her goat-skin, he roused himself to ask, “Are you cold?”

Honesty warred with tact.  Tact won.

“No, I’m fine,” she said, and tried to wrap herself a little more snugly in her goat and part of a nylon tent.

He grunted again, then pried his eyes open and peered at her.  “You are different from my Beth,” he said, sounding somewhat more awake.  “Is she younger than you?”

“I think she is, yes.”

“She’s so small,” he observed.  “And not strong.  I’ve been trying to teach her how to speak, but she isn’t learning.”  He studied Beth in silence for a short while, then looked back up at Olivia.  “Will her hair grow dark like yours when she’s grown?” he asked.

“No.  Humans look different.  That’s how we tell each other apart.”

His head tipped.  “But you all sound different.  You all smell different.”

“Humans don’t hear as well as you gullan, and we have trouble with smells.”

He grunted, dropping his head back into the bedding and nuzzling Beth’s neck until she rolled over and threw an arm around him.  “I did wonder,” he muttered.  “You have such little noses.  How young…”  He yawned, rubbed at his snout, and then apparently forgot the rest of the question and simply went back to sleep.

After many cramped, cold, envious minutes, Olivia finally joined him.

9

She woke again to the sound of gullan voices.  She opened her eyes and found herself alone in the pit with Beth, who was still sleeping soundly.  Olivia turned her head and saw her captor seated on a bench with a lantern on the floor between his feet.  Across from him, lacking another bench, Beth’s captor crouched, elbows on knees and wings slightly fanned for balance.

“It sounded that way, but what do I know?  I don’t speak human,” Beth’s male was saying.  “I know that she was worried about something, but I don’t know what.  Your Olivia said it was because she thought I would be angry with her, but I think she was lying.”

Olivia’s captor made a non-committal sound in the back of his throat.

“She was obviously trying to calm Beth down about something, though.  I just wish I knew what.  She’s been scared like that before, but I thought that storm had blown by.”

“Pregnant women can be nervous without cause.”

“That isn’t it,” Beth’s captor said.  “Murgull came by only yesterday.  She says women have a scent when they spark.  Beth doesn’t have it.”

“A scent,” murmured Olivia’s captor, amused.

“I don’t know any of that woman stuff,” the other grumbled.  “If old Murgull told me sparking women shed their wings and feathered nests with them, I would have to believe her.  Old Murgull says males can’t smell mother-scent anyway.  She says season-musk is all we can smell.”

“Murgull may be right,” Olivia’s captor said, but he was no longer smiling.  “When my Olivia came into her season, I took her like a rutting goat.  I thought I would have the wit at least to explain to her, but Great Spirit!  Her scent struck me like a spear.  Like ten spears!  We thrashed all day and night and then some, but her blood came all the same.”

Olivia was aghast.  She had no idea that he could smell her period.  And she had thought she was being so clever, washing out the bloody rags in secret every morning, so careful not to leave a mark around the chambers.  And he knew!  The whole time, he knew!

“Discouraging,” the other gulla was saying.

“Worse than that.  I think perhaps she didn’t know she was in season.”

Beth’s mate tipped his head to regard Olivia’s captor with a dubious eye.  “How is that even possible?”

“I don’t pretend to know.  But she didn’t seem to know what was happening and I…I was not kind.”  He shook his horns and grunted.

“My Beth hasn’t gone into season yet.”  He glanced worriedly back at the pit.  “If she doesn’t know she’s having one, how am I going to explain to her?  We couple,” he added, giving the base of his horns a self-conscious rub.  “She knows about that, but—”

“It is not the same,” Olivia’s captor agreed grimly.  “Most of the others have had a season by now.  It hasn’t gone well for any of them.  That scent…If you think it will be like the scent of our women, prepare yourself for a shock.”

“I don’t want to hurt her.  Maybe I should send her to the tunnels for her first—”

“No.”  Olivia’s captor reached out and grasped the other’s shoulder in a reassuring, if preoccupied, grip.  “Think of healthy young,” he said.

Still frowning nervously in Beth’s direction, the other male gave his wings a nervous flutter.  “Old Murgull says it might not happen right away no matter what we do.  She says when a woman feels threatened, it can make her belly hard, so she can’t catch sparks.  However, I remind you of what I know of females and feathering nests,” he added with a trace of irony.

“That would make sense,” mused Olivia’s captor.  “Then, if the threat is a drought or famine, they could not bear a child they couldn’t feed.  Hm.”

“So maybe I should take my Beth to the tunnels,” the other persisted.  “Just until she understands.”

“No.”

“But if it won’t work anyway—”

“We don’t know that.  If there’s even the slightest chance she could spark…”  Olivia’s captor set his shoulders stiffly, staring down the other gulla with a hard look that Olivia knew only too well.  “You will keep her with you for her season.”

“I don’t want to hurt her, vorgullum!”

“You’ll do what you have to do,” he said.

“Vorgullum!”

“You will do,” he said, very softly, “what you have to do.”

Vorgullum.  That wasn’t just another unfamiliar gullan word.  That was his name!  Olivia’s heart gave an extra-hard lurch before resuming its steady beat.  His name.  She knew his name!  He was Vorgullum!

She must have made a sound, because the voices were instantly silent, listening.  She feigned sleep, lying as still as she could.  Vorgullum.

“Was that yours or mine?”

“Mine, I think.”  He stood, Vorgullum, and she heard him come a few steps closer, enough to look in on her and Beth in the pit.  She didn’t move, concentrated on taking deep sleep-breaths, and she must have been convincing, because he just stood there and watched her.  It was the other one, Beth’s captor, who ultimately said, “She’s clever.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a little unnerving.”

Vorgullum grunted, or perhaps it was a short laugh.  “I know.”

“But she seems like a good…well, person, I guess.  She’s kind.”  A pause.  “I wasn’t expecting that.”

No reply, at least not one that she could hear.  Her skin crawled under the weight of their stares; her fingers kept wanting to clutch; her brows, to wrinkle.  Olivia gave in and rolled over, away from them, hoping she looked as though she’d done it while still deeply asleep.

“I need to take her home,” Vorgullum murmured, and then he came for her, reaching down to gather her carefully into his arms without waking her.

There was no way she could pretend to be asleep if he was holding her.  He’d feel the tension even if she managed to look innocent.  So she opened her eyes, raising one hand to shield herself from the glow of his lantern.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, setting her on her feet.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep.  I thought you’d be here a lot sooner.”

He started to duck his head, then glanced at Beth’s captor and straightened up again.  “I had things to do,” he said vaguely, and gave a nod to Beth, still sleeping soundly in the pit.  “Is she well, do you think?”

“I think so, only a little tired.  All the excitement of seeing her own kind again.”

It seemed to her that he looked at her for a long time, but in the end, Vorgullum gestured towards Beth’s captor and said, “He says you think his Beth is young.  Is she a child?  A human child?”

“No, not a child.  She is a grown woman, she’s just younger than I am.”

“But old enough for…for a mate?” Beth’s captor persisted, concerned.

“For babies, you mean?” Olivia asked, puzzled.

He brushed that off absently, searching out how to voice his thought.  “Is she old enough to couple?  To know what it is?”

“Yes, she knows.  She is quite old enough for that.”

“Good.”  He leaned back in relief, fanning his wings slowly in the close quarters.  “I didn’t look closely at you humans when we gathered you that night.  I didn’t realize how much smaller she is.”

Puzzled, Olivia glanced over at the sleeping teenager.  “Not that much smaller,” she said.  Beth was thinner, and lighter in build, but she was just as tall, if not taller than Olivia.

“Not her height,” Beth’s captor explained.  “Her shape.”  He indicated Olivia’s breasts.

She was too surprised to reply at first, other than to blush.

“I don’t think that has much to do with it,” Vorgullum remarked, looking thoughtfully over his shoulder at Beth.  “All the humans look different there, but none of them give milk.”

“Oh.”  He didn’t sound disappointed.  If anything, he sounded relieved that Beth’s relative flatness was not another indication of her sexual immaturity.  When he noticed Olivia’s expression, he added, “Our females are all the same size.  When they have young, they swell with milk for feeding.  When the child is grown, they lessen.  I thought it was the same with humans.”

“We’re different in a lot of ways,” Olivia managed.

“Let us hope,” Vorgullum said quietly, “that we are not so different.  Come, Olivia.  It is very late.”

She went with him and let herself be carried down the squeezing passage into the tunnels.  Once there, he let her carry the lantern as they walked back to his chambers. The sound of their footsteps in the otherwise empty tunnels seemed very loud.

“You impressed the others,” he said at length.  “They thought you were very clever.  I am the only one with a human who speaks so well.”

“I squeak like a mouse,” she teased good-naturedly.

“Apart from that, I mean.”  He carried her up the chimney to his rooms, brought her into the sleeping room, and hung the lantern over the fireplace.  He had dinner laid out on the bench by her alcove already. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said, gesturing towards it.

After spending the day trying not to eat someone else’s meager meal, Olivia was famished.  She fell on the food eagerly, devouring the apple slices and the cut of beef that came with it, saving the tough loaf of bread for last, as had become a habit with her.  The bread filled her stomach, which was the kindest thing that could be said of it, but she dreaded having to put it there.  Hunger was almost preferable to the ache in her jaws that was the inevitable result of her battle to eat the stuff.

It wasn’t the first time she’d wondered where they were getting the bread, but to keep from having to eat it, she asked him.

He seemed surprised by the question.  “The women make it.”

“They grow it?” she echoed, picturing with some disbelief a number of gullan with tillers and hoes working the neat rows of a wheat field.

He flapped his wings for a shrug.  “There is a…like a basin…on the mountainside where the washwater comes out.  A foul place, full of bugs, but the women do something there that makes some good, wet, black earth, good for growing things.  This food grows as long as the weather is warm, and the women dry it out and grind it up and make that nasty stuff.  Does it hurt your mouth?”

“It can be difficult,” Olivia hedged.

He laughed once, as dry and sour as the bread itself.  “My father used to tell me never to eat it in the dark, or I might eat a rock by mistake.”  He cut his eyes away.  “Or by preference.  I hate that food and I wish I had meat to give you, but I cannot spare the hunters yet.”

Because he’d turned them all into wardens, Olivia thought, guarding their human captives.

She ate her bread, hating the silence, and finally dredged up a new question for him, a safe one.  “Where does the water come from?”

“Up,” he said vaguely.  “The snow never melts entirely from the high peaks, but what does melt runs down and makes little rivers that run through the rock.  I forget exactly where the rivers come from and where they go.  I could go down to the sigru and look, but I do know it comes from far enough away that it is clean by the time it gets here.  Our ancient ancestors made canals for it to flow along so we do not mistakenly drink where we make our waste.”

She echoed the strange word he’d used, realized she’d heard one like it and not too long ago, and said, “Is the sigru and the sigruum the same thing?”

He gave her a startled look, and then a little laugh.  “The sigru is where the sigruum does his work.  He paints his stories there.  Not stories like these,” he added, flicking a claw at an ancient issue of Field and Stream, “although he keeps those as well.  Real stories.  From the old days.  He sees them in dreams.”

“Like…magic?” She wasn’t sure of the word, and his frown after he heard it did not boost her confidence, but eventually, he shook his head.

“He talks to spirits.  Sometimes they talk back.”  And gave her a quizzical glance.  “How did you hear of him?”

“Murgull said the sigruum convinced you to…to go get us.”

He nodded, clearly uncomfortable with the admission, then said, firmly, “I believe in spirits, Olivia, but it takes more than omens and stories to keep my people safe.  The sigruum keeps our past and so I hear his words, but I am tallest.  The decision was mine.”

If he were another man, or if he’d just said it another way, those words would have seemed like a boast.  On Vorgullum, with his dark voice and determined eyes, they were a burden he shouldered alone.  It made her smile.

He saw it, started to smile back, and then sighed and bluntly said, “Why do you hesitate to tell me why the other human was afraid?  I have seen tired,” he went on as she opened her mouth.  “And I have seen excited.  What I saw tonight was fear.  Why?”

She looked at him, then got up and went to him, until she was close enough to see that awful hardness if it came into them.  “I told them what you wanted me to say,” she said.  “But it’s a hard thing to hear, a hard thing to promise to be tribe when you don’t even trust us enough to tell us your names.”

He looked away, his jaw tightening, and she put her hand on his cheek and turned him gently back.

“Murgull told me about the White Fever and the wasted ones.  She told me you want us to give you children.  And that’s a hard thing to hear, too.  What will happen to us if there are no children?”

Cold light glimmered deep in his eyes, but it was only a glimmer yet.

“I can’t send you back to the human hives,” he said finally.  “I can’t trust anyone so much that I would do that.  Not even you.”

“Would you kill us?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away, but when he did, that answer was, “No.”

“Not any of us?”

He looked away again.  Again, she made him face her.

“To be leader,” he said slowly, “means that all of my decisions must be first for the tribe and then for myself.  There is no other way.  I would never kill one of your humans because she could not give me a healthy baby.  None of my tribe can do that, would I kill them all?  But a human who attacks us, who tries to make weapons, who speaks of destroying souls…I can no more allow such a one to live among us than I could welcome in biting snakes.”

Now it was her turn to drop her eyes.  He let her.

“I know these are difficult things to hear.  Do you think they are any less easy to say?”  He touched her cheek with the back of his hand.  “I know that you will have to choose what to tell them…and what to tell me.  I won’t ask you always to be honest.”  He let his hand drop.  “But you can tell Beth, when you see her, that her mate cares for her.  If she will learn to speak, she will be tribe.”

“Then you need to tell her mate that when he teaches her to speak, he needs to speak slowly and make his meanings plain.  And talk about everything, like you did.  Beth isn’t trying to be difficult.”

Unlike some of the others, she thought, and felt a shiver slide up her spine.

He may not have seen it, but he surely sensed it, because that hardness in him came a little closer to the surface.  “Beth doesn’t concern me, but I have reason enough to be concerned about the others I have seen.  Yet your words are strong with me.  I will wait, and if I see that they are also strong with your humans, I will make arrangements for you to continue to meet.  In small groups, closely watched,” he added.

“Thank you,” she said, and hesitated before venturing, “Will you tell me your name now?”

He looked at her for a long time as the lantern hissed behind him.

“It’s late,” he said at last, and began to undress for bed.

CHAPTER FIVE

COMING TOGETHER

1

She knew better than to hope for immediate change, but days passed and she was kept in Vorgullum’s lair, every bit the prisoner she had been before the meeting with ‘her’ humans. It depressed her, and there were several times when Vorgullum came home at the end of his day only to find her still lying in the pit just as he’d left her that morning.  He had to remark on her appearance before she bothered to wash or comb her hair.  She sat in her alcove when he brought food to share and ate only after he left, if she ate anything at all.  She spent too much time moping over her photo album and crying, even though she knew crying could only make things worse.  Vorgullum could see her red, puffy eyes when she came to him in the pit, and she could see the hurt in his, but he still fucked her.

Fucked her.  That wasn’t fair either.  She didn’t want to call it making love, but it was gentle, it was careful, it was kind.  He called her his Olivia when he touched her, and his stolen name sat in her heart like a stone, because he didn’t want her to know it.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked finally, when there had been too many hours of silence between them, too many times when he spoke to her and she just sat and stared into the fire.

“No.”

“I thought it would please you to see your humans.”

“Did you?”  She looked at him.  “When you showed me only the ones you needed to scare?”

He looked pained, but only for a moment.  Then his face hardened.  “I did not want to scare them.”

“No, you wanted me to scare them for you.”

He got up and headed out.  It wasn’t a victory.

“How is Beth?” she asked, as close as she could bring herself to calling him back.

He stopped and gave her a cautious look.  “She seems well,” he said.  “She tries to speak our words.  Many of the others try also.”

“But not all of them,” she guessed.

“No.”  He hesitated, and then came back to her, touching her cheek briefly before he sat on the bench beside her.  “But all are cared for.  We are not monsters.  We are your mates.”

She opened her mouth to challenge that, to tell him about Cheyenne, whose captor liked to hit her, but in the end, she said nothing.  She had no proof, unless Cheyenne had fresh bruises to show, and she doubted Cheyenne would appreciate being stripped and examined by another male gulla.  If there were no bruises, they’d both look like liars, and Cheyenne’s captor would be furious.

And if there were bruises…

“Think of healthy young,” Vorgullum had said, comforting Beth’s captor when he’d balked at the thought of the brutal sex that overtook male gullan during a woman’s season.  And maybe, “Think of healthy young,” would be all he said again if he knew that Cheyenne was being beaten.

That distance grew between them.  She could feel it stretching, pulling at her heart and soul until every part of her felt thin and cold and tattered.

He touched her again, her knee this time.  “I wish that I could tell you something better.  I do.  Some of them are happy.  Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”  She took his hand and gave it a little squeeze.  “Beth is happy.  She told me so.  And Ellen seemed all right.”

“And you?”

She made a smile for him.  He gazed at it gravely, then at their hands, joined together over her knee.

“I cannot give you the freedom I know you desire,” he said.  “The freedom I know you deserve.”

“Because I’m human,” Olivia said, and thought of Tina saying that they could do everything right, but they would never really be one of them, and when they got tired of waiting for the babies it was impossible to make with them…

Vorgullum got up and went to stand by the fire.  “I am leader before I am your mate,” he said.  “I must consider the possibility of escape and what it would mean to us.  Already, we have become a people of the under-earth, a people who do not dare to fly under the sun, a people who learned to fear humans when all they could hurl against us were stones!”

“You don’t trust me.”

“I cannot trust you!”  He swung with a curse, his claws striking chips from the wall in four deep gouges.  “I cannot trust anyone, Olivia!  I must be leader first!”

“Stop hiding behind that!” she shot back, knowing she needed to stop before the strained tether between them snapped entirely.  “That’s not an excuse!  You told me you wanted us to be your mates!  Why are you still treating us like enemies?”

He recoiled, but came back swiftly and with real anger.  “Why do you still sit and cry over your human book if you are so eager to be tribe?”

“What am I supposed to do with it?” Olivia asked, incredulous.  “Burn it, just to prove that I’m one of you?”

He glared at her, stiff-backed.  “When I see that you are ready to be tribe,” he began.

“Oh no, you don’t!”  She was on her feet in a heart-beat, standing toe to clawed toe with him, her hands in shaking fists.  “You don’t get to hold that over us!  You don’t get to force us to fit our whole world into bags we could carry and then tell us to throw it away if we ever want to see another human face!  You don’t tell us not to cry when we think about the families you stole from us!”

“Enough!”

“No, it isn’t enough, damn it!  We had lives and you took them and I don’t care why you did it, we have to stay here for the rest of our lives and we get to feel bad about that!  We get to hate that!”

“They do not ‘hate that’,” Vorgullum snarled.  “They hate us!”

“Oh, what could we possibly do to you?” she cried, throwing up her arms.  “The damned chute to this cave is more than I can climb, who do you think is going to climb all the way out of the mountain?”

Vorgullum’s stare hardened in that way she had come to know so well, the way she had come to dread.  “I can’t take that risk.”

“Then stop calling us your mates.  Stop calling us tribe.  Stop giving us hope if you’re just going to hide behind risk for the rest of our lives.  That’s what being a leader seems to mean to you.”

He looked at her, only looked at her, his entire body as hard as the shine in his eyes.   And still she couldn’t stop.

“We don’t have to be happy to get what you want from us,” she hissed.  “We don’t have to know how to speak your words.”  Her voice, pulled tighter and tighter, finally cracked.  “Tina was right.  We can do everything you tell us to, but we will never be one of you.  Get out.”

His nostrils flared.

“I have to stay, so you get out.  Get out, or I’ll leave just to make you drag me back.”  She advanced on him as he backed away, no longer just shouting but screaming at him. “I’ll make you see the monster you are!”

He went.

Olivia stood in the sleeping room’s doorway, her hands trembling where they gripped the rock, staring into the blackness where he’d vanished until it sank in that he wasn’t coming back.  Then she stumbled back to her alcove.  She sat.  Somewhere along the line, she began to cry again.  This time, she didn’t try to stop.

2

She was sitting in front of the fireplace when she heard the footsteps behind her.  She didn’t turn around.  Not until the gullan hand came flying around and slapped up hard against her ear.

Olivia’s first cry was little more than a yelp of surprise.  She scrambled back, grabbing at the side of her head as the hot, throbbing hurt spread out and finally registered as pain.  She looked up, but all her angry words died when she saw who it was.

Murgull’s extremely ugly half a face glowered down at her.  “Did I call you clever, eh?  May the foolish tongue rot in old Murgull’s mouth!”

Olivia rubbed her stinging ear and watched as the old gulla dragged herself to a bench and dropped atop it, unable to meet the disdainful glare of the other for more than a few seconds at a time.  In a shaky mumble, she heard herself trying to explain, but Murgull let her get as far as being alone all day before she pulled back her arm and gave Olivia one upside the other ear.

“He is leader!” the old gulla spat as she howled.  “You think he could not have you all in chains if he wished to keep slaves?  You think no one here has told him this?  You think it would not be easier than to coddle and care for you maggots?”

“He won’t even let us see each other!” Olivia cried out.

Murgull rocked forward with startling speed, putting her hideous face right up against Olivia’s to sneer.  “Whining whelp!  Milk-mouthed bawler!  Here does old Murgull sit with withered wings and thorns in her bones and one eye full of fog so that you can snivel that you are lonely, oh so lonely!”

“Leave me alone!”

“Oh no, maggot, I am not your mate to fold my wings and slink away when you wet your eyes and wail at me.  Clever Olivia,” she said scornfully, leaning away as though she were looking at a smear of something foul on the sole of her foot.  “Look what you have done with your clever mouth now.”

“What was I supposed to do, thank him?  He wouldn’t even tell me if the others were alive or dead until the day he needed me to threaten them!  I got one night to see them, just one, and I guess that was supposed to be good enough for me!”

“And this is how you ask for more?”

“Why should I have to ask?” she demanded, flushing.  “How many times have you ever had to ask for permission to see your own people?  He won’t let us speak our own language, and now he wants to burn my book!  Why should I pretend to believe him when he calls me his mate?  Why should I make it easier for him to keep us as slaves?”

Murgull’s mouth twisted, but she only grunted.  Some of the scornful fire went out of her stare, but only some of it.  She watched Olivia seethe herself back under control, then gave her neck folds a rub and said, “Easy to see you as slaves when you lie quiet in your mate’s lair, you say.  Old Murgull says, easier when you defy him.”

“Since we’re slaves either way, why shouldn’t we fight?”

“Fight?”  Murgull’s good eye narrowed.  “So now you croak the words of other frogs, eh?  Wise Olivia.  Clever Olivia.  Could you win such a fight, you and all your humans together?”

“Tina says—”

“Bah!  This one says and that one says!  When you had no humans to listen to, you knew better!  When it was only Olivia and Olivia’s thoughts, did you think you were his slave, eh?”

“I…”  Her voice faltered; she shored it up quickly.  “I thought I could make the best of things.  But apparently, this is the best of things, and it’s really not that damn great.”

“Could be worse,” Murgull grunted.  “Could be better.  You have the power to convince your mate one way or the other.  Which way did you turn him tonight, eh?”

Olivia couldn’t answer that.

“He is leader,” Murgull said.  “He must show no doubt, no hesitation, when he stands before his tribe.  Yours are the only words he will ever bend his neck to hear, and you do your humans no good work to fill his ears with poison.”

“They are not my humans!”

“Oh, but they are, my little wingless sister.  As much as we are his, so they are yours.  The leader’s mate stands tall beside him.  The leader’s slave does not.  Which would you rather be now, eh?  Eh?”

Olivia dropped her eyes and stared fixedly into the firelight, her cheeks actually throbbing with the violence of her blush.

“You think I do not know what your sisters are saying, just because I do not know your words?  Ha!  You can think of nothing that old Murgull has not already thought.”  Murgull gave her neck-skin a particularly vicious twist and gazed deep into the embers.  “You think he does not want you to see your humans so that you will not know when one dies, is that it?  Ha!  Did he fear to show you one gone mad?  You whine because he has made you carry his words to your people.  Are you not his mate?  You are his mouth, yes!  His ears and his eyes also, and his hands, when his own carry too much.  This, he does not demand of a slave.  This, he trusts only to a mate.”

Olivia wiped at her eyes, her lips pressed tightly together.

Murgull studied her and then the flickering coals.  At last, she grumbled under her breath and said, “This maggot who says you will never be tribe…does she say also you will be killed if your human bellies can’t bear our young?”

“I don’t believe that,” Olivia said curtly.

“No?  Then come, little sister.  I will take you back to the tunnels and show you desperation floating in a newborn’s death-box.”  Murgull bared her remaining teeth in a cheerless smile and leaned back.  “You will always be strange, you humans.  It will always be easy to see you as something different and dangerous.  Each time that your blood comes, the hearth of our hope grows colder.  I will not promise you a hundred years of peace while my people die.  No, I will not promise you ten!  There is only one in this mountain who can make such promises, and what did you say to him, eh?  What did you do?  Now perhaps he thinks that if you would fight him, even you, why must he insist on this dream of mates and tribe?  Why, when chains are so simple and so sure?”

“This isn’t fair!” Olivia burst out, once more on the knife’s edge of tears.

Murgull pulled back her arm to strike, but then slowly lowered it again.  “No, little sister, it is not.  But here we are, all the same.”

“I want to go home!” she wailed, and started crying hard.

“I want my eye back,” the old gulla replied, with just a hint of acid in her implacable tone.  She let Olivia sob out a few shuddering breaths while she watched the embers, but only a few.  “Useless,” she muttered, scowling.  “There never was a hurt healed by tears, or a fever broken, or a belly filled.  Stop it.”

And Olivia, somewhat to her surprise, did.  She sat wiping at her hot cheeks, and finally whispered.  “What am I supposed to do?”

“Think.  Your own thoughts, eh?  Not thoughts of angry humans.”  Murgull grunted and heaved herself up again.  “And not thoughts of old, dried-up Murgull and her rotting teeth.  You think, little sister, and I go.  When your mates comes, best he find a clever mate who does not need old Murgull chewing her ears before she knows she must beg his forgiveness for her foolishness.”

“Beg,” Olivia echoed, too worn to protest more than that.

“And remember when you do, that what he sees in you, ha, he believes of all the others.  So you will beg, won’t you?”

Olivia shut her eyes against the light of the fire.  “Yes.”

“And he will forgive.”  That gnarled and time-softened hand came down briefly to grip her shoulder—a hard comfort, but perhaps the best that she knew how to give.  This was not a world where comfort came easily to anyone.  Then the footsteps retreated the way they had come, and Olivia was alone again.

3

By the time Vorgullum returned, Olivia’s resentment and depression had mostly run its course.  Of course, she still wished for things to be different, and most of all she wished for the chance to see the other women and talk with them, because her instincts told her this was a life that could still be lived well, and she had never been the sort of person who trusted her instincts.  Tina’s matter-of-fact attitude wasn’t exactly heartening, but it did have a way of anchoring one to reality instead of drifting uncertainty.  Even Cheyenne, who’d had no real advice, had burned with the sort of fiery courage that had at least made her feel as though there was something they could do about the whole situation.  Maybe not escape, which was surely what Cheyenne thought, but something.  Murgull seemed to think Olivia’s ‘make the best of it’ approach was best, but best for who, really?

And that wasn’t fair, because, as her sociology professor had been apt to remark, when he wasn’t going on about Gilligan’s Island, “We are all the center of our own universe.”  Having the human baby-makers docile in their captivity definitely was best for the gullan who hoped to breed by them, but (and these were the untrustworthy instincts Olivia really wished she had a second opinion on) it also seemed best for the captives themselves.  If escape ever did become an option, it would only be possible if the would-be escapees had the trust of their guards and the liberty to move about and make plans.  And if not, well, at least they could live out their new lives with a modicum of freedom and purpose—if not the child-bearing purpose the gullan intended, at least as productive members of the tribe.

She didn’t want to apologize.  She didn’t think the responsibility for that was entirely hers, but with weary reluctance she had to accept that if she didn’t make the first move, the space between them would become insurmountable.  This was her world now, and it would be what she made it.

It was to this Olivia that Vorgullum returned at the end of his day.  He seemed wary as he entered the sleeping room, wary but encouraged, especially when she did not immediately leap up and renew the quarrel.  He folded his wings close, a guarded gesture softened somewhat by his deep nod, which she was coming to recognize as an invitation for that forehead-bump the gullan favored since they didn’t kiss.  She offered him half a smile from where she sat in her alcove, and he came a little closer and brought out some strips of meat from his belt-pouch.

“I did not know if I would be welcome at  mid-day,” he said, offering one.  “So I thought it best to stay away.  You must be very hungry.”

“I am, but I think it was good for me.  It reminded me that you have never let me go hungry before.  With the whole tribe to oversee, you have never neglected me.”

His wings loosened some.  “I neglect you more than I should, or perhaps you would know me better.  I don’t like your book—it will always be a part of you and never a part of me—but I would never ask you to burn it.  I only ask you…not to live in it.  If you are to be tribe, you must live here.”

“I guess I’ve been living in it a lot lately.”  Olivia started to grimace, but turned it into a sigh.  It wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be.  “And I’m sorry for the things I said.  I’m sorry I called you a monster.  It was untrue and unfair.”

“Unfair,” he said, and sat himself beside her.  “Many things I can promise you, my Olivia, but fairness will never be one of them.  You will miss the world you came from.”  He brushed at her knee with the back of his hand, then rested his palm on her thigh.  “You will miss the life you once had, but it…it is gone.”

“I know,” Olivia said.  It was the hardest thing she’d ever said, harder than any “Goodbye,” “I’m sorry,” or “It’s over.”  Nothing could be that hard unless it was true, and the truth in it broke her the way the situation itself never could.  She swallowed any further words—not that further words were necessary—and put her hand over his.

After a long, silent minute, she felt the feather-light touch of his wing on her other arm as he enfolded her.  And in the minute after that, he made his  forgiveness complete by bending toward her and touching his brow gently to hers.  She leaned into it a little and felt his strange, snouted mouth shift in a small smile.  “I have a present for you,” he said.

Her next breath came out as a leaf-dry laugh.  “That was optimistic.”

“A failing of mine, I am told,” was his dry reply as he leaned away to open his belt-pouch.  “But as you know me well enough to see that I would never neglect you, so do I know you well enough to believe you would not prolong a misery for its own sake.  I did not like your words, my Olivia, but I have heard them.  Here is my answer.” He brought out two metal objects and dropped them, clanking, into her hands.

They were each composed of three iron pegs, welded together somehow into a shape that was roughly that of a capital H.  The top two prongs were somewhat hooked, and had been brought to a blunt point over a thickly serrated blade.  The lower prongs were long and flat, with leather straps and buckles fitted to them.  She turned them over, feeling at the impressive weight of the things.  “They are very pretty,” she said, puzzled.

He reached across and fit one into her hand so that the two sharp prongs pointed outward.  “You use them to climb,” he explained, cinching the buckles tight around her wrist and forearm.  “I tried them and they seem to work.”

Olivia adjusted her grip on the uncomfortable crosspiece and made a few experimental passes with it through the air, not so delighted by this implication of freedom that she did not notice it was a lot like having a cinderblock strapped to each arm.  She managed to get the other one on while still wearing the first, clanked them together once or twice, and then gave the closest wall a speculative stare.

“I think you had best try a wall where gullan climb,” he suggested, motioning behind him.  “Iron claws won’t give you the strength to make holes in the rock, only to use the ones we put there.”

“Does this mean you’re letting me out?”

His smile of anticipatory pride faded.  He recaptured it after only a second or two, but it was not as bright as it had been before, and it didn’t go as deep.  “You and others like you,” he said.

“In small groups, I suppose,” she said, unbuckling her new claws.  “Closely watched.”

“I leave you every day,” he said quietly.  “You have had a thousand chances to escape from me, but you have not.  Not even this day.  You have chosen instead to trust me and so I will trust you.”

Heat crawled in her cheeks.  She nodded, not looking at him.

“I will not hold a watch over my own tribe,” he said.  “But first they must be tribe.”  He quieted, looking thoughtfully back over his shoulder as if he could see through the dark of his many rooms to the tunnels below them and all the people inhabiting them.  “However,” he went on finally, “I see that many of your humans are trying to find their place among us.  As for the others…perhaps they will improve once they have seen obedience rewarded.  In any case, after so long, I suppose it is not unreasonable to offer even the worst of them a carrot.”

He said the last word in English, then glanced at her, crookedly smiling.

She gave him a smile of her own.  It felt more honest.

He bent to bump his brow against hers and stayed that way.  “This won’t be easy,” he murmured, close against her cheek.  “But we will come together, your people and mine…you and I.”

“I know.”  Those were true words too, and almost as hard to say.  “But I can’t always be happy about it.  You wouldn’t even tell me why you took us, I had to hear that from Murgull.  You won’t let me see the others, or even tell me where they all are.  You won’t tell me your name—”

He started to move away from her, but she caught at his arm, and he let that hold him, even if he wouldn’t look at her.

“—but I have to sleep beside you.  I have to have sex with you and maybe have your baby.  I can live here, because I have to,” she said, and patted his arm once before she released him.  “But you have to give me something if you want me to be happy about it, something more than iron claws and maybes.”

He didn’t get up, but he did lean forward, heavily resting his elbows on his thighs and staring stone-faced into the fire.

“I don’t want to fight again,” Olivia said.  “But I don’t want to feel like this every day for the rest of my life, either.  If this is my world now, if this is my life, don’t I deserve to have some control over it?”

“Yes.”

She waited, but that one word was all he gave her.  She could feel that distance again, that tightening tether and impending snap.  “Then nothing has really changed,” she said, more to herself than to him.

His sharp teeth showed themselves in a snarl, and then he shoved himself up and away from her.  His step was light, like the furious pacing of a caged cat, but he did not walk far before he swung around and said, “Olivia, the man in me would make you every promise that a leader would not dare, but it is the leader who has claimed you for his mate.  So come to my pit and if you can’t love me, then at least pretend.”  He dropped his arms to his sides and gazed at her with pained determination.  “Because hating me won’t keep me from you.”

Olivia sighed and shook her head.  She looked down at her new claws, clacked them together once or twice, then set them aside and stood up.  “I don’t hate you,” she said.  “And I know that change takes time.  I just want to hear you say that things will change for us.”

He studied her face and finally offered her a smile of his own.  It didn’t have a lot of feeling behind it, but what it did have seemed honest, like her laugh.  He came to her, nuzzling at her shoulder first and then her brow.  “Things will change for us,” he murmured.  “I promise you this, my Olivia.”

Empty promises, said her heart, still aching.  Empty promises, said her head, still full of unanswered questions.

“Then I can wait,” said Olivia, and put her arms around him.

4

He fell asleep after the sex, snoring, it seemed, almost in the same breath as the last of his mating thrumms.  Olivia pulled the corner of a blanket up around her shoulders and tried to follow suit, but sleep wasn’t quick to find her.  It surprised her, sort of.  Sleep was usually her body’s first defense when confronted with emotional trauma.  God knew it had been one of those days, but she was wide-awake.

Stealthily, she arched her hips up, dug in both her heels, and pushed the heavy canvas serving as her bedsheet as far toward the foot of the pit as she could manage.  A much softer sleeping bag lay underneath, rumpled and musty-smelling, but better than lying in the wet spot on an army surplus tent.  (As always, her mind tried to whisper a few significant questions about whose tent it had been, whose sleeping bag, and where were they now, but after so many nights, she had become quite good at shutting that unpleasant voice out.)  She wrapped herself up and tried to sleep.

Her eyes would not stay shut.  The fire, dim as it was, still managed enough light to throw an outline around the gullan body slumbering beside her.  Her thoughts melted together into thicker and thicker flumes of nonsense, but her brain refused to be lulled to sleep.  She thought of bats, of arms and wings, of the way the moon had looked over his shoulders as they flew, of Vorgullum saying they had become a people of the under-earth, of cavemen hurling stones at flying gullan in prehistoric days, of the survivors of the White Fever crawling up from the depths to wreak their terrible vengeance, of that horrible baby slipping into the thick scum inside the scuffed blue cooler, of Tina saying they would never be tribe, and Vorgullum putting those iron claws in her hands.

She decided she was cold.  There was nothing left in the fireplace but a few diehard sparks, and even under this heap of furs and tents and sleeping bags, the cave was cool and dank.  Olivia got out of the pit and felt her way to the hearth, scraping away the ashes and blowing new life into the embers she uncovered before adding another dense log of whatever they used for fuel.

It took a few minutes to catch, but when it finally did, the little licks of blue and gold flame proved agreeably hypnotic.  She made herself comfortable there at the hearth and watched the fire burn, content just for this moment not to think about anything.

“It is late,” Vorgullum said behind her.

She glanced around and saw his eyes gleaming at her drowsily.  “I can’t sleep,” she whispered.

He seemed to wake up a little more.  “Are you still angry?”

“No.”  She thought about it.  “No,” she said again, with more conviction.  “I just need a little time.  Go to sleep.  I’ll be quiet.”

He continued frowning at her for a while, then yawned, rubbed at his face, and finally rolled onto his stomach, letting his wings relax, not quite unfolding, on either side of him.  His back rose in a yawn, then dropped in a gusting exhale.  He uttered a grunt of sleepy satisfaction and drifted off again.

Well, now she was effectively locked out of the pit.  Olivia went into the bathroom and started washing.  It did no good, really, to get back in bed if all she was going to do was make another wet spot.

The sting of the cold water gave her pause.  She thought longingly of the baths, steaming happily away down there in the depths.  She thought she could probably find them again.  Of course, there was the Deep Drop.  She doubted she could climb all the way down there and up again.

But the thought of a little walk put down some strong roots, and Olivia wasn’t quite up to the task of talking herself out of it. She crept back into the sleeping room for her new claws, took a flashlight from the box of candles, and snuck out, expecting at any moment to hear Vorgullum calling her back, or to feel his powerful, clawed hand closing on her shoulder.

She didn’t, of course, although she stood in the entry room for a long time, just waiting for one or the other.  At last, it sank in that he was soundly sleeping, and she…she was, well…

“Free to move about the cavern,” Olivia whispered, staring around at the darkness.  Just like they used to say on airplanes.  Or almost just like that.  Cavern or cabin was not the word in question, the word in question was free.

Her hands did not shake at all as she fit herself into the straps and buckles of her iron claws.  They felt good in her grip, strong and solid and right.  The flashlight’s weight was a satisfying anchor on her right side as she felt her way to the narrow chimney and scraped the spikes lightly over the rock until they found some existing holes and just…just slipped in.  The hooked tips dug in when Olivia angled her wrist and stayed snug, even when she pulled a little.

Olivia stood there for a while, putting more and more of her weight on that claw, trying to remember just how deep this chute was, wondering how far you had to fall before breaking a bone became inevitable.  Not far, given that this was a cave, she thought.  And then she groped for second claw-hold, found it, and pulled herself up, inch by inch, until she dangled entirely by her claws.

They held.  The metal frame lying across her arms made her wrists hurt fairly quickly, but the claws held their grip.  She kicked carefully at the wall until she found a solid jut for a toe-hold, then eased one claw out of the rock and groped for another below it.  It held too.  Down she went, hand over hand, until very unexpectedly, her questing foot smacked down onto the cave floor.

She couldn’t believe it was that soon, had to fish out her flashlight and shine it around for proof, and yes, there was Vorgullum’s lair, ten feet above her.

And here she was, out.

I could escape, thought Olivia, knowing she wouldn’t.  She couldn’t climb down to the baths and back, and she definitely couldn’t climb all the way up to the surface and then down the mountainside.  Still, standing here with her claws strapped to her wrists made the thought seem wonderfully plausible.  She could escape, she could…but she wouldn’t.

Olivia took off her shoes and put them in front of the chimney to set Vorgullum’s apart from all the other identical openings in the tunnel, then started walking towards the common cave.  It wasn’t far, and it was easy to get to without getting lost, since all she had to do was stay in the main passageway and not make any turns.  The rock under her feet was rough and cool, but not uncomfortably cold.  It was very dark; her flashlight only showed her twenty or thirty feet in front of her, and the shadows had a way of jumping with illusionary life.  It was also very quiet.  Although the tunnel was lined on both sides with openings, there was no sound of life from any of them.   Of course, it was late, as Vorgullum had observed, and it was only reasonable for them to all be sleeping, but the silence did get to her.  She found herself thinking of the depths, and the hungry spirits of the wasted ones who surely haunted it.

And then she saw the stalactite-teeth around the opening to the commons.  Dark, of course.  Quiet.  Really, she had no idea why she’d wanted to come here at all.  But as she was turning around to make her meandering way back to Vorgullum’s lair, she noticed a faint glow emanating from a subchamber, and heard a rumble that might have been the speech of the creatures.  Without thinking, Olivia moved closer, but then, she must have been thinking just a little bit because she turned her flashlight off before she peeked inside.

At first, she couldn’t quite track what she was seeing.  Oh, she saw the gullan, but at first, she only saw one of them and she had no idea what he was doing.  He’d pulled one of the benches out from the wall and appeared to be standing over it, hunched over something, his head bent low and wings tightly compressed.  There were two candles on the floor, casting huge, writhing shadows on the wall.  Olivia looked at those shadows, frozen in the mouth of the tunnel where she could be easily seen if only the gullan turned his head just a little and opened his eyes.

But his eyes were shut, and some small, critical part of Olivia’s brain could not help but observe that they were probably shut because the gullan female he was screwing was absolutely baboon-butt ugly.

She really was, poor thing.  Not ugly the way Murgull was, all raised scars and hairless patches, but ugly the way that only God could make, with a low sloping brow, jutting jaw, bulbous snout and beady eyes.  Her head was too big for her body; her face, too small for her head.  She lay flat on the narrow bench, her wings spastically slapping half-folded at the floor, her legs thrown wide, and her wrists trapped together and pushed into her soft belly by the male who rode her.  When she uttered another of those babbling moans, he put his other hand over her mouth and pressed down hard without even opening his eyes.  He thrust slowly and with great force, his lips parted in the rigor of lust to show the sharp tips of his fangs, and while Olivia couldn’t see enough of his shadowed, snarling features to make out a face, she knew him all the same. That bristly mane down his back was unmistakable.  He was Cheyenne’s captor.

All the blood in Olivia’s body fell out of her in an icy gush and then poured back in on fire.  Her feet unlocked.  She stumbled back, both hands pressed over her own mouth to keep the howls of her breath from being audible over the female’s muffled groaning.  If Vorgullum had heard Tina say the world ‘carrot’ from clear across the wide commons, then the gullan had exceptional hearing, and even if the caves didn’t echo the way they did in the movies, she didn’t dare break into a run.  Instead she forced herself to walk slowly and silently all the way back to the main passageway, and then she ran.

Her shoes were right where she’d left them, their shadows jittering in the light from her shaking flashlight.  She scooped them up and climbed into the entry room, every scrape of her claws screaming in her ears.  She did not feel safe until she was all the way back in Vorgullum’s sleeping room, standing in the light of his little fire, listening to his steady snoring breaths.  There, she made herself sit quietly on the nearest bench, until she looked down and saw that she was seated on the same sort of bench the gullan had been using to have sex on.  Looking closer, she could see grooves where the wings of the prone partner were supposed to fit.  God, this was the bench they ate off and the whole time it was a…a gullan marital aid!  She slapped her hands over her mouth again, this time to keep in the giggles.

The image of those two gullan would not leave her head.

God, that was embarrassing.  About the raciest thing she’d ever walked in on before had been her parents making out a little in the kitchen one Sunday morning, and once, in the bathroom in the girls’ dorm on campus, she’d overheard two teachers she half-knew compare techniques on how to give ‘mind-slamming good head’, but she had never actually walked in on anyone.  He would have seen her if he’d just opened his eyes.  Heck, he probably could have reached out and grabbed her.

The urge to giggle died all at once, killed by some unknown quality of that image, of Cheyenne’s captor looking up, his eyes shining red in the candlelight and that snarl still on his face.

Her mom had been right about her all those years: She had more imagination than she knew what to do with.

Olivia took her climbing claws off and put them under the bench.  She came around to her side of the pit and started to crawl in.

Vorgullum stirred and lifted his wing for her without really waking up.  She pressed up tight against him, which he didn’t mind a bit until he dropped his wing back over her.  Then he yelped sharply and looked at her in astonishment.  “Where have you been?  You’re cold!”

“I know,” she whispered, and chattered her teeth for effect.

He wrapped her first in a sleeping bag, then in his arms, and then in a wing.  He tucked his chin over the top of her head and she breathed in his reassuring scent, wondering just when it had become a comfort to her.  “Did you use your claws?” he asked.

She could detect no threat in his sleepy voice, but still she hesitated.

“Yes,” she admitted.  “Just down to the common cave and back.”

“They work for you?”

“Yes.  Very well.”

He chuckled.  “That will please Sudjummar.  They were his idea.  He has always been so good…”  He yawned into her hair and adjusted her into a better pillow for him, mumbling, “…thinking up things.”

He surely hadn’t meant to let the name slip, knowing as she did what Maria the Mojo Woman had done to Grunn (and no, she didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the gulla, thinking as she did that threatening a man’s soul with a dirty trick and a candle was still nothing in comparison with being kidnapped in the first place), but she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Who is Sudjummar?”

“Mm?”  She felt him wake up a little, rubbing at his face.  “He’s our metal-maker.  He made your claws.  I said that, didn’t I?”

“You’ll tell me his name, but not yours?”

The words hung there.  He propped himself up on one arm and looked at her until she dragged her eyes up to meet his.

“My name is Vorgullum,” he said quietly.

She stared at him.

“All right?”

She nodded.

He smiled and bent over her to nuzzle at the side of her neck, and soon was snoring again.

5

She dozed off and on until Vorgullum started stirring.  She’d been unable to sleep again, despite the fact that she was now bone tired, so she squirmed away from him and sat up.

“It is early,” he mumbled, pushing himself first to his knees, then to his feet.  “You don’t have to be awake.”

“If I go back to sleep now, I’ll be up all night again,” she complained wearily.  And then, “Where do you go all day, anyway?”

“Where do I not?” he grumbled, chasing out a coal to light a candle.  “I meet with the others who have mates and try to advise them.  I meet with the Eldest to see how our stores are filled.  I meet with my sigruum and my chief hunter.  I meet with old Murgull if I don’t see her coming.  Then, I leave the mountain to hunt.  We have to take as much game as we can find now, because soon the humans will come to hunt too, and after that, it will be winter.  A difficult winter,” he added, looking grim in a distracted way.  “We have been relying entirely upon our women to keep us fed for too long.”

“Why?” Olivia asked.

He started to answer, then shut his mouth with a snap and finished dressing.  As he was cinching the stays on his belt-pouch, he uttered an uncomfortable, throat-clearing growl, and said, “We have time enough to fill our stores before winter, if the Great Spirit favors us.  Game is plentiful, for the moment.  There will be fish in the water for some time yet.  The fruits are ripe in the human lands, and if we are clever, we can take what we need without drawing attention to ourselves.”

“You take food from humans?”

“Oh yes,” Vorgullum said.  “They grow all kinds of food, far too much for even a large tribe to eat.  We steal from them whenever we can, but it is a long way to fly and we can only take away what we can carry.  For now, the weather is fair, and so the humans come right up into the forest, just to sleep for a few days and then go away again.  We make a little noise—”  He uttered a particularly vicious snarl to demonstrate.  “—and they run into their metal boxes and go away.  Then we can raid their camps for the things we can use.”

“You’re going to get shot doing that,” she remarked.

“It is a risk,” he agreed.  “But they have such useful things.”

“Do they ever come here?” Olivia asked, and gestured vaguely at the walls around them.  “Inside the mountain?”

He slid her a troubled glance and turned away to rummage unnecessarily through the tins and jars on his food shelf.  Most of them were empty.  “We can’t allow ourselves to be discovered,” he said, which was, she supposed, a much kinder way of saying, ‘Yes, Olivia, and we kill them.’  But then he said, “Humans very rarely go any further than the trails they make for their metal boxes to roll upon, and those trails end far from Hollow Mountain.  They come to the forest, and sometimes to the foothills, but no further.  They just make their little camps, sleep a while, and go away.  Strange thing to do,” he muttered, and looked at her curiously. “Why do they do that, Olivia?”

“It feels good to be outside,” she answered, and then had to pretend not to see the pained look on his face or feel the new weight in his silence.

“I arranged for you to spend part of the day with some of the other humans,” he said finally.  “Perhaps you would like to have a bath first, since you’re awake so early.”

She gave him a broad smile, trying to make up for the awkwardness of their earlier moments.  “I would like that very much,” she said.  “Lead the way.”  She took up her new claws and climbed down the chimney by herself while he watched, but did not protest when he carried her down the Deep Drop.  That was a climb she was in no big hurry to make.

The baths weren’t empty this time.  Two female gullan were lounging idly in one of the bubbling pools, speaking in low voices.  One of them gave a sharp cry of alarm when she saw Olivia, and they both stared.

“Hello,” Olivia said.

“This is Olivia,” Vorgullum added pointedly.

The two females ducked low to confer, their lowered voices barely registering to Olivia’s ears.  One of them peeked over the edge of the pool as Olivia began to undress and made a gagging sound.

Olivia was almost offended, until she thought again of how she must appear to them.  Even to her own eyes, she was pasty, although she objected to the misconception that her naked skin was slimy.  Far from the rich, glossy pelt that meant good health on a gullan, Olivia had only a patch of unnaturally long hair on her head, and a wooly dark thatch over her crotch.  She had no wings, no horns, a flat face and flat teeth, and squinty little eyes with too much white in them.  And that made her wonder a bit about Vorgullum, who had admitted he’d come to find her attractive.

As she and her kinky gullan mate slipped into one of the pools, the two gullan females noisily clambered out.  Both had patches of balding skin showing through their pelts, and one of them had a slightly twisted gait as she walked.    They looked lean and powerful as they moved, but they had some feminine softness about them somewhere because they jiggled in the right places as they brushed each other down and briskly fastened on fresh loincloths.  Neither showed any signs of self-consciousness about their nudity.

They made token nods as they left, but started talking as soon as they’d crossed the threshold.  She heard her name several times as their voices receded into the hall, and smiled.

“I,” Vorgullum said, scowling, “find nothing humorous in what they are saying.”

“I have yet to find one of your kind who thought humans were attractive the first time they saw one,” she returned.  “Present company included.  So tell me.  Beth’s mate was so shy about sleeping in the same pit with me, but those two don’t mind at all dressing or being undressed in front of us?”

He looked confused.  “Why would they?”

“There’s nothing, oh I don’t know, sexually provocative about a naked body?”

“Not in a bath,” he said, baffled.  “There’s nothing sexual about a bath!”

“There certainly was in the last one we had together,” she remarked, and he flicked water at her with a quick grin.  “Are you trying to tell me we were the first?”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“We were alone then.”

“And that makes it less a bath?”

“You…Olivia, everyone takes a bath without clothing.  Even humans, yes?”

“Of course.”

“But humans never couple in the bath?”

“Occasionally.”

“And humans do this in front of others?”

“No.”

“There you are!” he said.  “You bathed before me back at the human hive and I thought nothing of your body then, except that it was so bald and white.  When you bathe with other humans, does it arouse you?”

“Except for when we’re very young and can’t be trusted not to drown ourselves, humans don’t bathe together,” she said.

He looked absolutely astonished by this fact.  “Why not?”

“I suspect it arouses us.”

“Be serious.”

“The tubs are too small,” she replied, straight-faced.  “And too far apart.”

“Ah.”  He thought about it for a little.  “But you make the…tubs.  I know you do.  You could make them any size, put them anywhere at all!”

He had her there, and she thought he probably knew it.  She thought fast.  “It’s more complicated than that,” she said, dropping her hand to the edge of the bath and hoisting herself out.  “But I will say that when two grown humans do share a bath, it nearly always ends in coupling.”

“Yours is a very strange race.”

They dried and dressed and went to the commons.  He let her climb partway up the Deep Drop, plucking her easily off the wall when she tired (which came only about ten feet up, she was embarrassed to see), and carrying her the rest of the way.

Cheyenne and the madwoman were already there, along with a lone male gulla at the very far end of the commons who sat on a bench in an unobtrusive spot, watching them and looking bored.  The madwoman sat on the floor while Cheyenne leaned against the wall with her arms folded.  She saw Olivia and gave her hair an terse little flip by way of greeting.

“I’ll send someone in shortly with food for you,” Vorgullum offered, patting her arm.  “You should be expecting two others.”

Only two?  Olivia opened her mouth to protest, saw his eyes narrow, and said instead, “Thank you.”

He nodded once, turned…rubbed at the base of his horns, and then came back and bumped his brow up against hers.  “It won’t always be this difficult,” he murmured.

“And change takes time,” she agreed, and thought she managed not to sound too bitter about it.

Vorgullum stepped back, nodded to the gulla guarding them, and left her without another word.

Cheyenne was watching, her face twisted in a singularly unpleasant mixture of amusement, anger, and contempt.  Looking at her made it hard to remember just how badly she’d wanted another human-meet, but—

I’m coping, damn it, Olivia thought, and started walking.  I’m coping and this is how I cope, so nuts to you.

“Does he rub your feet after a long day?” Cheyenne asked acidly, once she’d come close enough to hear.

“No,” Olivia replied.  “But he lets me wander around the caves at night when I can’t sleep.”

She took a peevish sort of pleasure from the look that jolted across the other woman’s face at that, a sort of See what happens when you play nice? satisfaction, but it didn’t last.  It was hard to play nice with a man who hit you.  She guessed Cheyenne was coping too.

“How are you doing?” she asked, which was the closest she could come to an apology without admitting how spiteful her words had been.

“I’m being used as a sex slave by a subterranean monster, thanks for asking.  How are you doing?”

“Fine.”  Olivia glanced back at the empty doorway, and then at the mouth of a certain short tunnel.  A smile twitched at her lips, but the embarrassment was still very real.  She looked back at Cheyenne.  “Was your, uh, guy with you all night?”

Cheyenne frowned.  “Why?”

“Just curious.”

Cheyenne waited, still frowning.

“I think I saw him last night,” Olivia admitted.

“So?”

“He wasn’t exactly alone.”

Slowly, Cheyenne’s eyebrows rose.  “You’re kidding.”

Olivia could feel herself blushing.

“You’re not kidding.”  And, unexpectedly, she started to laugh.  “Oh for God’s sake!  And I can’t even tell anyone!”

“Why would you want to?” Olivia asked, surprised.

“Oh, it would just be really nice to watch him get his balls cut off.”

The little smile that had been tickling at her lips as she’d watched the redhead laugh now fell entirely away.  “What?”

“Yeah.”  Cheyenne wiped at her eyes, shaking her head and still chuckling now and then.  “My ‘guy’, as you so delicately put it, is pretty high on the totem pole around here and they don’t know I speak bat-ese, so I hear stuff.  There’s been a lot of talk ever since we had our first get-together, a lot of bad feelings stirred up by all the bats who didn’t get a human sex slave and apparently don’t have a lot of other options.  I don’t know how it used to be, but I happen to know that it is now extremely forbidden to make a baby.  I don’t believe it.  That nutless wonder, sneaking around on me.”

“Hello!”

They both turned as another woman came in with her captor.  The gulla said a few quiet words, brushed at her cheek in an embarrassed way as he looked around the cave, then sent her ahead and left them.

“God, it’s unbelievably great to see ya’ll,” the woman said, sounding flustered and friendly all at once.  She was small, young-looking, Asian, with an unabashed Southern lick to her speech.   “My name’s Anita Chen, I’m thirty-one, I’m from Arkansas, and I used to be a bank teller before I became a harem girl.”

“Hi, I’m Olivia, and I used to be the front office receptionist in that dinky little office complex on Apple Street.”

“Hi, I’m Cheyenne, and I used to be free.”  Cheyenne brushed back her hair with a sour glance to one side.  “No one knows who that lady is, but we suspect she used to be a chef.”

“Poor thing.”  Anita looked at the madwoman.  “She only lived but three doors down from me, I think.  What a weird thing to want to bring with you.”

“What did you bring?” Olivia asked.

Anita shrugged self-consciously.  “I brought a spare pair of socks and a bag of snack-size candy bars, some soap, all my cross-stitching stuff, and my cell phone.  Don’t bother asking for a candy bar, because those suckers were gone the first day.”

“Cross-stitching,” Olivia said admiringly.  “I bet that passed the time.”

“I’m on my third project already.  He makes ‘em little stick frames and puts them up around the walls.”  Anita rolled her eyes, pretending exasperation but plainly very pleased.

“Any reception on that cell phone?” Cheyenne asked.

“Are you kidding?”  Anita laughed.  “I keep it anyway.  It’s got some pictures on it.  You know…special ones.”  She gave another little laugh, this one to disguise some pretty unpleasant-looking emotions.  “Dumb me.  The battery will be dead in a few days no matter what I do.”

“I brought a photo album,” Olivia said tentatively, unsure whether this would be a sore point, in light of the whole phone thing.

They looked at Cheyenne.

She looked back at them.  “God, you guys blow my mind,” she said after a second or two.  “I brought a teddy bear.”

Anita smiled.  “That’s kind of cute.”

“You think so?”  Cheyenne made a visible attempt to rein in her anger and said in a tight voice, “It wasn’t a childhood toy or anything, just some dumb thing I got at a Christmas party last year and hadn’t gotten around to getting rid of.  I don’t even remember getting it that night, I was so fucking stoned, and I could just kill myself for it now because I had a fucking gun in the first drawer of the same fucking nightstand where I kept the stupid bear, and if I’d had my head on even a little bit straight, I wouldn’t even be standing here now.”

“Prob’ly not,” Anita agreed with remarkable mildness.  She sat beside the madwoman and brushed back her hair.  “You’d have been killed right on the spot, and honestly, if you’re gonna be the kind of person who’s gonna harp on all the time about fucking this and fucking that, I’d just as soon not get to know you.”

Cheyenne stared while Olivia looked uncomfortably from one to the other of them.

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Anita continued, now straightening the hang of the madwoman’s ill-fitting clothes, “these people are definitely comparing notes when it comes to us humans.  Your bad attitude is everyone’s problem and I’m trying hard to get along with my guy.”

The redhead gaped for a second, then shoved herself off the wall (Olivia shot a glance toward their guard in time to see him rise to his feet and reach into the shadows for spear) and snarled, “Oh, I am so sorry I have such a bad attitude about being held captive by fucking bat-monsters!”

“Life is tough all over down here, darlin’.”  Anita looked past her and raised her hand as a girl, presumably their last arrival, entered and was released to their company.  “I ain’t impressed just because you can throw the loudest tantrum.”

Cheyenne balled up a fist and the gullan guard sprang forward, the spear actually making an excited little whoop of its own as he swung it up and ready for use.  The gulla himself didn’t say a word and that silence, his intense and somehow feral focus as he aimed the killing head of his laughably prehistoric weapon unerringly at Cheyenne’s heart, made them all jump back.  The new girl, who was halfway across the cavern with her arm up to wave, even gave a little scream, but he paid her absolutely no attention.

“Stop it!”  Olivia grabbed at the redhead’s shoulder and shook it once, hard.  “Just stop it!  What is wrong with you?”  To the gulla, in his language, she called, “There’s no trouble here.  Please, you are frightening us.”

He stopped, but kept the spear up and sighted, his arm steady and poised to throw.

This was going to sound just marvelous when Vorgullum heard about it at the end of the day.  So much for coming together in trust.

“I said, stop it!” she said, and it was a whole new tone, one she didn’t think she’d ever used before in her life.  One she didn’t even think her mom had ever used.  The others jumped again, not as hugely as they’d done for the gulla and his spear, but definitely with feeling.  They looked at her and Olivia was grimly pleased to see Cheyenne color up a little, even if she didn’t drop her eyes, or her fist.  “If you want to spend the rest of your life chained up in your lair, by all means, keep doing what you’re doing, but if you ever want to come down here and see another human face, you better lose the chip on your shoulder and start giving them a reason to think letting us meet is a good idea.”

Cheyenne thought about that, her eyes burning and lips pressed white.  The gulla across the room watched as she slowly uncurled her hand and lowered her arm.  When she backed up to a bench and sat down, so did he.

“That’s the last time I do that,” Olivia said, no longer The Voice of Authority, but still cross.  “If you’re not going to watch out for yourself, there’s no reason I should.”

“Um, hi?”

Introductions were made as the new girl found herself a seat, and they all ended up recapping their former occupations and what precious possessions they’d brought with them.  Even Cheyenne muttered something about the teddy bear, leaving out the bit about the gun.  The new girl listened very intently, as if she thought there might be a short quiz at the end of the day, and then said, “Well, I’m Liz, I’m twenty-one years old, I worked at the Burger Barn, and I brought my purse and, like, half the contents of my bathroom cabinet, so if any of you need change for the phone or some dental floss, let me know.”  She paused there to look back over her shoulder at the gulla guarding them.  “I have one of those,” she said.  “But he won’t tell me his name.  I just call him Needles, because he seems to think he was put on this Earth to poke me.”

The earnestness of this last comment, coupled with Liz’s sweet, childlike face, took them all by surprise.  After a short, startled silence, Cheyenne started to laugh, and the others joined in, all but the madwoman, who simply sat and hugged her saucepan.

“Needles?” Anita echoed.

“Mr. Needles, if I’m feeling snotty.”

“So this is what you naked bats do together?” boomed a familiar voice.  “You squeak and chatter!  Oh, your ancestors should strike you down for your offending faces.  Olivia!  What are you doing here, with these ugly creatures?”

“Hello, Murgull,” Olivia said, with a small smile.  “How are you this evening?”

Murgull ambled into the flickering, golden light of the common cave, casting a baleful eye on the group of women.  Shadows pooled in the ragged valleys of her ruined face, and her eyes gleamed from the center of this devastation like lava pools.  She showed the ragged, yellowing stumps that were what was left of her teeth in a snarl, and flapped her good wing in a sour shrug.  “Evening, morning, sun-up in the spirit-world for all it matters to old Murgull,” she said.  “Her teeth ache, her bones ache, her flesh aches.  All of old Murgull is reminding her how short a span is given us, and Murgull’s time is almost up.”

“You are too terrible to die,” Olivia said.

“Ha!  Too mean, too ugly!”  Murgull gave out that low pitched, witchy cackle and patted coquettishly at the scarred half of her face.

“What brings you here?” Olivia asked.

Reminded of her purpose, Murgull’s heavy brows drew together like thunderheads swelling for a storm.  “Old Murgull is looking in on little brown maggot, eh?  No season comes to that one.  Old Murgull is thinking maybe she should have a sniff.  Off goes Murgull, but does she get there?  No!”

Murgull stumped over and dropped an enormous satchel of food in Olivia’s lap.  She put her hands on her ample hips and glared at them all.  “Big brute catches Murgull’s arm.  ‘Feed the humans,’ he says.  Feed old Murgull?  Oh no, just crawling, chattering maggots.  Hah!”  She glanced at the madwoman, then hunkered down with some effort and peered into the blank, serene eyes.  “Should have eaten the food myself,” she grumbled.  “Maggots deserve no better than bones.”  She looked at Olivia.  “This one is full of stars,” she said softly.

“We know.”

“Pity her.  A naked frog alone in her own little brain.  Pity her mate.  No friend, no talk, no happy times making sparks in the pit.  Just clean and feed and dress the frog.  Pity them both.”  She grunted, shrugging.  “Pity is cheap.”

Old Murgull straightened and examined the other women.  “Well?” she demanded, exasperated.  “Eat the food!  Murgull brings food and you gape at her with eyes like bugs!  Great, fat fools you are!  White and lazy, with no wings and naked, slimy bodies.  You are like frogs some cruel foot has stepped on!”  She turned and started galumphing out, grumbling under her breath.  “Ugly, pasty, bloated leeches.  Give them old Murgull’s blood, poor Murgull.  Less precious than Murgull’s time.”  Her mutters faded with distance, and were gone.

They all stared at the doorway in respectful silence.

“What,” Liz said wonderingly, “was that?”

“That was old Murgull.”

“She sounds just like my mom,” Anita said, awe-struck.  “Gosh, if she could do it in Chinese, she could be my grandma, too!”

“Little brown maggot,” Olivia mused.  “Now who would that be?”

“Maria, maybe,” Cheyenne remarked, biting into an apple.  “She’s Mexican or something.”

“No, they call her the Mojo Woman,” Anita put in.  “My guy talks about her all the time.  She’s always going on about the bad mojo she’s going to put on this guy or that one.  Freaks them out.”

“Could be my roommate,” Liz offered.  “If they took me, they probably took her.  Karen’s blonde, but she’s awfully tan.”

“Heck, I’m tan,” Anita said, holding out her arms and giving them a dubious frown.  “Maybe she meant me.”

“No, because she left again,” Olivia pointed out.  “Anyway, she could have meant just about anybody with brown hair.”

“What was she talking about, sniffing?  Or that other word, season?  I mean, what…”  Anita looked back at the empty mouth of the commons, then at the gullan guard watching over them, and finally at Olivia again.  “What are we really doing here?”

Olivia looked at Cheyenne.

The red-head folded her arms and looked coolly back at her.  “Go ahead,” she said.  “You’ve got this speech all worked out, haven’t you?”

Liz and Anita were waiting, apprehensive.

Olivia sighed, sat down, and started talking.

6

Vorgullum came to take Olivia back to their chambers early in the evening.  Olivia offered brief, rather vague highlights of the day’s conversations on the way back through the tunnels (all but the important one, which had not been as unpleasant she’d feared it would be; “I figured,” had been Anita’s only comment on that regard, although Liz had cried for a while), and as she climbed up the narrow chimney into the entry room, she asked, “Have you spoken with old Murgull yet?”

“Not since this morning,” he replied, climbing up behind her.  “Why?”

“Oh,” she said, shrugging.  “She was so cross at being sent to feed us, she made us think she was on her way to do something important.”

“Everything is important to Murgull,” he answered.  “Unless it is important to someone else, and then everything is a tremendous burden.”

“Are you afraid of her?” she teased.

But he looked at her quite seriously.  “Oh yes.”

“Even you?  The tallest of all gullan?  Great leader of Hollow Mountain?”

“Great leader,” he mused, not without a certain pleasure.  But then he shook his head and turned serious.  “She is older than any gulla here, the oldest in the whole world, perhaps, and she knows things.  Woman-things.  Man-things.”  He thought about it, and actually suppressed a shudder.  “Spirit-things.  She is life and death in this place.  She heals and she hurts…and she loves no one.  Your Mojo Woman could not be the ground beneath old Murgull’s crooked feet,” he finished, and started to lay out food on the bench by the fire.

“She’s not my Mojo Woman.”

He grunted, then paused with a heavy loaf of bread in hand, and looked at her.  “But is she anyone’s Mojo Woman?  Are her powers real?”

The words Of course not were right there, dancing on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed them.  Maybe it was a mean way to do it, but it was the way Maria coped with all this, and who was Olivia to take that away?  “What do you think?” she asked instead.

“I think she’s full of air,” he replied at once, and frowned mightily.  “But even air can kill if it goes bad.  Grunn believes her.  And he is not alone.”

“What do you want to do about it?” Olivia asked, coming to join him.

He made room for her.  “Kill her,” he said, and tore the bread in half.  He offered her some, studied her expression while he held it out, and then set it on the bench and said, “There are some who say talk, simple talk, can’t be dangerous.  I think it can.  And when minds are weak, as so many of our minds are weak,” he admitted sourly, “talk can be more dangerous than spears.  This Mojo Woman, her mouth is full of poison.  She has bit into Grunn and he is biting into others.  I want it stopped.”

“If you kill her, do you know what that will do to the rest of us?” she asked softly.  “Do you know what that will do to the trust some of us are trying to make between us?”

His jaw clenched.  He looked away.

“And don’t think you can kill her and just not tell us, because sooner or later we’ll hear about it, and the longer you let that secret fester, the worse it will be when we do.”

“And the longer I let her live, the more power she claims to have!”  He scowled and took a savage bite of bread.  Chewing took a long time.  He was noticeably calmer when he swallowed and said, “I can trust neither to Grunn’s good sense nor Mojo Woman’s mercy, so I will trust you instead.  Perhaps, when she sees there is nothing to fear from us, she will abandon this evil whim of hers.  The Great Spirit knows, she’s not the worst of them.”  That seemed to remind him of something, and he reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a magazine.  “Our sigruum found this for you in our archives,” he said.  “I told him you like to look at human books.”

She unfolded it with some trepidation, studied it in silence for a few seconds, then started to smile.  “Oh my,” she said in amused English. It was an ancient copy of TIME magazine, the one with the cover showing the cosmos and the words “God is Dead.”

“Is it a good one?” he asked.

“A very good one.  Give the sigruum my thanks.”

She read bits and pieces to him over supper, stopping quite often to explain terms and words.  He accepted, after a brief debate, the concept of the planet Earth, and after a much longer debate, the fact that humans lived everywhere on the planet, and could keep in near-constant communication through mediums such as this magazine.  She tried to sell him on the idea of television and radio, but when he proved utterly incapable of visualizing something broadcast instantaneously from one point on the planet to a million separate points, she gave up.  She didn’t even try to explain broadcast satellites.

“The moon is a rock floating in the sky,” he said, for the tenth time and still just as dubious as he was the first time.

“Yes,” she said wearily.

“Then why doesn’t it fall down?  When I throw a rock into the air, it falls.  If I forgot to flap my wings, I would fall myself!”

“There is something called gravity, which means that bodies with mass are pulled together.  That’s why we can’t jump off the Earth and fly to the stars.”

“Mass is what?  How heavy a thing is?”

“How heavy and how dense,” she explained, again, covering her eyes.

“What is this dense?  I know, I know!  Two things of an equal size, where one is heavier than the other.  Like lava rock: Pumice is light and obsidian is heavy.  Because there is more…what did you call it?  Matter?  More matter packed more tightly into obsidian?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised, peeking at him.  “Obsidian has more matter compressed into the same space.  That makes it more dense.”

“The lighter rock is larger, but has less mass,” he mused.  “The Earth, this planet,” he interrupted, pointing down, “is lighter and has less mass than the sun, which only looks smaller because it is far away.  So the sun pulls us around it in a circle you call an orbit, and the Earth is larger and has more mass than the moon, so we pull it around us in another orbit.”

“Yes!” she said, straightening up.

He considered this for a very long time.  “Then how is it,” he began in frustration, “that the Earth is not pulled all the way into the sun?  Or the moon all the way into the Earth?  What keeps gravity from crushing everything together?  Why will it pull a pinecone to the ground but not a pinecone into me?  I have more mass than a pinecone!”

Olivia shook her head, saying, “That’s a good question.  I know there’s an answer, because I had to learn it once, in school.  But I’ve forgotten now.  Maybe one of the others knows.”

He seemed disappointed, but he didn’t disbelieve her.  At least, not out loud.  Instead, he took the magazine and turned pages until he came to the photos of Earth as shot from space.  He stared at these for a long time.  “This is…Earth?  We live here?”

“Yes.”

He inspected the photo, as though hunting for signs of life on the tiny Earth.  “Have you ever been in space, Olivia?”

“No.  You have to be special for that.”

He looked up intently.  “You are special.”

She smiled.  “Yes, but I meant that you have to know more about gravity than I do.  And how to fly the machines that take you out into space.”

“Humans have walked on the moon,” he murmured, and shook his head.  “Have they been to the sun?”

“No.  The sun is too hot.  Humans would burn up and die long before they got there.”

“Ah.”  He turned the page slowly, inspecting the pictures rather than the meaningless jumble of words.  “My kind believes that the moon is the belly of the Urga, the Great Mother, swelling with new life as she chooses which among us shall have the honor of bearing her whelp.  Your kind thinks it is a rock.  My kind believes that the sun is a glowing coal pit, banked every night and brought back every morning by the Great Spirit to warm himself.  Your kind thinks it is…?”  He glanced at her expectantly.

“A flaming ball of gas,” she finished, smiling.  “I like your way better.  It’s more poetic.”

“It’s more true.” He closed the magazine and put it aside.  “Lie down with me, Olivia, and I will tell you about the Great Spirit.  I am no sigruum, but I think I can tell the story right.”

Amused, she went with him to the pit, undressed, and crawled underneath a sleeping bag while he stirred up the fire.  When he was lying comfortably beside her, he tucked an arm around her, thought hard, and said:  “In the beginning, there was darkness.”

Olivia started a little.

Vorgullum didn’t notice, all his concentration turned inward.  “There was only empty sky that stretched out forever in all directions, and all was dark and cold and still.  Into that night was poured many years of time, forever and forever, until finally, the flow of endless years became seed and the night became a womb, and a soul was conceived.

“That first soul became aware of the darkness and the cold and the stillness of night and the passage of time.  It became aware of itself.  It gained a wisdom and it created thoughts, but at first, the little thoughts all slipped away and tumbled through the night to places the soul could not reach.  Again and again it tried to recapture its lost thoughts, but it was unable to find them in the night, so the soul turned all of its thoughts into light, so that even if it could never think of them again, at least it could keep an eye on them.”

Olivia laughed, delighted.  “And those thoughts are the stars!”

“Yes.  The soul realized that by creating lights to shine against the darkness, it now had the power to separate all things into two conflicting and distinct forms.  Eagerly, the soul set its will against the emptiness and stillness of the night and created substance and form to divide it.”

“Earth,” Olivia guessed.

“All worlds,” he corrected, but gently.  “And the soul quickly turned this power inward, and became the first living creature.  It grew a body that breathed and ate, and could run and fly and swim.  It became the Great Spirit.

“For many seasons, the Great Spirit created.  He made the mud and grew things in it.  He made the water, and poured it into rivers.  He made the stone and shaped it into mountains.  He threw colors all around, to separate his creations from the night, and he made things of every shade, in the sky, on the land, and in the water.

“But when forever and forever had passed by, the Great Spirit ran out of things to do.  He looked around and saw that by creating substance, he had only interrupted the emptiness, he had not defeated it.  His creations were devoid of the life and consciousness that he possessed.  Depressed, he crawled down into the clay and slept.

“But he had forgotten the thoughts of his youth, the thoughts that had fled from him into the night to be stars.  These were thoughts he had given up back before he had power over them.  These thoughts had become their own souls, and one of them looked down at him and had pity.  The star-thought threw itself out of the sky and fell to the ground, where it transformed into a beautiful woman, all made of stars.  The Great Spirit woke up and saw the woman, and discovered that he was a man, and they coupled for years and years.”  Vorgullum trailed off with what sounded like a wistful sigh.

“This was Urga?” Olivia asked.

“Urga, the Great Mother,” he agreed, returning to the story.  “And when she had filled herself with pleasures, she flew back up into the sky, but because she had been a thing of flesh, she could never be a star again.  She flew through the sky as the moon, but when her hour came, Urga knew the child would be mortal and so she fell back to the earth again and birthed.  The child was made in the shape of the Great Spirit and of Urga, and had his claws for climbing and shaping, and her wings for flying through the sky.  The Great Spirit was so happy with his son that his heart exploded, and all the animals and creatures of the world came out from the heart and ran away, but Urga took no joy in her baby and wished to leave it and return to the sky.  The Great Spirit commanded her to stay and give milk, but Urga’s ill humor grew with every day that she was forced to remain on the ground.  When the child was weaned, she flew away, leaving her son to fate and the elements.  The Great Spirit gave the child, and the others that inevitably followed, a place of their own and provided game to hunt and growing things to eat and they became the first gullan.

“For a time, all were happy, but then the Great Spirit noticed that all his children were sons and they were growing old.  He thought they should have mates, for there was nothing he liked so much as coupling with Urga and he wished for his sons to know that pleasure as well.”

“What a thoughtful father,” Olivia remarked, smiling.

He seemed about to make some light-hearted chastisement, but then looked pensive.  “It is a strange thing to want for a son, isn’t it?  I remember mine urging me once to take a mate, but I don’t believe he ever told me what to do with her.  And between us, in all honesty, he should have.”

“I don’t mean to distract you.  Please, go on.”

He didn’t right away, but he managed eventually to shrug his thoughts away and find the threads of his story.  “When next the Great Spirit met with Urga, he ordered that his next child be born female, to be a mate for his sons.  Urga argued—”

“Good for her!  Their own sister!”

“—saying that it was the Great Spirit who put the spark in her belly and she could not make or unmake at her own will.  But wishing to please her mate, she flew up to the sky as high as her wings could take her and called out to the other stars whose company she had once shared, begging them to carry her back to her place among them.  So piteously did she call and weep that one by one, the stars fell close to her, whereupon she seized them and cut their wings and molded them into female form and dropped them among the sons of the Great Spirit.  Then they too discovered they were male—”  He broke off and frowned at her, making her realize that she was staring at him, open-mouthed and appalled.  “This is how the story goes,” he said.

She shut her mouth.  “I’m sorry.  I know.  Human stories are no better, I know that.  Go on.”

“There were many young born, both male and female.  This pleased the Great Spirit, for he saw that his children would have continuation and a true place in the world he had made for them.  And it pleased Urga…”  He paused, searching her face, but she thought she managed to keep her growing dislike for that particular character from being too obvious.  “…because she found that she was able to bear her own young through these female gullan to be mothered by them, freeing her to return to the sky.

“Even now, when we go outside, we can see Urga floating above us, with her belly growing fat with the Great Spirit’s son.  When the thunder rolls and the mountains quake, we know that we feel the Great Spirit’s frustration and impatience as he waits for his mate to return to him and brood season to come upon her.  And sometimes, the moon is gone, and we know Urga has come back to couple with him, and bear another son through a mortal gullan.

“Since then, all women have bred according to the days of the moon, each to her own season, but in the same span of time.  And like the Great Spirit, all men are impatient,” he added, reaching over to slide his hand over her belly.  “Pining for their mates, and yearning—”  He leaned over to nip gently at her shoulder.  “—for their season—”  He ran the very tips of his blunt, hard claws over her hips, and then lifted himself over her, smoky-eyed and grinning.  “—to come upon them,” he finished.

The story had put Olivia in a very good mood, making her feel at once welcome and trusted.  She caught his hand and moved it to her sex, rubbing with him, with a faint wistful thought that he might learn something.  He thrummed and stroked her, his eyes drifting out to focus indistinctly at a point above her head.  She could feel his cock stiffening against her thigh, feel his whole body tensing as he coaxed the flow of her musky oils over his hand.

Unexpectedly, startling him and her both, Olivia reached up and caught him by the base of one horn, pulling him down to look at her.  “I am here,” she said firmly.  “I am right here.  Look at me.”

His hand stopped moving immediately.  He stared at her, alarmed and aroused and bewildered all at once.

He didn’t understand and she supposed she’d ought to just let it go, but the thought of another arduous bout of emotionless lovemaking suddenly exhausted her.  Olivia sat up, then stood up, and pointed over at the nearest bench.  His whole body shook once, hard, and the fire of lust in his eyes blazed hot before banking again with caution.  “Sit down,” she said.

“Sit,” he echoed.  He looked at her a long time, but she continued to stand and point.  Slowly, he rose and crossed to the bench and eased himself down to sit.  His cock stood rigid, the head gleaming with readiness.  She imagined she could see it swell as she approached him.

“Hold me,” she began, and his hands came around her hips at once and pulled her down to straddle him.  She caught him by the fur of his shoulders and yanked for balance, harder than she intended, but he only growled and swung her around, setting her with a bruising thump on the bench so that he could push her down.  “Wait!” she cried, shoving at him.  “Wait, no, stop!”

He did, at once, leaning back with a puzzled look.  “What is it?”

And he really didn’t know, that was the misery of it.  She made her hands relax, gave him a little pat on the shoulder, and smiled at him.  “I want you to be gentle, okay?  I want you to hold me and…and be with me.”

His brows rose, then wrinkled.  Plainly, he thought that was what he had been doing.  But he eased his grip on her, let her wriggle back until she could kneel beside him on the bench, and when she was settled, he immediately reached for her again.  She caught his wrist, moved his hand to her breast, and he uttered a ragged, eager thrumm, squeezed her roughly just once, and then tried to push her down again.  Again, she resisted and although he still backed off, he did it with noticeable frustration this time.

“Let me show you,” she said, petting his arm in what she hoped was a placating manner.  “All right?”

He sat back on the bench, giving assent with a curt nod and doing his best not to snarl too overtly.

The lesson in foreplay was just going to have wait for another day, but she was determined not to waste this opportunity or his patience.  Gingerly, she slipped her legs around his waist and eased herself down until his thick glans nudged hard at her sex.  She reached down to take his shaft, hot and throbbing in her hand, sliding him along the lips of her labia.  His breath roughened, but he held her tight and did not move, although she could see his nostrils flaring as her pussy began to throb and slick the head of his teasing cock.

“Just take a little time, okay?” she murmured, easing herself down around him. Holding his gaze with hers, still touching the broad curve of his jaw, she began to roll her hips, rocking him gently, reaching around behind them to massage at his heavy balls.  He tried to lower his head, hissing, and she pushed at his chin determinedly and said, “No.  Look at me.”

When he did, she almost wished he wouldn’t, so intense was the lust and heat of his eyes.  “I need…to move you,” he said hoarsely.  His hands on her were shaking, hard and solid as stone.

“Then move me.  But hold me, look at me.  Stay with me.”

Slowly, with obvious restraint, he pushed and pulled at her, sliding her effortlessly up and down along his shaft as she continued to roll and grind and grip him.  His eyes never left hers.

The throbbing ache in her sex intensified, began to pound in ragged harmony with the sound of his hot breath.  Olivia felt her own eyes rolling back as heat flamed out from her belly into real pleasure.  Her fingers clenched in his fur, her hips quickened until she was pumping down at him with abandon, clawing with single-minded purpose towards a true and honest climax.  Breathy cries of pleasure panted out of her, growing in pitch and power until she was nearly screaming.  She could feel him driving deeper and harder, his whole body shuddering as he neared his release.  Then came an awful moment when Olivia felt nothing at all for a bare instant and had time only to think that he was done and she was out of luck again, and then her entire inner core exploded with the most intense sensation of passion and fire she had ever experienced.

She flung her whole body backwards, arching until her hair slapped at the stone floor, never thinking that she would fall.  He held her pinned easily in space as she convulsed in the ruthless grip of pleasure; she was only beginning to come back to her senses when she felt his seed shoot deep against her womb and she screamed again as it slapped her into another rage of orgasm.

When it finally ebbed, she opened her eyes, gazing at the novelty of the upside-down pit room and marveling at the pleasant little shivers that still crawled through her.  Slowly, with tremendous strain, she put her hands on his arms and pulled herself upright.

“All right?” he asked.  He seemed to be genuinely concerned.

She meant to say something encouraging and yawned instead.

The side of his mouth twitched in a smile.  Without words, he lifted her, carried her to the pit and lay her down.  She tried again to think of something to say to please him, but when his wing came over her and his soft pelt pressed against her, she slept, her body aching but glowing with pleasure.

7

His muffled groans woke her from an agreeable dream in which she had just been crowned Queen and was about to make her first proclamation concerning clambakes while wearing a sequined peephole bra and a pink poodle skirt.  She opened her eyes to see him stretching out his wings to their full span, rocking on his heels as he worked first one, then the other, and finally arched his entire powerful frame with sinew-cracking force.

He saw her watching and snapped back into a normal posture.  He grinned.  “My Olivia,” he said warmly.

“That’s ‘Your Majesty,’ peasant,” she mumbled good-naturedly, and seeing his bewildered face, added in his tongue, “I was dreaming.”

“Yes?”

“I was tovorak,” she said.  “I was the tallest in the whole world.”

It took her a few seconds to realize he was staring at her, motionless.  She had to laugh at him.  “It was just a dream!  It didn’t mean anything.”

“All dreams mean something,” he said seriously, but went to fetch a clean loincloth from the box on his side of the pit.

Olivia yawned and rolled onto her back to watch him dress.  “Is it really morning already?  It doesn’t feel like it.”

“Morning, and well into the hours of morning,” he said reluctantly.  “I am usually among my tribe by now.  Someone is surely waiting for me.”

Still in a sleepy, teasing mood, Olivia dropped her eyelids and arched her back suggestively.  “Let them wait,” she purred.  “Come back to me.”

He jerked to a stop while putting on his loincloth, and she saw an agony of indecision on his face.  Finally, he shook his head, but slowly, as though doing so cost him physical distress.  “I wish I could,” he said.  “But I’ll be back for mid-meal.”

“Good,” she murmured.  “Because I feel like working up an appetite.”

He straightened, looking completely dumbfounded, then suspicious.  “You aren’t in season,” he said.  “What is wrong with you?”

“Did it feel wrong last night?”

He had to think about it.

“No,” he said at last, but he was frowning.

“I’m your mate, remember?  Shouldn’t I want to be with my mate and hold him in the pit?”  She rolled onto her hands and knees and crawled towards him, pretending she had a tail to twitch with cat-like intensity behind her.  Vorgullum backed away.  “Shouldn’t I want to push him down and wrap my legs around him and feel him inside me?”

He did not reply.

Olivia waited, trying to smolder, and finally sat up and managed another laugh.  “I guess I must not be doing this right.”

“What,” he asked, very cautiously, “are you attempting to do?”

“Work my wicked way with you.”  Remembering her dream, she straightened her shoulders and pointed imperiously at the pit.  “Your queen commands you!”

His foot twitched, but away from her, not closer.

“Oh fine.  You can go.”  Olivia fell back with a yawn and wrapped herself in one of his furs.  “You’re sending me a lot of mixed signals, you know.”

He tore himself away with a visible effort and the promise to be back early.  When he was gone, Olivia crawled out of the pit and went to the canal in the far passageway.  She gave herself a lengthy washing, relishing the sensation of the biting cold water as it numbed her stiff muscles and flushed skin.

She dressed, and for want of something to do, began to sort through the bedding.  The furs and sleeping bags were fine, but that canvas tent had to go.  Chafe city.  She found a number of small scraps of fabric and fur and removed them as well, dumping the entire pile of undesirable material to one side of the pit.  Good.  Now she felt productive.

Her stomach growled and she stood up, stretching, and went to get her climbing spikes.  Maybe she could find someone in the commons who would feed her.

As her fingers closed around the iron claws, Olivia heard a familiar voice, very welcome on this morning.  “Olivia!  You evil little frog!  Will you make old Murgull squeeze her fat self up that little passage?”

“You don’t have any trouble when you come to slap my head.”

“Oh ho, and should I be slapping it today?  Come down, I say!”

“Coming!” Olivia called, and soon she was spiking her way down the chimney to stand next to the old gulla, who gazed at her with reluctant admiration.

“Cunning things, those,” she said, nodding at the spikes.  “Iron claws for little frog hands.  Your mate gave them to you?”

“Yes,” Olivia said.  “Perhaps if you came to his pit, he will make you a new set of teeth.”

Murgull first gaped, then bellowed out laughter.  She clutched at the wall, wheezing and chortling, then slapped Olivia’s arm playfully.  “Not too old and ugly, me,” she giggled.  “Old Murgull has but one tooth left, but she had a clever tongue in her youth, oh yes!  Come with Murgull.”  She turned and hobbled off down the tunnel, Olivia following comfortably at her side.

“I hadn’t realized you were in the habit of dropping by private chambers,” Olivia prompted.

“Ha, and you know so much of old Murgull?”  The crone winked her withered eye in a knowing manner.  “But old Murgull, she has news for Olivia, concerning other maggots.”  She looked left, then right down the narrow, empty tunnels, listening with ears that were no doubt as keen now as they were in her vanished youth.  She dropped her voice still further, and said, “The little brown maggot awaits a new life.”

Olivia stopped and stared at her.  “I don’t believe it,” she gasped in English.

Murgull blinked, then glared.  “You croak at me, you little frog?!”

“I’m relieved, is all,” Olivia hastened to say.

“Are you?”  Murgull grunted and continued walking.  “It is soon for that, little sister.  No season ever came to brown maggot.  Whose child is in her belly, thinks Murgull.  When brown maggot’s mate asks if his spark is caught, old Murgull is crafty.  Old Murgull says, too soon to tell, too soon.  But Murgull thinks Olivia can speak to this maggot.  Ask her if a human has been between those bald legs.”  Murgull cut Olivia a glance, then frowned.  “Old Murgull sees little thoughts like bats flying around in your head.  Tell Murgull.”

“What happens,” Olivia said slowly, “if the baby is human?  What happens if she was pregnant before she got here?”

Murgull pulled a face, astonishing to see in one so initially ugly.  “What do you think happens, eh?  Think old Murgull chops her up and eats her?  Eh?  Do you think no one here has thought this may all be futile?  Ha!  Futility is all we ever think of,” she grumbled.  “Put your hand on Murgull’s arm.  The ground is dropping away.”

Sure enough, there was a sudden slope to the floor as Murgull headed down a dark tunnel.  Olivia groped for Murgull’s arm and found her crippled wing instead.  “Sorry,” she mumbled, fumbling for Murgull’s arm.

Murgull cackled.  “Go ahead!  No good to Murgull, that withered wing.  Dried up like Horumn’s teats.  Can’t flap.  Can’t glide.  Can’t fan it to keep cool.  Tears like brown leaves in winter-time.  Olivia can use it for guiding her down dark places.  Can use it to make little tents from, for all the good it does poor Murgull.  Ah, here!”  She stopped suddenly, so that Olivia bumped into her.

“Where is here?” she asked, puzzled.

“My home.  Old Murgull’s home.  Hush, little frog, and Murgull will show you a wonder!”

Olivia couldn’t see what she did, but there was a muted click and then a rumble of heavy weights sliding along metal rails as Murgull pushed the block of wall before them into the wall.  Light streamed from all around the hidden door a fraction of a second before Murgull slid it to one side, allowing them entry.

Olivia stepped into a whole new world.  Lanterns hung every few feet from the ceiling, some rusted and ancient, others gleaming with newness.  Iron pegs quilled the walls, and from each one hung a sprig of dried herbs or a bundle of roots or a wreath of bulbs.  The narrow tables crowding this room were cluttered with tools of the witch’s trade, with knives and candles, stone bowls, mortars and pestles, even flasks and burners, and every inch of shelf space was taken up by bottles, both plastic and glass, filled with murky and pungent potions.  In the furthest corner, an honest-to-God iron cauldron hung suspended over the dead coals of a fire, and just in case it all needed something even creepier to bind it together, a stone throne of sorts had been carved out of the wall and trimmed with dozens upon dozens of animal bones, from the tiny rat skulls that edged the arms all the way up to the spreading antlers over the crowning arch.

Murgull slid the heavy door shut with a groan, then limped over and sat.  She looked around, rubbing at the scarred wattles of her neck, and showed what remained of her teeth in a grin.  “A pretty lair, eh?  The sigruum has his archives, and the metal-maker his forge, but here does old Murgull do her terrible work and it is a place of such tremendous power that it does not even have a name.  Ha.  Your mate does not even know it exists, although he would happy enough, I think, just to know I do not work my magic where any hungry eyes can see and learn from me.  Imagine, eh?  A mountain filled with Murgulls!”  She threw back her head and cackled so wickedly that Olivia simply had to join her, but as their laughter ebbed, a cloud passed over the old gulla’s face.  “But there must always be one, eh?  One like me, to frighten the young and curse the sleep of brave hunters…and I think it must be you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you do not fear me.”  Murgull’s good eye gleamed, and not with humor.  “And that is a thing which gnaws at Murgull.  And so she sits and sits, and broods and broods, and finally decides that either she must kill this fearless naked frog who plagues her or she must embrace it.”

“You decided to embrace it, I hope,” Olivia said, half-smiling.

“I decided to kill it.”  Murgull flapped one hand to dismiss Olivia’s blanching stare, then heaved herself up and rummaged among the potions on the nearest table.  “And here it is, my wingless sister.  Your death in a bottle.”

It was placed in her hands, an old brown beer bottle with the top waxed shut, its contents as pale and thick as honey.

“But I dreamed,” Murgull continued, sinking back into her throne.  She watched the bottle as Olivia turned it around, her bad eye glowing gold with candlelight.  “And they were dreadful dreams.  The Great Spirit has ten thousand hands when he wants them, they say, and he put one around my heart that night, and gave it a terrible squeeze.  So.  You live, eh?  And you are here in the lair that will be your own when these old bones finally go to the ground.  And I will teach you to be a plague and a shadow and your mate will never thank me for it, but you may.  Ha.  You may.”

“I thought you liked me,” Olivia said, as ridiculous and little-girl-lost as that sounded.

“I do.”  Murgull took her bottle back and set it among the others with a careless shrug.  “I will like you even better now that I do not have to trouble myself with how best to kill you.  I will like you better still if the Great Spirit takes his hand from my heart and puts it on your foolish head so that you might learn some of what I have to teach you.”

“The Great Spirit has ten thousand hands,” Olivia grumbled.  “He can do both.”

“Ha!  Fearless little frog!”  Murgull paused and gave her a thoughtful look over one hunched shoulder.  “And do you know of the Great Spirit, eh?  More than Murgull’s fancies and Murgull’s bad dreams?”

“Some.  My mate told me a story last night.”

Murgull snorted.  “Did he?  Told you of Great Spirit and Urga, yes?  Thrashing together at the dawn of the world, oh yes, that is all the story most of these stag-heads want to tell.  ‘And they coupled for years and years!’” she chanted, screwing her voice down into a deep, manly pitch while contorting her face into an expression of such grotesque longing that Olivia burst out laughing again, bottle of poison or no.  “Years and years…Bah!  Murgull has yet to meet the man who could manage, ha, minutes and minutes!  But at least he tells you something.  The Great Spirit and Urga, yes.  Not Bahgree, I think.  Not of the River Woman, first mother of all humans.”

Olivia felt her smile slip.  “Who?”

“Who, indeed?”  Murgull grinned ferociously.  “Come, little sister.  We will go together to see the little brown maggot, and Olivia can chirp at her and learn what man’s tool has been rutting between her pasty legs.  Then, perhaps, Murgull will tell a story.”

8

To Olivia’s surprise, a familiar face appeared in response to Murgull’s bellows as they stood squeezed together in the ‘brown maggot’s chimney.  It was the dark-eyed, brown-haired woman from the first human-meet, the one who was married.  She peered nervously down at them, bit her lip, and in thickly-accented bat-ese, said, “He no go here.  He is to go yesterday about apples bucket.  He go here many somedays.”

Olivia and Murgull exchanged a glance.  “Difficult enough to do,” Murgull grunted, “when idiot maggot knows our words.  You go.  Find out the truth from her.”

Olivia handed her candle to the ancient creature, then pulled out her climbing spikes and started up the chimney.  In English, she said, “It’s all right.  Murgull just wants me to talk to you.  I’m Olivia.”

“I remember you.  I’m…Judith.”  She backed away anxiously as Olivia gained the landing of the entry room.  “I’m not supposed to be in here when he’s away,” she explained with a nervous laugh.

“He won’t care, not with Murgull out there, and I won’t be long.”  Olivia hesitated, then plunged ahead.  “Judith, were you pregnant when you were captured?”

Judith flinched, but only slightly.  Her face folded in on itself, and she twisted away.  “Come into the bedroom,” she whispered.  “I’m not supposed to be in here.”

Olivia followed her out of the small entry room into a slightly larger sleeping room.  There was no fireplace, only a few strategically-placed lanterns, a few furs and leathers in the pit, and a bucket for a chamberpot.  Judith sat on the only bench and ran her hands restlessly over her knees.

“So,” she said after a moment.  “That witch out there is pretty sure?”

“That witch out there is positive,” Olivia agreed, sitting opposite her.  “But since you never got your period after you came here, she can’t be sure that you weren’t already pregnant when you arrived.”

Judith gazed into the fire.  Her hands rubbed at her knees, almost separate from the rest of her body.  “I don’t know,” she said at last.  “I don’t feel sick.  My mom never got morning sick.  I don’t feel pregnant at all.  I don’t know.  I guess…if we’ve been here as long as I think we have…I know I should have gotten my period by now.  I guess I’m pregnant.  It could be David’s.”

Olivia felt lost.  How was this supposed to continue?  “Have you…have you had sex with…with…”

“With my abductor, yes.”

Now Olivia took a deep breath, having an inkling of how to determine whether or not Judith had conceived by her husband or her captor.  “What has it been like?”

Judith turned slowly towards her.  “Excuse me?”

“Sex.  With your, um, abductor.  I mean, is it always slow and kind of drawn out, or has there been a time when it was quick and…and kind of violent, maybe, and several times a night?”

Judith took a deep breath and let it out.  “It has always been,” she said, enunciating clearly, “very slow, very nervous, and very thorough.”

In other words, either Judith’s captor was the only gullan in the world with self-control, or she’d never been in season.

“That actually means something, doesn’t it?” Judith asked, frowning.

Olivia tried to shrug, but it came off looking wooden and forced.  “It might.  Probably.  I don’t know enough about them to say for sure.”  And this was true, she didn’t know enough about them.  Were the gullan males so sensitive to female fertility because they could only conceive during their seasons?  Or were they like humans, who were certainly more fertile at that time of the month, but who could catch at any time?

Her distraction and silence clearly made Judith uneasy.  She rubbed her palms over her knees, looking at Olivia, at the lantern, at the paints on the wall, at the pit.  Suddenly, she said, “The first time he tried was the day after I woke up here, but I started crying so hard that he gave up.  He couldn’t do it again for a while, but after that…it’s been almost every night, unless I cry.  I don’t…I don’t like crying in front of him.  I’m afraid he’ll make me tell him why and I don’t want him to know about David.  I don’t…I don’t want to share that.”  She rubbed at her knees again.  “But…I suppose I have to, if I’m having David’s baby.  Do you really think I am?”

Olivia hesitated, then said, “See, the thing is, when women are at their most fertile, whether it’s us or them, we apparently all give off a particular scent, which the gullan can, um…”

Judith was nodding.  “I know,” she said quietly.  “Tina says they’re more pheromone-receptive, whatever that means.”

“Well, in this particular case, it means they can tell when we’re, um, ovulating.  And it has an extremely powerful effect on them.  If you had ovulated after you got here, your…abductor would have been, um, very aggressive in bed.  So, I’m not a doctor, but I think you must have already been pregnant.”

“I understand.”  Judith looked at the pit, and her expression was still serene.  “You know…I think he loves me.  I look at him and I can’t…I can’t see anyone but the monster…who took me away from my home…who made my husband a widower…who is killing me.  But he loves me.  He thinks he’s making love to me.  He thinks…I’m making love with him.”

There was nothing, absolutely nothing, Olivia could think of to say to this.

“But, believe it or not, this actually settles my mind.  I mean, if I’m definitely pregnant, then I definitely have to deal with it, you know?”

“Yes,” Olivia said.

“So that’s what I’m going to do.”  Judith stood up, and started walking back into the entry room. “But do me a favor, please.  I want to tell him myself.  Tell Murgull that I’ve been with another human, but that it was a while ago.  That’s not exactly a lie.  When I’m ready, I’ll let the truth be known.”

“I can do that.”

“Okay.”  Judith watched as Olivia lowered herself through the chimney, then vanished from sight as she left the entry room.

No sooner had Olivia’s feet touched the stone floor than Murgull was prodding her in the side with one blunt claw.  “Well?”

“She’s not sure.”  Olivia looked Murgull in the eye calmly.  “She wasn’t even certain she was pregnant.  She has been with another human, but it was some time ago.”

Murgull leaned back a little, rubbing her scars in a brooding fashion.  “Some time ago…Did she say when?  What was the moon on that time ago, hm?  Was it fat like a mother-swollen belly or thin like a sleeping eye?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Some time ago,” Murgull muttered, moving away down the main passageway.  “What shall Murgull say to the mate of that human?”

“Say nothing, for now.  She says she’ll tell him herself when she’s ready.”

Murgull grunted, nodding.  “Easy to make a silence, little sister, but never easier to break it with words of truth, or even words of lies.”

“This is her decision and I think we have to respect it.”

“Why?”

Olivia blinked.  “It’s her mate, isn’t it?  And her baby.”

“Bah.”  Murgull flapped her hand at her.  “You go back to your lair now, little sister.  Your mate will be coming to fill your belly soon, hm?”  She cackled.  “Fill it and fill it again, eh?”

“But you said you would tell me about Bahgree.”

Murgull nodded, waving her hands in cranky dismissal.  “Not so young as you, is Murgull.  Needs to rest herself.  But come to my secret place after your mate goes happy back to his hunting.  You know where it is.  Come, and we will have some chat together.  Long and long into the day.”  Another witchy cackle.  “And then you will go home to another thrash in your pit.  Long and very long.”  Still chortling, Murgull stumped off down the tunnel.

Olivia knew better than to try and argue.  Instead, she found her way back to her lair, and there, to her great surprise, was Vorgullum.  “I thought you were going hunting,” she said.

“I tried,” he murmured.  “You have been haunting me, my Olivia.  I heard your laughter in the running water and your sighs in every slip of wind.  I felt your teasing hands and the touch of your body in the air as it lifted me.  I am half-mad with wanting you.”

“Prove it,” she said, smiling.

9

For Olivia, there was only a shadow of the previous night’s pleasure, only a dull heat made bright with friction and the familiar shuddering of her purely physical responses.  He did not appear to notice the difference, but made the effort at times to look at her before burrowing against her neck and groaning his desire into her ears.  At last, finished, he forced himself from the bench with obvious reluctance, wrapping himself up in clothing with muttered curses, then fumbled out some food from his belt-pouch and tossed it to her.

“Great Mountain, give me strength,” he moaned, leaving.  “I will never hear the end of this.”

Humming, Olivia cleaned up and got dressed again.  She snacked on her lunch as she walked down the tunnels, stopping by the common cave to see if anyone she knew was there.

Ms. Africa was there with Anita and Ellen, along with two others she didn’t immediately recognize.  Anita saw her in the doorway and waved her over, grinning.

Much as she hated to make Murgull wait, Olivia went.

“They said there would only be five today,” Anita said.  “Okay, ya’ll, quick recap: this is Carla, Karen and Ellen.”

Olivia waved at Ellen and gave Karen a smile, saying, “I saw Liz yesterday.”

“Yeah?”  Karen, who was indeed very tan, particularly for their corner of the Pacific Northwest, rather disinterestedly finger-combed a section of her limp blonde hair and started braiding it.  “She ask about me?”

She hadn’t, now that Olivia thought about it.  “She seemed worried, you know,” she hedged.  “Wondering if you’d been taken.”

Karen snorted.  “She probably just wants my half of the rent.  Bitch.”

“You have this great excuse for not having it this month,” Carla remarked, and Anita laughed.

“Believe me,” said Karen, shaking out her half-made braid.  “Being kidnapped out of your bed by a horny bat-monster means nothing to Elizabeth ‘Checkbook’ Chase.  I ate one of her precious power bars once and she charged me two bucks and thirty-seven cents.  She’s a bitch.”

Ms. Africa cleared her throat in a tight, angry way.

“Oh, I forgot, and this is Her Royal Highness, Mrs. Victoria Viktabitch.”  There were some snickers and an especially scathing glare from Ms. Africa which Anita cheerfully ignored.  “Excuse me, I meant Viktavich.  Come on in and set yaself, as my daddy says.”

“I really can’t,” Olivia said.  “I’m actually on my way to see a friend.”

“They let you run around by yourself?” Carla asked, stunned.

“Of course they do,” Ms. Africa, Victoria, replied frostily.  “That’s the one I was telling you about.  That’s Olivia.”

They all stared at her, suddenly quiet.  Olivia stood there awkwardly, feeling a chasm open up between them, pulling her away from the others.  She could almost see space stretching out, separating them, making them smaller with distance.

“Um,” she said in a little voice.  “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand why you seem to think that means something.”

Anita looked around at the others, then picked at some loose threads on the frayed edge of her rough halter.  “It’s not you, exactly, it’s just what-all some of the furries say about you.”

“What do they say?” Olivia asked apprehensively.

“Oh God, you know.  Stuff.”

“Why can’t you speak as well as Olivia?” Carla muttered.  “Christ, I get that one all the time.”

“Olivia doesn’t need new clothes every day,” said Ellen, sing-song, rolling her eyes.  “Forgive me for wanting to change my underwear.”

“Oh, and my personal favorite—”  Karen held up both index fingers to her head, indicating horns, as she adopted a deep gullan voice.  “Olivia eats it.  Why don’t you?  And if you are eating it,” she added, dropping her hands onto her hips, “whose fucking teeth are you using?  I lost a crown on that fucking bread, no joke!  Eight hundred dollars of dental work right down the drain!”

“And let us not forget,” finished Victoria, every word dripping acid, “that this is the same Olivia who wants to make certain we all play nice with the animals who have abducted us.  Olivia, the good slave, who wants us all to start having nice furry babies.”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” Olivia said.  “All I’m trying to do is get along down here.”

“And of course, the easiest way for you to get along is make the rest of us look bad.”

“I’m not making you look anything!” she protested.  “You’re doing what you’re doing on your own!”

Victoria merely cut a thin-lipped smile at her, but Karen angrily said, “What are we supposed to be doing, huh?  Lie there and pretend to like it when one of them is shoving his hand up your trap and growling in your ear?  I shouldn’t have to ‘get along’ with these things!  I’ve been kidnapped, for Christ’s sake!”

“It’s not going to get any easier unless you give them a reason to start trusting you!” Olivia said.

“What’s easier?” Carla asked.  “Whether you run around in a big cave with a bunch of them or a little cave with just one of them, you’re still in a fucking cave with a bat, aren’t you?  Nothing I do is ever going to convince him to take me home.”  She shrugged, but her eyes stayed with Olivia and stayed hot.  “He doesn’t get to tell me I have to be happy about that and neither do you.”

Olivia looked at them.  Anita dropped her eyes and Ellen had already turned away to pick at little flakes of stone on the bench where she sat, but the other three glared right back at her and she didn’t know what she was supposed to say to them.  “It won’t always be this difficult,” she said finally.

“Yes, it will!” Karen snapped.  “I’m pissing in a bucket, goddammit!  And that’s never going to change no matter how many times I make happy eyes at that fucking furball!  He kidnapped me and I’m going to hate him!”

The gullan guard on duty today looked over from his post across the cave, one hand reaching for, but not quite touching, the spear leaning up against the wall beside him.  Karen glanced that way, then sat back down with a muttered curse and started braiding her hair again.

“For the rest of your life?” Olivia asked softly.  “Can you really hate him for the rest of your life?  Because I can’t.”

“Well, aren’t you the prize?” Victoria sneered.  “Aren’t you just precious?  Well, let me just tell you something, Olivia.  If these monsters want to see a smiling face under them, they can all have you.”

Carla and Karen snorted twin votes of wordless agreement.  Anita and Ellen were very quiet.

“Well, go on,” Victoria invited, smiling so tightly that the fine surgery scars underneath her chin stood out as white as ice on her furious face.  “Defend yourself.”

“Defend what?” Olivia demanded.  “I’m not going to apologize for trying to get along.  You’re right, Carla, nothing you do is going to convince anyone to take you home, but hating them might just convince them to put us in chains, so yeah,” she said as Carla began to frown, “I’m getting along with them.  Olivia the good slave, you bet, because something tells me that pissing in a bucket isn’t as bad as this place can get.”

Now Karen frowned as well, although she kept her eyes fixed on the hank of hair between her fingers.

“Now come on.”  Olivia forced a smile onto her face and held out her hand to Victoria.  “We’re all in this together, aren’t we?  I don’t want to fight.”

The other woman regarded the hand as if it were a nest of writhing worms.  “You are a bat-fucking whore,” she said evenly.

No one else spoke.

“Right.”  Olivia made the effort to put her hand down without pulling it into a fist and punching Victoria right in her hateful smirking face.  “Fine.  You win.  But this bat-fucking whore is walking out of here.  Have fun with your guard.”  She turned on her heel and stalked away, leaving them in whispers behind her.

10

Olivia made her way out of the main passageway and into the sloping, seldom-used tunnel that was the way to Murgull’s cave, letting anger carry her but trying not to let it carry her so much that she fumed off down the wrong tunnel and lost her stupid self in the bowels of the mountain.  Paying attention to where she was going, however, did a lot to cool her internal fires and by the time she reached the end of the passage where Murgull’s secret room should be, her boiling rage had simmered itself down into sulky resentment, and that cooled even further when she realized she didn’t know how to find or open the hidden door. She felt along the wall where she was pretty sure she’d been standing earlier, but couldn’t detect a crack or seam that would indicate an opening.  She pushed, but there was no give to the very solid-seeming rock under her hands.

“Oh hell,” she muttered, trudging to the far side of the wide tunnel, and feeling her way along the full width of the wall, trying to find an indention somewhere which would mark the door.  Her hand slipped into a broad hole with a lever of some sort inside.  She tugged on it, heard a muted click, and felt the block become somehow loose.

She pushed again, and this time it fell back easily, gliding on rails about twelve inches deep into the cave.  Light poured from around the stone door as the block shifted tracks onto a horizontal running rail.  Olivia slid it to one side and came into Murgull’s dwelling.

“Clever Olivia,” Murgull said.  She was sitting on a bench against the wall, watching.  “I was beginning to think you would give up.”

“I don’t give up easily,” Olivia said, closing the door again.

“Unless you are captured by monsters and taken away to their mountain to breed with them,” Murgull suggested.

“Well, yes, unless that, but where everything else is concerned, I don’t give up.”  Olivia put her hands on her hips with a darker glower than she felt like making.  “I was holding onto a really bad mood, and you just ruined it for me.”

“Old Murgull ruins everything,” Murgull sniffed, a little smugly.  “Now come here, little sister.  I made a promise to you, and I intend to keep it.  Old Murgull lies to everyone, sooner or later, but Olivia will be later.  Come and hear the tale of Bahgree, mother of your kind.”

Olivia sat on the floor at Murgull’s knee, a position that seemed oddly natural to both of them.

“My story begins when the world was still young, but not so new.  The ancestors of my people were fresh as children, and they played as children do, exploring the world the Great Spirit had given them, and all the creatures in it.  The Great Spirit was new as well, and like all men new-come to coupling, wished to spend each moment with his prick pounding between Urga’s open thighs, ha!  But with each coupling, Urga conceived, and flew back up the sky to be the moon, leaving the Great Spirit alone for all the days and nights that her belly grew fat, all the days and nights that she grew slender again, for not until her season came upon her once more would she fly down to share the Great Spirit’s endless passions.

“As it happened, one day the Great Spirit and Urga coupled near a river, unaware that a strange, new soul had begun to grow there, and was watching them.  Urga conceived that night, and disappeared into the sky before the dawn, and Great Spirit was left on the bank, enraged with lust.  As he lay there, the water began to flow upward from the river, forming itself into a shape inspired from Urga, but reflecting the river’s own nature.

“It was a shape like yours, little sister, with long hairs that flowed like water from her brow down her back.  It was a shape with curves like a winding river, so different from the lean Urga, with breasts as full as a milking mother and hips full as the fullest moon around her tempting sex.  This was Bahgree, and she came to the Great Spirit and said in her low, laughing voice that he need not wait for Urga’s return.  Bahgree the River Woman was always there, and could flow around him and drown him with passions.

“The Great Spirit tried to defy her, but Bahgree danced on the water and cast back the light from ten thousand stars, and she was irresistible.”  Murgull paused, thinking, and added, “And if the Great Spirit was anything like every other male since, his efforts at resisting her were very short-lived.”

Olivia giggled.

“Bahgree came into his arms and she was all she had promised to be.  They were like a single beast.  Their thrashings built mighty chasms in the ground.  Their sighs and moans of passion stirred up terrible storms.  The sweat that ran down both their bodies caused devastating floods.  But when it was done, the Great Spirit fell back, gasping and weak, and Bahgree slipped smiling back into the water.

“Every night she came to him, poured herself around his body and rode him to frenzies of lust and madness, and leaving him only when he was too weak to move.  With every new day, the Great Spirit only wanted her more, until he trembled with need of her.  He did not sleep, he could not eat.  He grew thin and pale and sick, but still he fell into her arms and drowned in her embrace.

“In the meantime, Urga had long since birthed her child and sent it to the gullan to be mortal-born and reared.  She waited, growing slim and beautiful in the sky, thinking only of the day when she would return to her mate’s arms.  But when she entered her season and slipped from the sky, the Great Spirit was not there, awaiting her eagerly in the customary place.  Confused, Urga walked over the world, calling for him.

“Coupling feverishly with Bahgree, the Great Spirit heard his mate, but could not leave the River’s grip.  He cried out with shame and rage and sorrow, but Bahgree only had to move around him and he was lost inside her.

“With the coming of the dawn, Urga flew back up to the sky, unfulfilled and lonely.  Ten seasons came and passed in this manner, and Urga was thin and pale throughout.  Every night, her light grew dimmer as she turned further and further away from the world she had helped to populate.  Finally, the night came when anger swelled up in place of her sorrow.”

“Finally,” muttered Olivia, and Murgull burst out laughing.

“Would not take as long for Olivia to go hunting her mate, hm?” she demanded.  “No, it would not!  And it would not take Murgull one season, no!  If the Great Spirit wants to swim around with Bahgree, old Murgull will find herself another male to thrash with!  Any tool fits an empty hand, my mother used to tell me, and old Murgull is very, very good with tools.”

“Very wise woman, your mother,” Olivia said.

“I was never so fine in face as the other females,” Murgull replied.  “Certainly not after I went in search of others.  But I had every male old enough to use his tool crying with his legs crossed at the crook of my littlest claw.”  She shrugged her bent shoulders and fanned her good wing.  “No sparks ever came to Murgull.  Punishment, I suppose, for all those males I stole away from their mates.”  She glanced down at Olivia, scowled, collected her thoughts, and began again.

“Urga walked the world, and this time, she did not bother with calling for her mate.  She stalked him like a cougar, with claws hidden but at the ready.  And after many days had passed, she found him coupling with Bahgree on the banks of a river.

“Urga began to be furious, and then she saw how sick and thin and weak he was, even as he thrashed in the River Woman’s grip.  Dawn came at last, and Bahgree slipped back into the waters, leaving the Great Spirit unconscious on the shore.  Urga ran to him, but when he opened his eyes, there was no memory of her inside them.  Urga realized that Bahgree was stealing the life and the soul out of the Great Spirit, and she vowed to have vengeance done.  First, she moved the Great Spirit’s sick and sleeping body away from the river.  Then, she used her powers to transform herself into the shape of the Great Spirit, and she lay down on the river bank to wait for Bahgree.

“When night fell, Bahgree rose from the waters, as naked and beautiful as ever, and she moved towards the transformed Urga with a mocking smile.  Urga grabbed hold of Bahgree’s arms, then changed back into her true form, and began to fight with Bahgree.  Bahgree struggled, trying to go back into the water, for there she would be safe, but Urga flew with her up into the sky and then plummeted back to the ground, pounding Bahgree into the rocks again and again until she pounded all the power out of Bahgree’s body.  Helpless, Bahgree fell to her knees in the sand, begging for her life.

“‘You shall live,’ Urga told her.  ‘But the earth will never welcome you again, and you shall have no power over it and its kind.  You will be as water, formless and cold, forever cursed.’  And then she kicked Bahgree in the side and sent her scurrying away into the water.

“Now,” Murgull continued, “You would think that would teach Bahgree a lesson, but Bahgree was angry now, and she wanted revenge.  With her watery body, she returned to the Great Spirit while Urga whelped her new child up in the sky.  Even without her powers, Bahgree could not be resisted, and the Great Spirit coupled with her for many days, until he sparked inside her.

“When Urga came back to the world and found Bahgree’s belly swollen with child, she was furious, at the Great Spirit as well as Bahgree.  Urga ripped a handful of fur from the Great Spirit’s back.  ‘To remind you what you should avoid!’ she spat, and threw the fur at Bahgree’s sex, where it remains to this day.

“But Bahgree had what she wanted.  She bore a little, bald female child in her own image.  Wingless, hairless except for the hair that flowed down her back like water, and the curse Urga had placed on her sex.  That child was the first true human, and all of your kind are born of her.  Bahgree’s daughter, like Bahgree herself, continued to breed among Urga’s children, seducing males away from their mates and driving them mad with passion.”

“That’s kind of a scary story,” Olivia said slowly.  “Is that…Is that really what gullan believe?  That humans are descended from…from a demon?”

“Old stories.”  Murgull shrugged.  “Legends.  Was the first elk truly born from the hollows of a tree that Tovorak the First One struck with his spear?  Were the first fish truly beads of semen that spilled down Bahgree’s leg as she crawled back into the river, eh?  Long nights and cold winters have a way of making stories, and stories have a way of changing from one age to another.”

“Don’t you have any other stories about humans?”

“Many.”

“True stories?”

Murgull eyed her, pulling and scratching at the loose folds of her neck.  “A thousand years ago, they say, when this tribe was new, one of its hunters spied a human female bathing, and was so inflamed with desire that he stayed all night, watching her.  For nights, he followed her to her tribe and gazed on her, until he went mad with wanting her and carried her away, here to Hollow Mountain.  For days and nights, he lay with her in a secret lair, and at last she caught his spark.  But the crying of the child drew many ears and his tribe discovered her.  The leader cast mother and child both from a cliff and killed them, driving her mate so mad with grief that he cut his wings and threw himself from the same cliff, so that he could lie with their broken bodies forever.”

“Do you think it really happened?” Olivia asked.

“I have never found anyone who did not believe it,” Murgull said.  “Especially now, because it says our kinds may breed together.”

“Cheyenne…One of the other humans said that there’s been some bad feelings from some of the other gullan who don’t have human mates.”

“True, very true.”  Murgull rubbed at her neck.  “Feelings and more than just feelings.  There has been talk, dark talk, angry talk.  They fear you, yes, fear your human powers and the madness you hide in your smooth bodies, but fear does not keep them from wanting to bury their little pricks in a nice, tight hole.”  Murgull sneered, then gave Olivia a thoughtful sidelong stare.  “This Cheyenne, eh?  Does she call herself the Mojo Woman?”

“No, that’s someone else.  And you don’t have to be afraid of Mojo Woman anyway.”

“Afraid?”  Murgull straightened sharply, incredulously, then blew out a gust of her witchiest laughter.  “You think old Murgull is afraid of that poison-spitting fool?  Ha!  Ha ha!  I have crushed more than one snake in my days, oh I have!  I fear nothing in all this mountain, and nothing under your human sky either.  Ha.  But she does your kind no good with her talk of trapping souls.”

“I know.  I only just learned my mate’s name, after all this time.”

“And you are the first, I think.”  The old gulla eyed her, rubbing at her neck.  “Brave man, to give a daughter of Bahgree such power over him.  He must truly trust you.”

“Maybe he just finds me irresistible.  He told me my name was like water to him.  He compared me to a river.”  Olivia looked up, hurt.  “Does he really think of me that way?  Like Bahgree?”

“And is it so terrible to be irresistible?  Is it such a curse to drive men mad when they come to your pit, eh?”

“I guess not,” Olivia grumbled.  “Sure feels that way sometimes.”

“Eh?”

“Oh, nothing.”  Olivia raised both arms and dropped them in a shrug of mingled embarrassment and exasperation.  “He just does so little for me.  Most of the time, he just…gets on and gets off, you know?”

Murgull snorted.

“And he’s big,” Olivia added.  “So when I’m not, you know, into it, it’s a lot like getting hit with a hammer a few hundred times, every damn night.”

“He’s a man, little sister.  A good man, eh?  A brave man, strong man, but just a man.  And men are cattle.”  She ran her eye critically down Olivia’s body and grunted speculatively.  “What they know is enough only to sink their tool in the right pit.  Anything else, they must be taught.  If you do not teach him, you cannot blame him.”

“I’ve tried!” she protested.  “Sometimes it works.  Sometimes…we’re just not built the same way, Murgull!”

Murgull heavy hand smacked cheerfully down on her shoulder, knocking Olivia sprawling.  “Little sister, you speak words I understand very well.  Stand up and let old Murgull have a look at you.”

Olivia stood up and held still while the old gulla poked at her chest and stomach and pinched her thigh, but did let out a startled scream when Murgull lifted her skirt.  Murgull recoiled, blinking at her as if surprised, then walloped her up the side of her head and lifted up the skirt again, this time actually wedging her hand between Olivia’s thighs to prod impersonally at her pussy.

“What in the hell are you doing?”  Olivia scrambled back, shoving her skirt down with both fists.

Murgull caught her by the gold buckle of her belt and hauled her roughly back, thumped her down on the bench, and pointed one claw menacingly at her face.  “You want help, eh?  Or just to moan and whine?”

“Hey, I am not where the problem is!”

“Ha!  You want pleasure in the pit, you learn to give it!  And you will not find another female in this mountain who will tell the leader’s mate so freely of the ways of coupling, eh?  Now, when the making of whelps is so forbidden?”

There was that.  Olivia kept a protective grip on her skirt, frowning, but she was thinking of Cheyenne, whose captor was apparently risking castration when he snuck out for a tumble with his hideous girlfriend.

Still…

“I’ll answer questions,” she said, “but I’m not showing you my stuff.”

Murgull’s good eye narrowed.  “Do you want help?” she asked again, blackly.  “Or just to moan and whine?”

Damn it.  Olivia fidgeted on the bench for several scathing seconds, and finally threw up her hands and sat furiously back.  “Help,” she said mutinously.

“Then shut your flapping mouth.”  Murgull hunched over to jab at her some more, muttering and rubbing at the scars of her neck.  “Problem is, you feel too much, I think.  Thin skin, little body…flimsy claws good for nothing.  And this!”  She pulled the skirt up to aim a ferocious scowl at Olivia’s naked pubis.  “It does not take a big man to hammer at that tiny hole!”

“We are,” Olivia said, gritting her teeth, “just exactly the right size for our own males.”

“Must be, I suppose, since there are so many humans.”  Murgull leaned down to sniff once, her grotesque face furrowing in concern.  “Strong musk, even now.  Potent.  Not always a good thing.  But a powerful thing, yes, that much is so.  So!”  She struck her hands briskly together.  “Your hands are nearly useless against your male.  Good heavy pelt on that one, and skin is too thick anyway.  But there are things even you can do.  Old Murgull will show you.”

11

Vorgullum was filling the fuel box when Olivia finally returned to his lair.  He looked up warily, as though he suspected she might attack him, but at the same time suggesting that he might not be too difficult to conquer.  She smiled at him, and went to pick at the remains of the supper he had brought.

“It is well past nightfall,” he said, joining her.  “Where have you been?”

“With Murgull,” she answered vaguely, picking up the TIME magazine and flipping through it while she ate.  She wasn’t entirely sure he would approve of the kind of girl-chat she had been engaging in with the tribe’s oldest nuisance.  When she’d taken the edge off her hunger, Olivia put down her magazine, clasped her hands in her lap and gave him her most direct and interested stare.  “What did you do today?”

He seemed taken aback by the question, enough that he had to stop and think about the answer.  “I went out with a hunting party to search for game.  We have not had fresh meat for a day now.  My chief hunter found a herd of elk, and we killed two, butchered them, and brought them back.”

“Big elk?”

He gave her one of his crooked little smiles.  “Elk only come big.  And these were males,” he added.  “Strong bulls, with antlers as long as my leg.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No, no,” he assured her, simultaneously swelling his chest.  “After all, there were four of us, and we each had spears.  Of course,” he added, “one of the others was hurt.  Badly scratched.  From here to here,” he informed, drawing a line from his shoulder across his chest.

“But you were so quick and strong,” Olivia purred, dropping her eyelids and giving him a long, smoky look.  “My mate, the fierce hunter.”  As with any male, the best stroke was always to the ego.  Olivia didn’t even need Murgull’s advice for that one. “My own strong bull.  My wild, passionate elk.  Elk are passionate, right?”

“When they rut.”

“Are they rutting now?”

“Very soon.”

“You’ll have to hunt them again after they start, so you can come back to me with their spirit inside you and be my passionate elk.”

“Now you are teasing me,” he said, but he was smiling.

“A little.  But I’m still impressed.” On impulse, she leaned forward and raised her chin.

He touched a claw to her inviting forehead, then bent and pressed his brow to hers. “I would rather hear your simple words of praise than songs of adoration, but they did please me, even so.  You make me very happy, my mate.”

“I am glad.”  She looked up at him, studying his face as though it was new to her again.  “And I want to be happy, too.”

He leaned back, a guarded expression turning him briefly to stone.  “What would you have me do?”

“Would you relax?” she said, and laughed a little.  “I think I’m past asking to be dropped off at the nearest human camp.”

His expression never changed, but some of the tension went out of the rigid way in which he was holding himself.  “Are you?”

“At this point, my miraculous appearance back home would cause more problems than either one of us could live with.”  The reality of this squeezed her heart once in sorrow.  “Believe me.”

“You do not…wish to return to your home?”

“Oh, I do.  But I can’t.  Even if I did, after all this time…”  This wasn’t going at all the way she intended.  She sighed.  “I think I killed the mood.  Can we just sleep…just for tonight?”

He was considerate enough not to look disappointed.  Vorgullum turned his attention to banking the fire while Olivia undressed and crawled into the pit.  When he came to stretch out beside her, she snuggled into his chest.

“My brave hunter,” she murmured.

She felt him smile against the nape of her neck.

“Not even a scratch.”

He thrummed.

“My fearless warrior.”

“If you wish to sleep, I suggest you do so before I am possessed by the spirit of a rutting elk.  I have seen them mate twelve times without rest.  You are warned.”

She drowsed a little while, feeling his body gradually relax, then reached up and tugged gently on his chin until he opened his eyes.  She said, “I am going to do such things to you tomorrow.”

He swelled at once against her thigh.

“Good night,” she said, and rolled over.

12

Olivia wasn’t certain quite when she dropped off to sleep, but she was awakened in the middle of the night by Vorgullum tossing restlessly beside her.  She lifted herself partway out of the pit and glared at him, as though doing that would force him to be still.

He groaned sleepily, muttered something unintelligible under his breath and started to roll over.  He pinched his wing, gave a weak yelp and rolled back onto his side.  For a moment, he was still.  Then he sucked in a deep breath, released it in a sigh that carried her name, and began to snore.

Olivia started to go back to sleep herself when she heard the fire pop.  Thinking that it might need another log of fuel, she started to crawl out of her sleeping bag, casting an incurious glance over at the hearth.

Cheyenne sat cross-legged before the fire, stirring it with a poker.

Olivia’s heart stopped and then kicked painfully back in—ba-BOOM!  She locked her jaws against a scream, but couldn’t quite prevent a smothered sounded whimper.

Vorgullum stopped snoring, wriggled around, then started snoring again.

Cheyenne looked around casually, saw Olivia, and lifted one finger in a sort of wave.

Olivia, now convinced she was not dreaming, crawled carefully out of the pit and wrapped herself in one of the ripped sheets of bedding she’d piled up the previous evening.  She didn’t dare demand anything of Cheyenne, not even in a whisper.  Instead, she snatched up her flashlight, tugged sharply at Cheyenne’s sleeve and stalked out.

She went to the furthest room, the one Vorgullum used for storage, and huddled in a corner.  Cheyenne came a few moments later, carrying a candle and looking around with an expression of mild interest.

“Hello, Olivia,” she said calmly.  “Nice place you’ve got here.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Olivia hissed.

“I need to talk.”

“About?”

“About my man sneaking off to fuck around on me and you just happening to be there.”

“You’d better not be implying—”

“Like I care.  It doesn’t matter how you saw him, although I’m sure it was an interesting story.  I just want to hear you tell me he was with another of these furballs.”

“He was.”

“A female?”

“Of course!”

“Don’t assume.  You’re positive it was a female he was fucking?”

“I’m positive,” Olivia said, frowning.  “His back was mostly to me, but I had a really good view of, you know…that.”

“Did he cum in her?”

Olivia blanched.  “I didn’t stick around to watch.”

Cheyenne nodded pensively.  “Okay, well, I’ve been thinking about it, and the thing is, my guy is gone a lot.  I mean, a lot.  So if he’s actually meeting up with his girlfriend every time he sneaks out on me, then he is in real trouble.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” Olivia asked.

“I’m going to expose him, I think.  If I can figure out how.”  Cheyenne crossed her arms and tapped one finger against her bicep.  “The problem is, no one is awake at this hour.  I’ve been as far through these caves as I can go without spelunking equipment, and I’ve yet to see any guards posted, even in the middle of the night.”

“Why would they need guards?” Olivia asked crossly.  “We’re at the very top of a mountain, and about three hundred feet deep.  Who would they be guarding against?”

“Exactly.  And this is great as far as my escaping goes, but unfortunately, it’s really bad for exposing the little lovebirds.  I mean, I can make all the accusations I want, but no one’s going to take my word for it.”

Olivia watched while Cheyenne sat herself on a bench and made herself comfortable.  “Do you think I’m going to accuse him for you?” she asked finally.  “Because I am not having any part of getting someone castrated.”

“He is raping me.”  Cheyenne’s eyes were steady and cold and impossible to meet.  “You told me about him and his little fling, so don’t you stand there and tell me that you don’t want to get involved.  You’re sleeping with the fucking King Bat, and you are the only one of us he listens to, so you are goddamn well going to help me now.  You’re going to tell him what you saw—”

“I don’t have any proof!” Olivia whispered furiously.  “And when your guy denies it, mine is going to have to decide which of us to believe, and I am not that confident in my womanly wiles!  Besides, even if he did believe me, all he’d do is castrate him, he wouldn’t set you free as a consolation prize!”

“I know that,” Cheyenne said coldly.  “But if my guy is castrated, I’ll be given to someone else, maybe someone who wouldn’t make it completely fucking impossible for me to escape.”

“Escape?!  Jesus Christ!  You come here in the middle of the night talking about castrating people and escaping and you know how sharp their ears are!  We could all be in chains tomorrow because of this stupid little stunt!”

“Not you.”

“Yes, me, goddamn it!”  Olivia crept back along the tunnels to peer in on Vorgullum.  He was still sleeping, one arm thrown out over her side of the pit, snoring into the crook of his arm.  She watched him as her emotions settled, then returned to the storage room where Cheyenne waited, idly investigating the various tools and devices that cluttered up this chamber.  “If you want me talk to him about how you’re being treated—” she began.

“What good would that do?”

“He might give you a new mate if you asked for one.  Well, he might,” she insisted, when the redhead only gave her a withering stare.  “We’re here to make babies.  I don’t think he cares who we make them with.”

“Or how they get made,” Cheyenne countered.  “And even if he cared, which he won’t, all he’d do is ask my guy if it was true.  He’d deny it, and then he’d beat the living shit out of me.  No thank you.”

“But if you could prove your side of the story—”

“If I could prove anything, I could get the son of a bitch’s balls cut off!  Forget it!”  Cheyenne stood up, raking her hair back and pacing around the room until she’d calmed herself down.  “But you have a point,” she said at last.  “And I have to admit, you’re more useful to me as a good slave than someone who makes accusations, so okay, we’ll play it your way for now.  I’m leaving.”

“Good.  Don’t ever sneak back in here like this again.”

Cheyenne looked at her.  “I’m leaving,” she said again.  “I’m going to go back to that bastard’s cave and if he’s there when I show up, he’ll beat me until I piss blood again, so you think about that while you’re lying there with King Bat’s arm around your waist tonight.”

Olivia’s anger continued to simmer, but the words hit hard, and the shame that came with them made her feel sick and hot.

“I can’t get out of here by myself.”  Cheyenne said, her eyes piercing at her, hard and sharp as knives, unblinking.  “I need your help, damn it.”

Her stomach clenched and churned.

“Do I have to beg you, is that what you have to hear?  Fine, I’m begging.  Help me before he kills me.”

“I…”  She broke, pressing one hand over her eyes in defeat.  “What do you want me to do?”

“Just be there when I need you,” Cheyenne said.  “I have to think about things, plan things.  I’m not going to have a lot of time when it happens, so just be there.  And believe me.”

Olivia could only watch while Cheyenne took her candle and left.  She stood in the empty room for a while, then made her way back to the sleeping room and the pit.  Vorgullum murmured sleepily as she came in close to him, then opened his eyes and blinked at her.

“Go back to sleep,” she whispered.  “It’s too early.”

“I dreamed of voices,” he said thickly.  “Yours and someone else’s.”

“Shh.  There’s no one here but me.”

“I know, but—”  He yawned cavernously, and spooned up against her.  He mumbled something more, then disintegrated into snores again.

Olivia lay awake, his arm lying over her like an accusation.  She didn’t think she’d sleep after that, but she did.  Her dreams were cold and filled with pain.

13

She was wakened a second time by Vorgullum trying without much success to extract himself without jostling her.  She sat up, rubbing her eyes crossly, and he ducked his head in apology.

“I tried not to wake you.”

“I was awake, sort of,” she muttered.  “It was cold in here last night.  Can you try to find some more bedding for us?”

He glanced at the pile of random rags and rough fabric she had removed from the pit the day before, then shrugged.  “Yes, if you like.  If the weather is good, there will be humans in the foothills.”

“Good,” she smiled, dropping back into the pit.  She stretched luxuriously, aware of his appreciative gaze.  “Because I want to try it out with you.  Oh, my handsome mate,” she sighed.  “I wish that you could stay with me all night.  You cannot know how much it hurts me to open my arms and have nothing but your memory to fill them.”

He tightened his belt and looked at her, amused.  “And where was this last night when I had time to tend to you?  Such things I will do to you, indeed.”  He made a final adjustment and tossed his horns at her.  “If you are lonely, there is a gathering of humans in the commons this morning.”  He hesitated, then said, “This mountain is your home.  I forbid my mate no part of it.”

She rose from the pit, knowing just how the firelight would be playing across her naked body, and hugged him.  “You take such good care of me,” she murmured. “I don’t deserve such a fine mate.”

“No, you don’t,” he agreed, and let her slap playfully at his arm before he left her.

She washed up and dressed, donned her climbing claws, and went to the commons.  She recognized Beth, Judith, and the crazy lady with her saucepan, but the other two were strangers.  Beth and another blonde were playing cat’s cradle with a long loop of twine while the other woman watched.  Judith sat next to the crazy lady, watching her reflection in the pot’s copper bottom as she rocked.  All looked up when Olivia came near.

“Hi there!” Beth cried happily.  “We were only expecting four.  Or five, I mean,” she added, glancing at the madwoman.

“I have special permission,” Olivia said.  “He’s tired of baby-sitting me.”

The others laughed.  All in all, a much better crowd than that of the previous day, Olivia thought, and introduced herself.

“Yeah, we know,” said the blonde woman opposite Beth.  “I’m Amy Evans, and this is Beth.  Here we go, Bethie, Moon Gone Dark.  Pull your thumbs.  That’s Judy—”

“We’ve met,” Judith said without looking up.  “Hi, Olivia.”

“And this is Sarah J.”

“Sarah J.?” Olivia echoed.

“I haven’t met her yet, but there’s apparently a Sarah B. around here somewhere,” said Sarah, and stuck out her hand.

Olivia shook it.

“So what shall we talk about?” Amy asked, deftly plucking the string from Beth’s fingers onto her own.  “I’m not really good in social situations.  I’m something of a geek.”

“You bite the heads off chickens?” Sarah J. asked, startled.

“The other kind of geek—Navajo jump, Bethie!  Back into African Sun—the kind with pocket protectors.”

“Computers?” Beth asked, concentrating on the string figure she constructed under Amy’s watchful eye.

“Nothing so glamorous.  Plain old math.  Statistics engineering.  That sort of thing.  For example, twenty-six percent of all households in America are owned by single people.  Forty-three percent of all single people are women.  Fifteen percent of all single women are aged sixty-five or older, but we can flub with that number because the average age of people who live in apartments in our neck of the woods was about thirty-two and there’s an even more significant flexibility where our income bracket is concerned.  High Hills had one hundred and twenty-eight single-occupancy rooms—”

“Where in the heck are you getting those numbers?” Sarah J. asked admiringly.

“Eidetic memory.  Keep up.  Statistically speaking, our intrepid bat-men should only have found eight women worth the pluckin’, and yet I have personally seen eleven of us and I believe there’s more.  Keep in mind that, according to the Big Boys Who Know, an unexplained deviation of statistics of sixteen percent or more proves the work of an unknown agent.”

“Unknown agent?” Sarah J. echoed.

Amy glanced up even as she wove new patterns in the string between Beth’s fingers.  “You religious?”

“Extremely lapsed,” Sarah said, clearly amused.  “Are you saying God brought us to High Hills so we could be abducted by bat-people?”

“I’m saying numbers don’t lie.  Jacob’s Ladder, Bethie.  I’d be curious to know how many of us were new tenants.  I know I’d only been there six weeks.”

“Four months,” Olivia said, sitting down.

“Two and a half,” said Beth, “but that’s about average for me.”

“Six years,” said Sarah J.  “I guess that blows that little theory.”

Amy shrugged.  “Just means you were one of the original intended eight.”

Sarah J.’s smile faded.

The string had time to pass from Beth’s hands to Amy’s and back again before anyone spoke, and when someone finally broke the heavy silence, it was Amy, saying, “I told you I was bad at social stuff.  Someone else talk.  Olivia, tell us about your man.”

“Yeah.”  Sarah J. turned toward her at once.  “You can start with his name!”

The other woman’s naked eagerness made her first hesitate, and then lie.  “He hasn’t told me yet.”

“Mine has,” Beth remarked, plucking at the string.  “If you all promise not to tell Maria, I’ll tell you what it is.”

“Do you think she’ll put it in a candle?” Judith asked, a little listlessly, but at least she was including herself in the conversation.

“I just don’t want to give her ideas, okay?”  When she got nods and promises from all of them, Beth lowered her voice and said, “Wurlgunn,” and immediately blushed.  “It means Leaf Storm, like, leaves falling?  Or the way they fly around and blow into stuff, probably, knowing him.”

And Vorgullum meant something like Watches People.  Watched over them, maybe.  It made her wonder if he’d had another name before he became leader.

“I think it’s neat how their names mean something,” Beth continued.

“What does Nogruth mean?” Sarah J. asked.

Olivia and Amy both blanched in unison.  “Long tooth,” Olivia said.

“Yeah, but it’s a pun,” Amy corrected, looking dubious.  “It’s not his tooth that’s long.”

“That liar,” Sarah J. said.  “I knew it wasn’t his real name.”

A moment of startled silence ended in snickers and sly suggestions for new names for each of their mates.  In addition to her skill with numbers, Amy proved the most talented at this game, as well.  Although Olivia knew the language marginally better, Amy was utterly fearless when it came to stringing words together.

“Heap Big Boulders,” Amy said in gullan, straight-faced.

Beth, already bright red and gasping for air, collapsed again in giggles.  Sarah J. took a moment to work out the translation, then she, too, erupted in peals of bawdy laughter.

“Heap of what?”

Olivia turned and saw Vorgullum in the middle of the common caves, looking at Amy in a wary, puzzled manner.  She climbed to her feet, leaning on the wall and shaking out her leg, which had gone to sleep.

“Heap Big Boulders,” Amy said again, without the subtle inflection that made it a pun.

Vorgullum stood there, looking confused, while Olivia limped over to him, snickering.  He slipped an arm around her waist, fanned a wing out protectively, and whispered, “What was she talking about?”

“Well, she and the others decided to rename all of their mates who wouldn’t tell them their real names,” she began.

“Heap Big…”  He burst out laughing.

She had to stop while he sagged against the doorway, clutching his middle and howling.  Olivia looked over her shoulder and saw the clutch of women huddled together, blushing as a unit, but unable to keep themselves from laughing.  Even Judith had a hand over her mouth.  Vorgullum’s hysterics were contagious; Olivia felt herself first smiling, then giggling along with him.

He slowed to snorts and gasps and wiped his eyes with the flat of his palms.  “That was pretty good,” he wheezed.  “Who was that?”

“That was Amy.”

“Amy,” he echoed, and sniggered.  “She’s clever, too.”

“I thought so,” Olivia agreed as he slipped his arm around her again and continued down the tunnel.  “And maybe, if you are good to me, I’ll tell you the name I picked for you.”

He managed to look scandalized, amused, and cautious all at once.  “I’m your rutting elk, of course.”

She tossed her hair in an impertinent flip.  “That was yesterday.  Today, you may just be my lazy turtle.”

He growled and pounced at her and she took off running down the tunnel to their chambers.  The bulk of his wings slowed him down, which was good because it gave her enough of a head start to climb up the chimney before he caught her.

As soon as he stuck his head up into the entry room she dropped to her stomach on the floor, seized him and introduced him to the kiss.

He froze, his claws contracting and relaxing, digging little furrows in the floor.  She felt him begin to respond in a hesitant, clumsy fashion, and then pulled away.

“Come, my mate,” she coaxed, rising to her knees as he crawled a little further up the chimney.  “We humans know better things to do with a mouth than chew our food.”

He came all the way out of the narrow passage and stood tensely, eyes closed and wings fanned out, as Olivia explored his alien mouth with hers.  She kissed a path down to the hollow of his throat, nibbling here and there for emphasis as she reached down to rub the heel of her hand against the straining leather that contained him.

“Olivia!”

“Quiet, please.  Determining turtles from elk requires intensive study.”  She slipped her hand beneath his loincloth.

“Not here,” he whispered, trying desperately to call her attention to the chimney just behind them.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said sternly, closing him in her fist.

He swiftly slapped a hand over his mouth and muffled a groan.  “Not here, for pity’s sake!” he hissed.  “Someone could hear us!”

“Oh, all right.”  She released him and stepped back.  “If you are going to be such a baby about it, we can finish this later.”

She laughed when she saw the thunderstruck expression on his face.  Then he ripped the loincloth from his body and threw it blindly behind him.  “All right, here,” he said, and advanced on her.

Olivia put up her hand and he froze mid-step.  “Are you going to obey me?” she inquired, managing to sound at once severe and cheerful.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

“Come here.”

He went at once, and she backed up before him until she felt cold stone at her back and the heat of him was before her.

“Now, I am going to touch you,” she whispered.  “And you are going to be very quiet.”

He shivered as she found a good nibbling place at the hollow of his throat.  She lingered there, caressing the thin skin at the base of one horn as she did, and using her free hand to resume the slow, steady strokes of his cock.

“I’m ready,” he whispered.

“You can wait,” she replied.  “First, I think you need a little lesson in human mouths.  Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you to.”

He frowned, but closed them, and she turned him around with his back to the wall and stepped in front of him.

“No peeking.”

“I won’t.”  He sounded very slightly offended.

“If you peek, I stop,” she warned him, kneeling.

“Stop wh—”

She licked him, the very tip of her tongue drawing a thin line right across the middle of his glans.

“...what,” he finished shakily.  One hand rose, groped before him, then swept up and covered his eyes.  “What was that?”

She licked him again, back and forth in tiny sips, until the entire head of him was slick and shiny.  The taste of him was earthy and strong, but not unpleasant.  It made this easier; she had done it only once before, with Bobby and his hands shoving at her head the whole time as he grunted what she was doing right and wrong, mostly wrong.  This was better, maybe only just because she was in control, but it felt good.  She pressed her lips firmly to his glans, letting her tongue steal out to flick at him, and hummed against his cock.

“Great Spirit,” she heard him breathe.  It sounded like a prayer.

Milking him slowly in her fist, Olivia began to lick down the underside of his shaft, attuned to every flinch and leap of his muscles.  Now and then, she drew back to suck at the tip of his cock, and also to look up and see if he were peeking.  He wasn’t.  He now had both hands over his eyes.  But mostly she stayed busy, tonguing and lapping beneath his cock around the steady passes of her thumb, until she reached the hard-swollen sac of his balls.

“Don’t!” he hissed as she tongued him there.

“You’re telling me what to do again.”

“Don’t!”  Louder.  His thighs clenched as she slowly sucked what she could manage into her mouth and out again.  She could feel his cock heavy on her hair, twitching like a living thing.  “Don’t!  Stop!  Stop it now!”

She hummed again, with him hot in her mouth.

His balls clenched on her tongue and suddenly she felt the little patter of semen falling over her back.  Laughter was perhaps not the appropriate response, but it came tumbling out of her anyway.  She leaned back, wiping clumsily behind her as Vorgullum sagged against the wall, still hiding in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he groaned.

“I was warned.  Sorry.  I didn’t realize you really meant it.  You can look now, if you want.”

He shook his head.

She laughed again.  “You don’t want to look at me?”

“I’d rather have you finish.”

“Look at me, Vorgullum.”

Very slowly, he lowered his hands.  She waited until his reluctant eyes met hers, then smiled at him, took his softened cock in her hand, and kissed it.

“You’re killing me,” he said seriously.

Her lips parted.  She pulled him in over her tongue, drew back while softly sucking, and took him in again, gazing up at him all the while.

“Killing me,” he breathed.  It was the last thing he said for a long time.  After that, he only watched, breathing in hoarse, rapid pants without moving, rarely even blinking.  She was able to take less and less as he hardened, but he wasn’t Bobby, trying to drive himself in to the back of her throat and pulling on her hair when she struggled.  He was Vorgullum and this was all new.

At last, with a dull ache in her jaws and another, brighter, throbbing through her womb, Olivia gave the full length of his cock one last, long lick—from hip to tip, all along his sensitive underside—and pointed at a bench.

He looked at it, his eyes somewhat wild, and at her, pained.  “Not here,” he whispered.

She waited.

“They’ll hear us!”

“I don’t care if they watch us,” she replied, and never mind that she very much would care.  She pointed at the bench.

He went.  His first step was a little uneven, but he went.  She sat him down, and then pushed him slowly back until he fit his wings into the indentations and lay prone.  Olivia pulled her skirt up around her hips and straddled his thighs, keeping one hand moving on his cock while she kissed him, teasing at his lips until he finally responded with clumsy kisses of his own.

“See, isn’t this nice?” she murmured into his mouth.

“Not the word I would have chosen,” he grunted, and arched back hard as she bit once more at the sensitive hollow of his throat.  “Don’t!”

She laughed at him.  “Don’t bite or don’t do this?”  She squeezed.

He seized her, yanked her forward by her hips and onto the impale of his cock, groaning hugely as he drove into her, pulling even after their hips met.  Olivia laughed again, sank her flimsy human claws into his chest, and began to ride him. She could hear his strained cries growing steadily louder, and her own beginning to wind through them in high harmony; her hands dug and clawed at him, trying to pull him closer, deeper, and then she came at last, tossing and bucking and driving herself down on him with abandon even as he roared and spent himself inside her.

She hunched over his chest, breathing hard, deeply pleased with herself.  His eyes were shut tight, as if in pain.  She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.  “Rutting elk go twelve times, is that what you said?”

“No one believes me when I talk about you,” he muttered thickly, and shook his head.  “I have to hunt, Olivia.”

“What if I decide not to let you go?” she teased, bracing her hands against his chest.

He looked genuinely unnerved by this possibility.  Olivia laughed and got off him.

Vorgullum struggled into a sitting position and looked around for his loincloth.  She fetched it for him, and he tied it on.  He stood to go, limped towards the chimney, then paused and looked back at her.  There was a distinct glint of uncertainty in his eyes.

“You need to hunt,” she reminded him, smiling.  “Be careful out there.”

His lips twitched.  “My mate, I think I am in more danger in here.”  He dipped his head—his way, perhaps, of bumping brows from across the room—and then left.

Oh, what the hell.  Olivia waited to give him a good head start before climbing down the passage and following him. She kept a careful distance, well back so that he would not realize he was being tailed, carefully marking which twists and turns were taken so she’d be able to find her way back out.  Perhaps in deference to the humans meeting in the Commons, the main passageway had been set with candles; Vorgullum moved in and out of their light, his head bent and deep in thought.

After an eternity, the passage began to narrow, and then to roughen, and finally the sound of voices and coarse laughter came to Olivia’s ears.  Vorgullum disappeared around a turn and presently she heard his name called.  She stopped, found a shadowed place to hide her, and listened.

At first, the talk was all business: tracking herds of deer and goats, the risks of taking more cattle from the foothills, the crop growing in the human fields.  Then Vorgullum must have done something, either yawned or simply let his attention wander too overtly, because someone laughed and said in a cheerful baritone, “You’re going to be useless to us again, aren’t you?  Curse it, I need strong spears on this hunt!”

“There’s nothing wrong with his spear,” another voice said dryly.  “Did you hear them?  Great Spirit, I thought someone was throttling a rua in his lair!”

Rude laughter.

Vorgullum said, “That one I have is Bahgree’s own daughter.  She has lured me into a fishing net and pulled me to the river.  She is drowning me with pleasures.”

“Poor Vorgullum,” someone said mournfully, and all the others, a dozen at least, took up the refrain: “Poor Vorgullum!”

“Ah, you laugh,” Vorgullum said irritably.  “I stand before you half-killed, and you laugh at me!  Go on!  I am like the mountain, I am above your petty words.”  Olivia heard scuffling sounds of a wrestling match and Vorgullum’s words were distorted as though he struggled while he spoke.  “I am ice upon my surface and fire in my heart.  I am hard—”  An explosion of laughter to accompany whatever gesture he was making.  “—like the rock, for ages and ages.”

“So we should all envy you, and snap our teeth.”  Olivia recognized this voice as well, that of Cheyenne’s captor.  “Because your little wingless woman will lie quiet for you.”

“Quiet?  Lie quiet?  Ha!  The things she did to me!” Vorgullum groaned.  “It was more than my mere body, she took my mind away.  I tell you, for a moment, I could see through time!”

Respectful silence.  Olivia could hear every word.

“She has looked on me these last few days with eagerness and longing.  She praises me.  ‘My handsome mate,’ she says.  ‘My fierce, my brave, my noble mate!’  Touch on touch she places on my body, and she climbs my mountain like a wild goat!”

Another wave of manly laughter.

“Now when I come to the pit, she is there before me, holding out her arms with a look of fire and air in her eyes.  She moves all around me, she cries out and freely takes her pleasures from me.  Here!”  The thump of a fist sounded once.  “Here, my chest still burns where her hand pushed me down—pushed me, I say—so that she could have her way.”

Olivia couldn’t help but smile.  His insistent, half-hummed words were weaving a magic of pure longing.  She could feel the collective lust in that room rising like smoke into the air.  Old Murgull was a genius.

“She’s in season,” someone said quietly.

“She is not!” Vorgullum insisted.

“No,” said another, the madwoman’s caretaker.  “She’s overwhelmed by his mighty mountain.”

“Go back to your own human mates,” Vorgullum urged.  “Give them praise.  Give them gentle hands.  Look into their eyes and see if they will abandon themselves as my Olivia has done.”

“Show me the spark,” Cheyenne’s captor said grimly, “and I will do as you say.  Give me proof that any of this is worth the effort, and I will tumble mine into my pit and keep her there for days, but my mate is no Olivia.”

Mutters of agreement answered that.

“I’m sorry, Vorgullum,” someone else said.  “But he’s right.  If I used gentle ways on my human, she’d have my stones in one hand and my eyes in the other.  Until I see a human belly made hard with gullan child, I won’t even try.”

“I’ll try,” said another stranger, but in a dubious tone.  “Hell, it’s been one month, she’s ripped out half my damn hide, and I have no shame left at all.  What exactly are you doing in the pit?”

“You have to look at her,” Vorgullum replied at once.

“Look at her?  I can’t take my eyes off her!  She’s trying to kill me!”

“It’s a different kind of looking, I think,” said a second voice.

“No, no,” said that easy-going, rolling baritone.  “By all means, let’s stand here and discuss it all night.  I’m sure the herds will wait for us.  Go on, Vorgullum, you were saying?”

More laughter and the rattling of weapons as spears were taken up once more.  Olivia slipped away down the tunnel as the hunting party moved out, smiling to herself.  It seemed that she had bitten Vorgullum, to use his own words, and now he was biting others.  That could only work out well for her.

14

Olivia went back to the commons first and peered inside.  The other women were still there, all but Judith, and most of them were finishing up the mid-day meal.

“You’re back!” Sarah J. said, surprised.

Olivia came all the way into the cave.  “I just couldn’t stay away from your happy faces.  Where did Judith go?”

“She wasn’t feeling well, so she went home.  Where were you?”

“Pining for want of your pleasant company.”

Amy batted her eyelashes.  “We took a vote,” she said.  “Your new name is Noglagumms.  Finger-Lickin’ Good.  What are you naming your fella?”

Olivia sat down with the others, weighing risks, then shrugged and said, “His name is Vorgullum.”

“Vor—” Amy began, grinning, and then her expression melted into one of amazement.  “Is that his real name?” she asked, astounded.

Olivia nodded.

“How did you do it?” Amy asked.

“I spun him a web of sexual ecstasy and forced him to tell me.”

“No, seriously,” Amy persisted, leaning forward.

“He just did it one night,” Olivia said with a shrug.  “I kept asking and I guess he finally decided he could.”

Beth nodded.  “Wurlgunn told me the same way.  It’ll happen.  It’s just, you know, this whole Mojo Woman business.”

“Vorgullum,” Amy murmured.  “I’ve heard that name before.  Great Scott!  He’s the leader of the tribe!  You’re the Captain’s woman, Olivia!”

“Yeah, I know.  Try not to hold it against me.”

“Hey, luck of the draw,” Sarah J. said with a shrug. “It could have been any one of us.  Of course, with my luck, my man’ll be the gullan equivalent of a ditch digger.”

“Popularity isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, believe me.”

“I heard about that,” Sarah J. remarked.  “Anita told me all about Ms. Viktabitch’s little snit.  She’s not exactly pleased to be thought of as ‘your’ human, but she admits it’s not your fault they do.”

Olivia scowled.  “Yes, well, it would have been nice if she’d said something, instead of sitting there and letting that bitch bite my ass.”

“You shouldn’t let her get to you,” Amy commented, leaving her bench to come sit beside Olivia.

“Well, for crying out loud, it’s not like I went to bed that night saying, ‘Gee, I hope I get swooped off my feet tonight by a big, hairy bat-man and carried off into the mountains.’  What does she expect me to do, just pretend none of it is happening?  I’m twenty-four, for God’s sake!  That’s a hell of a long time to pretend!”

“You’ve got a point,” Amy replied calmly.  “I’m twenty-three, but I have to admit, I’m still entertaining pleasant thoughts of rescue and/or escape.  Never gonna happen, of course, but it helps to pass the time when all I have for company is a deck of cards with four missing diamonds.”

“Don’t forget the sex,” Sarah J. said archly.

“Who could forget that?” Amy asked as Beth blushed and giggled.  “When do they even give you the chance?”

“Too true,” said Sarah J.  “Every night, my aching back.  And frankly, although my man isn’t too shabby as far as equipment goes, I don’t think he’s read all the way through the operator’s manual.  And God knows I must make him nervous because he still can’t get through it without apologizing.  That kinda kills the mood, you know?”

“It do, don’t it?” Amy mused.  “Take my guy, for example.  For the first three days, all he did was go on about how he didn’t want me, wasn’t interested in me, didn’t find me the slightest bit attractive, but he had to do it.  Over and over, so earnestly.  It was really hard on my self-esteem.  Finally, I said, ‘Look, pal, I’m no prize, but I’m all you’ve got, and if I were you, I’d be trying to make me feel as romantic as possible.’”

“What did he say to that?” asked Sarah J., smiling.

“He just about fell out of the pit trying to tell me how devastatingly attractive I was all of a sudden.  Oh, he was praising everything.  My eyes, my teeth, my toes, my friggin’ ears!  Honest to God, he’s sitting there waxing rhapsodic about how the freckles on my nose are the most amazing freckles, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I burst out laughing, and he sat there for a few minutes and then went, ‘Heh heh,’ and that just got me going harder.”  Amy shook her head.  “So I kind of tossed my hair and said, ‘Come on up here, cowboy, and ride this hoss.’  I don’t think he quite got the reference, but he sure got the message.”

“Mine doesn’t speak not one word of English,” Sarah J. announced.  “It’s a damn good thing I picked up gullanese so quickly, otherwise neither of us would know what the hell the other one was going on about.  Do you know how long I had to play charades before he realized I had to find the bathroom?  And then what do I get?”

“A bucket,” said the other two in perfect unison, prompting Olivia to start and stare around at them.

“A bucket.  To think that I worked two jobs through four years of college just to piss in a bucket.  Oy vey.  But I can’t blame him for that,” she added.  “He has to use the bucket, too.”

Beth raised her hand like a child at school.  “Speaking of which?”

Both Amy and Sarah J. pointed at a particular side-passage.

“You better take a candle,” Amy said as Beth stood up.  “It’s not a long walk, but the ground drops away.  God give me strength to get used to public unisex bathrooms,” she said in an aside to Olivia.  “But at least the one down here has running water.  Of course, it’s running all over the floor, but it is running.”

Olivia murmured something and did not mention she had one just like it in the privacy of Vorgullum’s lair.

“I can’t complain about the man much at all,” Sarah said after a while, gazing thoughtfully at the wall.  “The fur takes some getting used to, but at least it’s not nasty, shaggy, smelly yak-fur.  And really, he went so far out of his way that first night to make me comfortable.  He gave me a blanket.  He gave me a tent.  He showed me a place in the corner that could be all mine, and gave me a candle.  He arranged all the things that I brought with me in a place where I could see them.”  She paused there, because Beth was coming back, and once the other woman had settled herself back on the bench, she went on, “Then he got undressed, pointed at himself…you know, down there…then pointed at me…same place.  He looked so grim, like he was getting ready to muck out the chicken coop.”

Beth snickered.

“What do you say to an enormous…thing… pointing you in the eye?” Sarah J. demanded.  “It was the first time I’d even seen one that wasn’t circumcised!  Now, keep in mind, this is still the first night, and I was still a little woozy from whatever it was they slipped in our water.  So, he climbs in the pit and makes himself comfortable, then reaches for me, all business-like, and I don’t know what happened next because I fell asleep.”

All of them erupted into laughter.

Sarah J. shook her head, the apologetic effect ruined slightly by her smug smile.  “Talk about a major faux pas.  He couldn’t even look me in the eye the next day.  He didn’t touch me again for damn near a week, and when he did, it was so half-hearted, I couldn’t help laughing at him.  You want to talk about killing the mood?”  She seemed to think about this to herself, caught between wonderment and amusement.  “Can you imagine how devastating that has got to be to a man’s ego?  To have the woman you’re making love to fall asleep?”

“Well, dammit, you were tired!” Amy said grandly.

“Exactly, but he wasn’t convinced.  Like I say, he had no English, I had no gullanese.  We were a hell of a match.”

“It couldn’t have been all bad.  At least the food’s kosher.”

“This is true,” Sarah mused.  “How proud my parents would be.”

Beth leaned back on her hands and wriggled her petite chest.  “Speaking about the first time,” she announced dramatically, and everyone gave her polite and undivided attention.

“I was wasted for forever after they first got me.  Honestly, I don’t even know how long.  So it was a long time before he even tried anything.  I mean, he slept in the same pit with me and stuff, but it wasn’t the same.  About the time I decided I wasn’t hallucinating this whole thing was the same night he decided I was all better and it was time to get busy.  So I look up one night after dinner and he’s getting naked.  I guess I must have freaked out a little, because he started making all these nice, soothing hand gestures and kind of humming at me, and I started to relax and he started to come toward me…” Beth paused theatrically, then grinned.  “And then he did a total belly-flop right on top of me.  Knocked the breath right out of me.”

“Bonzai!” laughed Amy.

“That’s sure what I was thinking, but no, he just tripped.” She shook her head while the others laughed.  “He’s so clumsy, I just can’t believe it.  He’s always tripping over things and whacking into benches, and dropping back into the pit and smacking his head on the edge of it.  I spend half my time checking him to see if he’s bleeding.”

“Maybe he needs glasses,” Amy suggested.

“I don’t know what the trouble is,” Beth said.  “He went out hunting elk the other night and one of them gored him all the way across his chest!  It isn’t very deep, but it goes from his right shoulder to his left breast.  He just gives me his ‘Aw, shucks,’ expression, but when I think of him flying around with spears, I get goosebumps.”

“Amazing that they would take him on a hunt, considering the reputation that he’s got to have,” Amy remarked.

“I know, I know.”  Beth sighed.  “But he takes it so personally when they suggest that he stay behind.  Hunting is this great sign of manhood or something.  And he knows that he’s clumsy, that’s the worst of it.  He always feels like he has to prove something.  He has to steal more food, and bag the biggest game, and get the most sex, and just be better than everyone else.”

“Is he?” Amy asked innocently.

“Is he what?”

“Better than everyone else.”  Amy wiggled her eyebrows up and down.

“I don’t know,” Beth returned.  “I haven’t tried everyone else.  But the day’s young.”

“What goes on here?” a male’s voice called to them.

“We’re trading tribal secrets,” Amy called back in their language.  “Come and join us.”

“I shouldn’t stay.”  The male was not so big as Vorgullum, and was graying along his back and at the base of his wings, but his horns were much more impressive.  He also favored his right leg, which had a strangely unhealthy sheen to the fur there.  In one hand, he carried a much-battered metal pail packed with apples and loaves of bread, which he held out as if to show him his pure motives for peeking in on them.  “I only wanted to see that you had food.”

“Someone took care of that already,” Amy replied.  “But sit a little, please.  I want to show you off.”

He eyed the other women, but eased onto the bench next to Amy and sat, holding the lunch-bucket and looking awkward.

“This is my mate,” Amy announced.  “Look on him and tremble.”  A subtle nuance in the last word indicated a shudder of arousal rather than a tremor of fear.  The gulla glanced at her, amused.  “See the marks of valor he wears, bravely gotten from pit and prey.  Mostly pit.”

He covered his eyes briefly, but fanned his wings out expansively, suggesting that he was not entirely displeased with the description.  “Has my Amy been telling you stories all this time?” he asked, pained.

“Yes,” Olivia replied, straight-faced.  “But we do not believe her.  It would take ten men to lift the pick she claims you mine with.”

He looked up sharply, suspicious.  Olivia had not used the tones that made plain a pun, but by the little snorts that escaped the small circle of straight-faced women, he had to be fairly sure that it had been one.

“Well, I told you he was big,” Amy commented, keeping up the joke.  “And after all, the tunnel is so deep, you would need a big pick to mine it.”

Beth nearly lost it.  She was turning red by slow degrees, tears of suppressed laughter welling up in her eyes.  She tried to hide behind Sarah J., whose shoulders were twitching in an alarming manner.

“I move my share of rock,” the male agreed warily.  “Yesterday, there were two big boulders—”

That was as far as he got before Beth and Sarah J. broke out in fits together.  He studied them, confused.  “What is the matter with them?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” Amy said seriously, regarding the laughing pile of women as though she’d never seen them before.  “They’ve been doing that all morning.”

“Tell us more about the boulders,” Olivia suggested, and Amy made a snerking sound, despite her expression of polite interest.  “Were they big boulders?” she inquired.

Amy began to tremble minutely.

“They were huge boulders,” replied the male, setting down the food so that he could gesture with open arms to indicate the exact size.

Amy underwent the hilarity equivalent of spontaneous combustion, rolling off the bench in howls to join the others on the floor.  If he had been confused before, he was baffled now.

“I sure would like to have seen those boulders,” Olivia said wistfully.  The other four went into renewed hysterics.

“I could show them to you,” answered the male, looking down sharply at the women, who set up simultaneous howls.  “They’re not as big as before, but—Great Spirit, woman, what has gotten into you?” he demanded of Amy, who had begun to beat on the floor with her fist.

“Never mind her,” Olivia said, flapping one hand in Amy’s direction.  “Show me your boulders.”

Amy rolled onto her back, grabbing herself around the middle and shrieking with laughter.

The male glanced down at her, half-worried, half-confused, then held out his arm.  “You are Olivia, yes?” he began.  “I’ve heard of you.  Good things.”

“Oh my God, I’m gonna die,” gasped Amy in English.

“I’m flattered,” Olivia replied, ignoring Amy.  “I’ve heard good things about you, too.”

He led her out of the commons and into the maze of tunnels, letting Olivia’s flashlight go before them, although he didn’t seem to need it.  “Your mate talks of you sometimes.”

“Does he?” Olivia murmured, smiling.  “And what does he say?”

The male cut her an embarrassed glance.  “Oh, this and that thing.  How clever you are in speech.  How friendly and…active.  He hopes to see you catch his spark very soon.”

“He might get his wish.”

“If the Great Spirit wills it.  My Amy, she wishes for a daughter.  I would take any child, any child at all, but Amy says, ‘A daughter I can understand.  I never knew much about boys, and I never liked them much, either.’”  He limped along in silence, and then said, “I am old to be made a father for the first time.  I think I am older now than my own father was when he saw the last of my brothers born, and I was the eldest of six.”

“Maturity is very attractive to humans,” Olivia said, and he gave her an odd look.

“That is exactly what my Amy says.”  He brought her down a set of carved steps and into a wide tunnel, hung with lanterns.  All around were sounds of picks striking stone, voices raised to one another, and rocks dropping heavily onto rock.  Some stopped their work to look at her, but most only rested their eyes and let their bodies continue to toil.

“What are you mining?” Olivia asked curiously, watching the workers watch her.

“Oh, nothing.  Not here, anyway.  We take out the metal when we find it, of course, but between us, the metal-maker has enough raw ore in his stores to last ten thousand years.  No, this tunnel has always been here.  We’re just making it bigger…smoothing it out…”  He glanced around and lowered his voice to something scarcely above a breath.  “Make-work, to say the truth.  To make old fools like me feel useful.  Not all of us can hunt every night the way we used to.”  His eyes shifted to a much younger male with withered, stunted wings.  “Not all of us can fly.”

“I see.”

“A man is a man in his heart first, not his hunting trophies.  Your mate knows this.  He is a good leader.  Here.”  Amy’s mate brought Olivia into a side-passage and displayed the remains of what had truly been enormous boulders.

“There is a good-sized cave past them,” he said, motioning to the darkness beyond.  “And water, which might be good.  And a strong draft, which means good air and maybe light.  We need to bring logs and shore up this tunnel before we clear the opening, but you can see how huge they were.”

“They’re still huge,” she said honestly.  She had to stand on tiptoes to shine her flashlight around the chamber beyond.  “Did you actually break them up by yourself?”

He flexed his whole body, an impressive sight despite his obvious age.  “There are years and years left to this old gulla,” he said, in the oddly purring voice Olivia was beginning to associate with flirting.  “My Amy tries my strength a thousand times more than any cavern full of boulders.”  Suddenly, he seemed to remember that he was speaking to a female, and a human at that, and backed up, looking flustered.  “What I mean to say is—”

“You don’t need to explain,” she said, smiling.  “Human females can be very… aggressive.”

He nodded, looking at her with a new gravity.  “Tell me, Olivia, what can I do to make my Amy happier here?  She doesn’t complain, but I know she still cries sometimes.  Is there anything I can bring her?  I know what she has lost, but there must be something I can do, something to make all of this…at least a little easier.”

“All I can tell you is that my own biggest enemy was boredom.  The human-meets are nice while they last, but the rest of the time, we’re all alone.  If you can borrow a book from one of the others, I am sure she’d appreciate it.  Give her something to do, a game or hobby, or even work, anything at all.”  A thought struck her.  “Bring her a handful of different colored stones from the river.  Bring a pouchful.”

He looked doubtful, but nodded.

“Um, what goes on here?” someone asked curiously.  “The humans are not supposed to leave the commons.”

Amy’s mate flinched a little, fanning out his wings as through trying to shield her from sight, but of course, the tunnel was now lined with gullan, and even those who still pretended to be working were looking their way, not at her so much as at him.  Amy’s mate scowled, then raised his head (and his horns) and folded up his wings in two short snaps.  His thunderous expression dared anyone to challenge him, and when no one did, he took Olivia by the arm and turned around.

She didn’t turn with him.  A gentle hand on his released her, and she took a few steps towards the other gulla, who seemed to be having trouble deciding where to look.  The sound of picks and scraping stone had now entirely ceased.  She didn’t look to see how many people were watching; she supposed they all were.

“I know who I am,” she said quietly.  “I know where I am and who I am with.  And I know who I am going home to.  I have his approval.  Do I really need yours?”

Amy’s mate folded his arms and found a stretch of wall to lean on, watching.  The other gulla shifted on his feet, muttering and rubbing self-consciously at the base of his horns.  Beyond that, no one moved or spoke.

“There was a time when we needed to be watched,” Olivia admitted, and her thoughts could not help but drift toward Cheyenne and Maria.  “But that time has to end if we are going to be tribe.  Do you agree?”

He bent his head in a ready nod, keeping his eyes averted.

Olivia turned around.  “I think I will go,” she told Amy’s mate.  “But you don’t have to come with me if you’re busy.  I’m sure I can find the way.”

“As you will,” he said mildly, and showed her the palm of his hand in what was either a salute or half a wave.

The other gullan working in the tunnel squeezed themselves flat to the wall as she passed, and she heard the whispers start up immediately.  “Who was that?” someone asked, and the last thing she heard as she climbed out of the tunnel was Amy’s mate proudly answering, “That was our leader’s mate.”

CHAPTER SIX

TRIBE

1

Several days passed in the dark fathoms of Hollow Mountain, perhaps even weeks, and they were, for the most part, good days.  She supposed she was rationalizing if she could come to think of them that way and believe it, but it didn’t feel like rationalizing.  It was a very different life from the one she’d led before, that life in which she’d had family and a job and running water and TV, but that didn’t make it a bad life, really.  The food was tough and came either dried and leathery or stewed and watery altogether too often, but it was nourishing food and she never went hungry.  Moving about in the caves meant a lot of walking and a lot of climbing, but she was proud of her growing strength.  She divided her days between the ever-more frequent human-meets and Murgull’s often terrible company, and sometimes, having the freedom to go anywhere she pleased, chose to stay in her lair and wait for Vorgullum to come home to her.  She tried to be a good mate to him when he was there, not just a sexual partner but a friend, and she knew that he was pleased by her efforts.

The days passed.  In the dark.  Without the sun.  But they were good days.

And then came the night Olivia was shaken violently from sleep.  She woke in immediate panic; Vorgullum, like most if not all of his kind, believed that the dreaming world was as real as the waking one, and those pulled from it before their time risked losing their soul in the unknowable void between the two.  But it was not Vorgullum’s face she saw looming at her over the top of a flickering candle.  It was Murgull.

She was, thought Olivia as she draped herself in a blanket, extremely upset.  One might even say furious.

“What is it?” Vorgullum asked, dazed, pulling a flap of hide around his waist.

“Bolga is with child,” Murgull spat.

“What!”  Vorgullum dropped the hide and sprang out of the pit, now completely oblivious to his nudity.  “How?”

Murgull reached up and slapped him.  “How, you festering little wart!  Some rutting male has been pounding at her hairy shanks, that’s how!”

Vorgullum wrapped his loincloth around his hips, fumbling with the belt pouch.  He already looked angry, more so by the moment.  “Who?” he said tightly.  “Who put that life inside her?  Who is breeding deformity and death inside my mountain?”  His voice rose steadily, thick with fury.  “Who is it that has defied me and sired a new monstrosity among my people?”

“Bolga cannot say.”  Murgull looked fierce and frustrated at once.  “I don’t think she knows.  She says she was hot and couldn’t sleep, so she went out.  She says she met a man who took her into a ‘little place’ and ‘sat on her’.  Bah!”

“Where was Horumn?” Vorgullum roared, really roared.  Olivia stared at him and saw a monster for the first time since the night she had been taken.  His horns were low, his hands were claws, and his eyes in the low firelight were blazing red.  “Where was my Eldest if not in her place to prevent this?”

“Where were you, then?” Murgull fired back.  “Has she not as much right to sleep as our great leader?  There are more than Bolga to hold watch over during the dark hours when the males in your charge, ha, your charge are prowling for an open hole!”

“And she never saw his face.”  Vorgullum raked one hand back between his horns; the slick fur there stood up in spikes, like the hackles of an angry wolf.  “She has let him put death inside her and still she will protect him!”

“Bolga has clay for brains,” Murgull said, rubbing at her neck.  “If she says she did not look, she did not look.  She is too stupid to lie.”

“And too stupid to breed!  What new horror will she bring upon our heads?”  He started to stalk away, and then whirled back and aimed a claw at her, inches from her glowering good eye.  “Bring Horumn here at once,” he snarled.

“And what will you do when you have cut away the Eldest from all our lives?” Murgull demanded.  “Chain the females to the ground and place a guard around them?  And when they all go into season together, what guard do you trust not to rut with all of them, and bring thirty new brothers and sisters dead and bloated into the world?”

Vorgullum towered over her, breathing hard.

After a moment, in a much-restrained voice, Murgull said, “What is to be done?”

“Nothing,” he spat.  “There is nothing more I can do, damn you!”

“About the child,” Murgull prodded.

“Nothing,” he said, and his shoulders slumped.  “Do nothing.  It has as much right to draw breath as its mindless mother.”

“And shall I bring Horumn to you now?”

Vorgullum bared his teeth, but only for a moment.  “Let the Eldest sleep,” he said.  “Has she not as much right as I?”  He turned away and moved to the hearth, showing his back to both of them.  “Damn us both and the good watch we hold over our charges.”

“As you will,” Murgull nodded, and heaved herself to her feet.  She glanced towards Olivia.  “We will say more of this another time,” she said.  “When Olivia is not so young.  When Murgull is not so old.”  She turned and shambled out.

Vorgullum looked over his wing at Olivia.  She had never seen him look so defeated, so hopeless.  She opened her arms, and he dropped to his knees in the pit to let her embrace him, his arms limp at his sides.  “It is all ending for us,” he said, his voice muffled against her shoulder.  “I am holding a broken mountain together with my hands, Olivia.”

“It will be all right,” she whispered.

“I would give anything,” he moaned.  “My life, my blood, my soul if only health would come back to my people!”

She held him, and he began to weep.

“A child,” he said, sobbing.  “A child.”

Neither of them slept more that night.

2

Vorgullum took Olivia to the common cave early in the morning, then left to make a summons.  Soon, it seemed all the tribe was gathered.  They filled the commons, but not to over-crowding, and as much as Olivia had understood intellectually what the situation was here, seeing them before her was still a shock.  She had been in movie theaters with more people than comprised this entire community and half of them, easily half of them, were very old.  For the first time, she fully understood that this was it, this was the final generation before extinction, and time was already so short.

Vorgullum climbed up onto the flat rock in the center of the commons and motioned for Murgull, who came forward with a appallingly ugly female with vacuous eyes.  It was a face Olivia had seen before, twisted with idiot pleasure beneath a gulla’s open, muffling hand.

“Bolga is pregnant,” he said without preamble.

Across the cavern, wings unfolded and flattened again, reflected light shimmered over shifting bodies, and gullan voices murmured.  There was no shock, only a sense of dark concern.

“Who has done this to her?” Vorgullum asked, his voice hard but reasonable.

No one moved or spoke.  Olivia looked back through the crowd and saw Cheyenne with her captor’s hand tight on her shoulder.  Cheyenne glanced over, her color high and excited as much as furious.  She gave her chin an almost imperceptible jerk backwards at the gulla who held her, her eyes cutting like razors where they met with Olivia’s.  Tell them it was him, those eyes said.  They’d never believe me, but they’ll believe you.

And they might.  And certainly Olivia could do it with a clear conscience, knowing that it had been Bolga she’d seen that night and it had been Cheyenne’s captor riding her, but…

But Cheyenne didn’t know that.  All she knew was that this was the perfect opportunity to see her abuser dead.

It was still the truth, wasn’t it?  Or was it?  That silvered crest along his back seemed so unmistakable and even now, she couldn’t see another one in this crowd, but the doubt remained.  If only she’d seen his face!

“Once more,” Vorgullum said, his rage barely in check.  “Who was it put the spark in Bolga’s belly?  Tell me now and you shall have pardon.”

Bolga herself looked blankly out over the crowd, clearly puzzled by all the attention.  Clay for brains, Murgull had said, and for once, it didn’t appear to have been an empty insult.

Vorgullum suddenly roared into the silence, “Who, damn you?  Who are you that you would rather she die alone birthing your get than admit your crime!  Look at her!  Look at the child you have seeded with death!  Do you think she has any idea what is growing in her womb?”

Bolga blinked owlishly.

Silence, silence from the crowd.  Wings were fanned, glances roved across the sea of male faces.  Anger and outrage rose from them like mist from dark waters, but no one came forward.

Cheyenne’s eyes stabbed and stabbed at her.

Olivia could actually hear the words she was going to say, not here, not in front of everyone, but later, when it was just her and Vorgullum.  He would listen, he would believe her.

And then Cheyenne’s captor seemed to notice that the human under his hand wasn’t watching the performance on the raised rock.  He looked down at her, and then he followed the path of her furious gaze.

He looked at Olivia.

He looked at Cheyenne.

He looked at Bolga.

And then his black eyes were back, piercing her with his narrow, suspicious stare.

“If I learn you who are,” Vorgullum said in a low, vehement voice, “I will pour out your blood into the water.  I will burn your bones and scatter the ashes.  You will end in this world.  You will never wake into another.”

He waved his arm curtly and Murgull took Bolga and led her away.  The tribe began to break up, the gullan women slinking off while the men drew off into groups and spoke in low, angry tones.  The humans pulled together, and Olivia started to join them when a clawed hand closed on her shoulder.

Cheyenne’s captor had her, propelling her swiftly ahead of him out of the crowd until he could push her hard up against the cavern wall and put his face very close to hers. “What is it you think you know?” he demanded.

“Let go of me.”

He did, but slapped his hand flat against the rock beside her, blocking her escape.  “Tell me.”

“There is nothing to tell.”

He leaned back slowly, holding her eyes even as space grew between them, then finally let his arm drop to his side.  “You can tell me,” he said, now speaking softly, scarcely above a whisper.

Olivia could only shake her head, her mouth too dry for more denial.

He looked at her for a long time, and then finally broke the iron grip of his stare to glance back over his shoulder at the muttering crowds of gullan.  “Your mate knows me,” he said.  “He trusts me.  He will believe anything I say to him.”  He looked at her again.  “So if you ever decide you have something to say…say it to me.”

Olivia was stone, ice and stone.

Cheyenne’s captor stepped back, folded his wings up tight, and walked away.  He found Cheyenne in the grip of another gulla, took her in hand, and left with her.  Neither of them looked back.

Breath came back first, and then warmth, and finally she was able to move.  Olivia stepped shakily away from the wall and immediately found herself grabbed by another clawed hand.  She spun around with a shriek tapping right at the backs of her teeth, only to see Horumn glaring back at her.

“Murgull wants to speak with you,” the old gulla grumbled.  “I resent having to bring you messages.”

Olivia sighed.

“She will wait for you in the women’s commons.”  Horumn turned around.

“I don’t know where that is.”

“Useless!  Naked body and naked brains!”  Horumn stomped off, loudly and bitterly complaining.  Olivia followed.

The women’s commons turned out to be that same mirror-lit cavern just behind the barred door, the same room where Olivia had been shown the dead whelp in its Coleman coffin.  Now there were fires lit in the wide hearth, pots of something simmering over low coals, bread baking in the ashes, and a dozen unknowable chores left half-done around the many work stations, but there were no gullan here, only Murgull slumped heavily on a bench, watching Bolga crouch on the floor nearby, playing with some smooth stones.  Neither looked up when Horumn entered with Olivia in tow, but Murgull flapped a hand at them.

“Here is the human,” Horumn announced.  “Tell her your secrets since I am too old and ugly!”

“Oh, go soak your foot,” snapped Murgull.

Horumn bared her yellow teeth at all of them, and then limped off down another tunnel and was gone.

Murgull motioned for Olivia to draw near, and she sat on the floor close to the old gulla’s knee.  Murgull stroked her hair once or twice, and then simply rested her hand on Olivia’s head.  They watched Bolga, chanting to herself in nonsense sing-song as she stacked and arranged her stones.

“It is a heavy day,” Murgull said at last.  “Like smoke is heavy.  Hate and fear and anger, squeezing on old Murgull’s heart.  Old bodies like mine need no encouragement to die.  It is a heavy day, hmm, and there will be more, heavier every day until the dying starts.”

“What will happen now?”

“Bolga will stay with Horumn.  If the baby can be brought safely into this world, so be it.  More likely it will flow out of her screaming body in blood and pain long before its time.  If the baby comes in its proper season, it may draw a breath.  More likely it will be dead.  If it breathes, it may even survive to breed another terrible life.  More likely it will die in days.  So.  If it lives, Great Mother show mercy, this poor tribe will surely celebrate its every breath, for it will be the first in far too many years.”

“And Bolga?”

Murgull looked over at the mindless mother-to-be and grunted.  “Most likely she will die in birthing.  Her body is weak.  Her mind is weaker.  Even if she lives, she will not understand what is happening.  She does not even understand that she is pregnant.  Murgull says to her, ‘You have a child inside you.’  Bolga thinks she’s swallowed it.  Murgull says, ‘Why did you couple with that male?’  Bolga says, ‘It felt good.’”  Murgull shook her head.  “Felt good,” she muttered.  “Hot bath feels good.  Long sleep feels good.  To that idiot, playing with rocks feels good.  It would be a simple thing, little sister, to put out the spark she carries and make certain there will never be another, but Horumn says no.  Ha.  Horumn says what your mate says, that every life is precious, even terrible life, monstrous life.  Old Murgull wants to grab her and shake her until her last tooth falls from her fool head.”

Olivia said nothing, but she slipped her arm around Murgull’s thick leg, just to hug something.

“This is not life, little sister,” Murgull said, and turned her head to spit.  “This is only the shadow of a life that is long dead.  We have become spirits in the living world.  We are haunting our own mountain.”

Bolga gave Olivia a few darting, nervous glances, then edged towards her and shyly offered a stone.  Olivia took it, handled it while Bolga anxiously watched, and then gave it back.  Bolga retreated to the fireplace, crooning to herself, and began to paint ashes on the hearth.

Murgull spat again.  “See her there, no better than a child herself.  What monster must live in a man to make him poke that star-filled fool?”

Tears stung, and Olivia had no strength to fight them back anymore.  She buried her face in the coarse hair of Murgull’s knee and just let it happen.

Murgull grunted above her, her gnarled hand stroking her hair.  “Lost my eye ages and ages past, but I see more with one than most people do with two.  You know, don’t you?  The male who bred poor Bolga.”

“I’m in awful trouble, Murgull,” Olivia wept.  “He knows I saw him.  I’m afraid he’ll kill me.”

“He might,” Murgull said bluntly.  “Your mate meant what he said.  He might have spared the male castration if he had come forward, but by allowing Bolga to stand alone, he showed he had no care for her, no care for the thing he sired.  Such a man is less than cattle.  Such a man is not tribe.  Now if he is found, he will die.”

“Vorgullum would never do that,” Olivia whispered.

“So sure, are you?  These are desperate days, little sister, desperate men, and a leader must be hard.”

“What am I going to do?” Olivia asked, raising her face to meet Murgull’s grotesque gaze.

“Do nothing.  Say nothing.  Olivia saw nothing.”  Murgull hushed her before Olivia could protest, her good eye narrowing to a cold slit even as the bad one whitely bulged. “But tell me, little sister.  Tell old Murgull.”

And oddly, she did.

Murgull listened and recoiled in surprise.  “That one?  Are you sure?”

“I saw him,” Olivia insisted.

“But he has a mate, a human mate.  With striped hair like a skunk.  Why would he take such a foolish risk when he could polish his tool at home?”

“He hates her.”

Murgull snorted.  “She hates him.  I see that one, that one with spears for eyes and fire in her tongue, oh yes.”

“So they hate each other.”  Olivia wiped at her eyes.  “He hits her.”

The old gulla actually gaped.  “That one?  He would never!”

“But he does!  He hits her to make himself hard, and he hurts her as much as he can when he couples with her.”

The shock on Murgull’s twisted face began to melt into doubt.  Seeing it broke something inside her, as sharp and brittle as glass.  Olivia struggled up, fresh tears scouring at her eyes.  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me!”

“Sit down,” Murgull said, rubbing thoughtfully at her neck folds.

Olivia hesitated, then slowly lowered herself onto the very edge of the bench.

Time passed.  Whatever was cooking on the fire began to smell very, very good.  Bolga got tired of playing in the ashes and wandered away through one of the tunnels.  Now and then, a gullan face peered in at them and retreated again, but Murgull remained deep in thought.

Finally, she raised her head and looked at Olivia.  “If red skunk-human said this to me, I would not believe her.  No, if she had bruises on her naked body and blood in her mouth, I would believe she put them there herself before I believed it of him.  But you, little sister…you, I must believe.  Still, old Murgull thinks, if he used pain to put iron in his tool, we would have heard this from Bolga.  This, even that star-filled fool would remember.”

“Maybe he didn’t have to because she was in season.  Or because she didn’t fight him.  Or maybe it was enough for him just to know what he was doing to someone with clay for brains.”

“That one,” Murgull muttered.

“How am I supposed to know why he hits Cheyenne but not Bolga?  Maybe he just thinks sex with humans is perverted.”

Murgull scowled and shook her head.  “That one…I know many who would think so, but not that one.  He was the first to tell your mate that humans must be taken, that your kind was our only hope.”

“That was before he actually had to couple with one.”

Murgull absorbed that.  Finally:  “Does he know you saw him?”

“I’m sure he suspects.”

“Has he threatened you?”

“Not with words, but he knows I know something.”

“Then you are in danger, little sister.  An angry man will bluster.  A killing man hides his spear until he means to blood it.”  Murgull patted her knee before heaving herself to her feet.  “You have some protection.  Your mate is powerful and cares for you.  If you were to die, he may, in his grief, actually do all in his power to find someone to blame, even one he has trusted so many years.  And if that does not comfort you,” she added, grinning back over her shoulder as she opened the iron door to leave, “remember that when you do not stand in our leader’s shadow, you yet stand in mine.”

That did help, some.  Even Vorgullum was afraid of Murgull.

“What will you do?” she asked, following her out into the tunnels, and down the narrow, winding way that led to Murgull’s secret workshop.

Murgull shrugged.  “What would you have me do, little sister?  I could put him in the ground easily enough.”

“No.”

“No?”  That bulging, blind eye peered back at her, shining goblin-green in Olivia’s flashlight.  “When you are so certain it was him you saw?”

“I’m not so certain of anything that I want to kill a man.”

“Fool,” Murgull said, and they walked the rest of the way in silence.

Olivia opened the secret door and then they were inside, Olivia shining her light where Murgull pointed so that the old gulla could rummage through her shelves.  “What are you doing?” she ventured at last.

“What is there to do?” Murgull countered, flapping a hand behind her without turning.  “You have decided already to do nothing, so have the sense at least to do it well.  Stay in your lair when you can, but do not avoid this male any more than you do already.  If he suspects you of suspecting him, he is certain to attack.  Where is it, then?” she muttered last, slapping crossly at the wall as she moved to another shelf.  “Years and years it clutters up this place, but when old Murgull wants it—aha!”

“What is it?” Olivia asked apprehensively.

“Something for your friend.  For Cheyenne the skunk.”  Murgull limped back, offering a glass bottle in her cracked claws, holding maybe three ounces of blood-red liquid.  “Give this to her.  Tell her to wear it.”

“What is it?” Olivia asked again, starting to uncork the bottle.

“Leave off!” Murgull said sharply.  “Your mate is making iron enough for a thousand tools!”

Olivia started, lifting her eyebrows.  “Excuse me?”

“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!”

In the considering silence that followed this, the sound of Tina slapping her forehead sounded very loud.

“And I’ll say something else, since I kind of already know how most of you feel about me,” Olivia went on, deliberately not looking at Victoria, but at Amy, who merely looked back at her.  “If someone did believe us and they came looking for this place, if they found it, I only see that ending one way.  And I don’t hate anyone so much that I can wish this whole tribe dead or…or cut open in some secret test facility two miles under Area 51.  I mean, let’s not kid ourselves here, there are only a few ways that an escape can go and not one of them ends with us back in the lives we had.  That’s over.  That’s done.  And being part of this tribe as close as I honestly believe I’m ever going to get to peace and quiet again.  I’m sorry, but that’s just how I see it.”

At last, Tina cleared her throat and grudgingly said, “I can appreciate what you’re saying.  And I guess I could be doing more.”  She gave Olivia a sour glance.  “I think it’s time you talked to your…man about finding us something to do instead of just sitting around like this.”

Victoria loudly protested and Maria muttered something in Spanish, but the other women seemed amenable, so Olivia nodded.  “I’ll do that.”

Tina started to turn away, then abruptly came back.  “I’m really not as bitchy as I’m sure I look,” she said.  “Tobi…my roommate.  She’s here somewhere, I just haven’t seen her, you know?  I’m scared sick for her.”

Olivia nodded again, unable to think of a thing to say.

“This is just how I cope with things without flipping out and popping someone.”  She glanced in the direction of the gullan guards.  “All things considered, I think I’m behaving myself remarkably well.”

“All things considered, I guess we all are,” Olivia said.

“Some of us could sure be better.”  A second dark glance, this time toward Maria.  “But I guess I’m one of them.  I’d just feel a whole lot better if I could see…”  She trailed off, then shook her head hard and looked at Olivia again.  “It’s nothing personal, that’s all I’m saying.  If I snap at you some, I mean.  You’re not saying anything I haven’t thought.  It’s just hard to hear.”

“I know.”

Tina managed an awkward nod, then trudged over to a bench and sat down.  Her shoulders slumped.  She stared at the rock between her feet and said nothing, did nothing.  She looked a lot like Vorgullum in that moment.

“So.”  The dark-haired Ellen tentatively raised her hand again, and when she thought she had Olivia’s attention, lowered it back to clasp the other.  “I heard…talk of killing?”

“It’s true,” Maria said, shrugging. “But killing isn’t the worst thing.  This man who knocked up the furball, they don’t just want to kill him.  They want to take away his soul.”

“I’m surprised no one’s asked you to do it for them,” Karen said, making sure the sarcasm came out clearly.

“Who says they haven’t?”  Maria smirked at them, idly tracing the nonsensical design she’d drawn over her left shoulder.  “And who says I can’t?”

Olivia rolled her eyes, and quite a few of the others exchanged glances and short sighs, but it was Tina, still staring stoically at the ground who said, “You can’t even make a friggin’ cappachino right, you freakin’ moron.”

“You can believe what you want,” Maria said.

“In that case, I believe I’ve had about enough of your bullshit.”  Tina looked up, just one eye showing through the mess of her unbrushed hair.  “And I believe that if you say another goddamn stupid thing in front of me from this day on, all your devoted followers are going to get treated to the sight of me popping you one in your fat mouth. We’ll see how scary they’ll all think you are when you’re spitting teeth, shall we?”

Maria retreated a little too rapidly to be called a swagger and Tina went back to staring at the floor.

Amy took Olivia’s arm and walked her away from the others.  “My man’s name is Kurlun,” she said conversationally, once they were alone.  Her expression was reserved, difficult to read.  “He told me.  I guess he figured that if Vorgullum could trust you, he could trust me.  That’s a lot of trust.  He also brought me a bunch of rocks, at your suggestion, he said.  Didn’t look too sure of himself, but he sure looked hopeful.”

Olivia waited.

Amy grinned.  “God, I had a blast!  I counted them, I split them into piles, I worked out fractions and percentages and ratios!  I played with those stupid rocks all night.  He must have thought I was out of my head.”

“I’m really glad,” Olivia said, smiling.  “I thought you’d like that.”

“It is a sad, sad thing to have to admit, but that was probably the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me,” Amy said.  “I’m not really a people-person, but I think I could be a good friend.  You’ve got your head on straight, anyway, and I won’t hesitate to kick your ass a little if I think it starts to go wrong.”

“That’s good to know,” she said.  “Really.”

“Yeah, well, I think I’ve had enough day care today.”  Amy glanced around, scowling.  “I’m going to find my man, and then I’m going home to play with my new rocks.  You can come with me if you want to.”

It should have been a tempting thought.  It really hadn’t been so long ago that Olivia had been, quite literally, crying for human company.  Still, she hesitated, and it dawned on her that she wasn’t enjoying herself the way she’d hoped she would, and in her current mood, being around people wasn’t the best idea.  “Some other time, okay?”

“Yeah, Kurlun told me you’re spending a lot of time with old Murgull.  I don’t envy you that.”  Amy thought about it, then added, “I don’t envy you much of anything, to tell you the truth.  Celebrity sucks.”  And with that, Amy walked away, raising her hand to the guards as she passed them and receiving distracted half-waves in return.

Hearing Murgull’s name struck a chord in her.  Olivia put her hand in her pocket and touched the glass vial with Cheyenne’s potion still in it.  If she did nothing else, she’d really ought to deliver it.

So she went over to the guards, who all stopped talking to watch her approach.  In all three of their strange faces, she saw the same discomfiture, as if they weren’t certain where to look or what to say.  She wasn’t sure if it had to do with being human, being a woman, or just being the leader’s mate, but she supposed she’d better make it quick.

“Do any of you know where I can find Cheyenne?” she asked.

Blank looks.

“She has red hair,” Olivia said, gesturing to indicate length.  “Kind of dark up here, uh, in a stripe?”

“Oh.  Her,” said one.  The other two looked at him, and Olivia received the strong impression that they all three knew exactly who she meant, but if he was the only one dumb enough to admit it, then he could be the only one to deal with her.  Apparently, the speaker got the same vibes.  He bared his teeth a little, but stepped forward.  “I can take your message.”

“I need to speak with her myself.”

“Oh.”  This was obviously a much more palatable option.  “Follow me, then.”

He shouldered his spear, but kept it with him as he headed out into the main passageway, slowing his pace to match Olivia’s stride.  The few gullan moving about gave them room, but apart from curious glances and the occasional raised hand (she was never sure whether the salute was meant for her or her escort, and often had the feeling that the gulla giving it wasn’t entirely certain himself), no greeting.

The silence felt oppressive, and Cheyenne’s lair was not nearby.  Eventually, Olivia nerved herself up and said, “Do you have a mate?”

“Yes.  Karen.”  He half-turned while walking and stuck out his hand.

Startled, she took it and felt it clumsily squeezed once before he let go.

“Did I do it right?” he asked, and grinned when she nodded.  “I try to do human things.  Karen is…not happy here.  I’m Bodual.  You can have my name,” he went on, motioning her ahead of him down a sloping side-passage.  “Just don’t tell Mojo Woman.”

“She has no real magic,” Olivia said.

“I know, but she still talks to spirits and that means the only spirits who would talk back will be the very worst kind.  Right up there, see?”

What she saw near the end of the tunnel was a male gullan with yet another spear leaning up against the wall beside a chimney.  His wings were withered and his body specked with grey and somewhat gone to fat, but it was clear that he took his duty seriously.  He had brought a small bundle of food with him, as well as a spare candle for light, the 1988 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue to flip through, and a bucket to answer nature’s necessity.

“Has she tried to escape?” Olivia asked.

“She’s tried all sorts of things,” was Bodual’s cryptic reply.  He took the magazine out of the first gulla’s hands and took up a position at the other side of the chimney.

Olivia announced herself with a self-conscious holler up the dark chute, and then climbed on up.

The first thing she noticed was the mosaic on the floor, then the intricate paintings that covered the walls, and finally the three narrow tunnels leading out of this relatively elaborate entry room.  Whoever Cheyenne’s captor was, besides Vorgullum’s trusted friend, he was obviously very important.  She called out again, and then picked the tunnel which would take her to the sleeping room if this were Vorgullum’s lair and started walking, shining her flashlight ahead of her.

She came to a workshop of some sort, really just an extra wide place in the tunnel with shelves cut into both walls, filled with boxes and tins, stacked stone bowls, several mortars and pestles of varying sizes, and numerous clay pots and jelly jars containing unknown and often pungent liquids.  It reminded her in no small way of Murgull’s secret room.  Another potion maker.  Another poison maker, perhaps.  And just beyond the workshop, the tunnel terminated in another waterway, the only other private bathroom Olivia had seen so far.

“What the hell?”

Olivia turned around into the brilliant beam of a flashlight.  She held up her arm, wincing, until the light lowered.  It seemed to take rather longer than she would have thought necessary.  “I hollered,” she said, rubbing at her eyes.

“I thought I heard something.”  Cheyenne looked over her shoulder, and then back at her.  “How did you get in here?”

“I walked past the guard.”

“Figures,” she muttered.  “All right, get out of here, I have to pee.  Take the first right you come to and then the first left and wait for me.”

Olivia obeyed, passing through two more ornately-painted and well-furnished rooms before she came to a sleeping room with a fire burning in its hearth.  The similarities to Vorgullum’s lair were impossible to escape, although these rooms did seem to be somewhat smaller and there were definitely more paintings.  Some of them were the same abstract patterns as could be found on Vorgullum’s walls, but most were action scenes, painted with a few bold strokes in subdued colors for a surprisingly striking effect.  She was deeply involved in what sure appeared to be a mammoth-hunt when Cheyenne came back, so much so that she had to be roused from her study with a not-so gentle shake.

“Make this quick,” Cheyenne said crossly, and sent another glance over her shoulder.  “As bad as things are, they’re going to get a whole lot worse if he thinks I’m conspiring against him.”

Olivia took out the bottle Murgull had given her and handed it over.  Cheyenne took it suspiciously.

“What is it?” she asked, looking as though she were a second or less away from smashing it against the wall.

“It’s an aphrodisiac.”

Cheyenne stared at her, then drew herself up and savagely hissed, “What in God’s name do I need that for?”

“You told me yourself that half of his trouble comes from not being able to—”

“I know what I told you,” Cheyenne snapped.  “This was your solution?  To help him rape me?”

“I already told you, I’m not going to help you kill anyone.  You don’t have to use that,” she said, heading for the door.  “I just thought you might like to have an option.”

“Wait.”  Cheyenne heaved a curt sigh and looked down at the bottle.  “Am I supposed to drink it?”

“You’re supposed to wear it, actually.  Like perfume.  From what I can gather, he won’t know you’re wearing anything either.  Murgull called it a scent they couldn’t smell.  I guess Tina would call it pheromones.  I’m really kind of afraid to know how she bottled them.  And from what.”

“Murgull.”  Cheyenne’s expression grew cooler, more pensive.  She uncorked the bottle and sniffed, then sealed it up again.  She started to speak, and then simply closed her mouth again and stared into the wall.  Her head tipped.  She thought.

“I realize it must seem like pretty backhanded help,” Olivia began.

“Oh, it’s going to help.”  Cheyenne stirred and slipped the bottle into her pocket.  “Actually, I think it’s going to help a lot.  But now you really better scram.  I never know when he’s going to come back and check on me, and he can’t find you here.”

“It won’t always be like this,” Olivia said, knowing what weak comfort those words must be to someone like Cheyenne.

“No, it won’t,” she said.  Then she smiled—a tight, humorless smile, but a genuine one.  “And it’ll all be thanks to you.”

It wasn’t gratitude.  Confused, uneasy, Olivia left.

4

The day passed, not quickly and not always cheerfully, but it passed in human company and that still felt good. Food came promptly at noon—a woven bark basket filled with bread, apples, and a huge wedge of salmon still sizzling in its crispy skin—and tea whenever they emptied the jug. When the light shining down from the mirrors turned golden and began to fade, their guards hung lanterns around the commons so their meeting could continue, but it didn’t last long after that.  One by one, her companions were collected by their gullan mates and taken away, and ultimately, Olivia was alone.  One of the guards—Bodual, the one who belonged to Karen—came over to sit with her while the other two finished up what scraps the humans had left from their last meal.  His good-natured chat was a pleasant way to kill time, but it was just killing time.  Vorgullum didn’t come for her.  He must have decided she could find her own way around by now.  She tried to take this as a show of his faith and not feel, well, forgotten.

So she waited for the end of Bodual’s rambling story (it had begun when she’d tried to find out the word for salmon, but that simple language lesson had mutated somehow into the tale of his first salmon hunt and how he had been beaten up by a fish), laughed politely, and excused herself.  He let her go at once, no doubt eager to get home to poor neglected Karen, and she left as the remaining guards began to switch off the lanterns.

Soon, Olivia was back in Vorgullum’s lair, yawning her way to the sleeping room, and surprised to find the fireplace dark and the pit empty.  For a moment, all her weary mind could think was that she’d managed to climb into the wrong lair.  But no, there was her cooler full of games and there was her photo album.  Where was Vorgullum?

Puzzled, Olivia went through each of the four rooms looking for him, but confirmed only that she was alone.  Now fully awake and rapidly approaching good, old-fashioned panic (her World History teacher, silent all this while, piped up faintly:  ‘Without her protector, Olivia’s place in the tribe has been reduced to that of food source!  It’s hard to watch, but it’s nature’s way.’), Olivia climbed back out of her chambers and tried to think of where she would go if she were a bat-man in a bad mood.

The common cave was empty now, all its many nooks and crannies unoccupied.  She shone her flashlight down each of the narrow tunnels leading out of it and found a storeroom for the fuel-logs, the canal that passed for the common bathroom (quite a large one, really, much bigger than the one in Vorgullum’s lair), and a few private chambers like the one where she’d seen Bolga and Cheyenne’s captor canoodling, but no gullan.

After a moment’s troubled concentration, she padded off resolutely to check the mines.  Empty.

Feeling a certain uncomfortable dread, Olivia backtracked to the main passageway and went to the women’s tunnels.  She met no one but old Horumn guarding the hide-flap entrance, who waspishly informed her that there were no males at all in the women’s tunnels, which is why they were called the women’s tunnels, and that none of the safe females (whatever that meant) were available, and in any event, Olivia’s mate was the least likely of any gullan to want the company of a ‘real’ female, so would Olivia kindly scuttle off into a corner somewhere and die?

Olivia retreated to the commons and stood there with her candle, now approaching a state of real worry.  She didn’t know where else to look.  There were the baths, but she knew she couldn’t manage the climb down the Deep Drop.  And God knew there had to be hundreds of tunnels and chambers and lairs unexplored by her, but it was all too easy to imagine getting lost down one of them…all too easy to imagine this stupid flashlight going out and getting lost right here in the commons.

“Who is that?”

She jumped, screamed, and dropped her flashlight, which promptly went out.

Great, she thought, her heart pounding.  Now I’m alone in the dark with a stranger.  “M-Me,” she stammered, trying to keep from shivering.

“Well, that tells me exactly nothing.”  Whoever it was trailed off into grumbling, his claws clicking closer, and stopped again.  She could hear him sniffing.  “Is it Olivia?”

“Yes.”

A long, puzzled silence.  Then, “Are you lost?”  Here? the unvoiced thought continued.

“No, I’m not lost, I’m in the damn commons,” she snapped.  She took a couple of breaths and added, “Vorgullum isn’t back yet.”

“Ah.”  And that was all he said.

She didn’t know his voice; it was a distinctively deep voice, even vaguely familiar, but she didn’t know any of them by voice, excepting Vorgullum and that was only because she spent so much time with him.  Who was he?  She was suddenly gripped by the illogical fear that he might be Cheyenne’s captor, although if he was, he had to be hurting himself to make his voice go that low.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice quavering.  She didn’t really expect to be answered.  She was astonished when he did so.

“My name is Doru.  You might know my Tobi.  Short head-fur, with colored stripes?”

“Oh, yes.  Tobi,” she said weakly.  “Tina’s friend.”

They stood in the dark and were silent.

Slowly, as if trying very hard not to frighten her, he said, “Olivia, I am going to touch your arm now and take you back to your cave.”

“Vorgullum isn’t there,” she protested.

“Perhaps not, but when he does come back, that is where he’ll go.”  A huge hand closed over her arm.  “There now, that’s not so bad, is it?”

“Look, instead of treating me like a baby with a broken toy, help me find Vorgullum!”

He uttered a low bark of laughter.  “Olivia, this is a big mountain and an even bigger forest.”

“Fine.  Go home.  I’ll look for him myself.”

He seemed to consider that as he ignored her heartfelt and extremely futile efforts to pull out of his very effective grip.  “All right,” he said at last.  “I’ll take you as far as the entry shaft.  Then you are going to stand there very still and I am going up to have a look.  If he isn’t there, I’m taking you to your lair and you are going to stay there.”

“I make no promises.  You go look first.”

He made that barking laugh again, but he didn’t argue as he led her away.  He walked slowly, letting her feel her way along with one hand on the wall.  Presently, she came to feel a cool breeze against her face, although she still couldn’t see anything.

“Stay here, Olivia.  Your mate will have my horns if you wander off and lose yourself,” he added in an undertone, and she heard his claws striking off stone as he climbed.

Olivia huddled in the blackness, breathing in the cooler air that blew down the entry, and tried not to picture herself alone and abandoned in this mountain.  There was no other sound expect her heavy breathing.  There was nothing to see but the dumb swirl of color the human brain will conjure up in dark places when it is bored.  Her watch was broken; she was all alone for several years.

“—of all people would keep a better grip on yours,” she heard, and bolted to her feet.  “She’s frightened half out of her mind.”

“I am not!” she called, and bit her lip.

“See?”  Patiently, as if she’d made his point for him.

She could hear them now, coming hand over hand down the wall.  The faint rustle of their wings added a strange depth to the rough grind of claws in rock.  Presently, she could smell the faint mineral-water musk of them, as if her panic had heightened her human senses to rival theirs.  And then a hand was on her arm and it was Vorgullum’s hand.  Olivia pressed into his chest, crushing herself with the reality of him, and tried very hard not to babble at him.

He stroked his hand down her hair, rubbed her back, said nothing.

“Well, as my Tobi says, my work here is done.  Sleep, Vorgullum.  Sleep is always good.”  The sound of heavy footsteps receded from them.

“Say something,” she said, muffled against his soft fur.

“I frightened you.  I apologize.”  Heartfelt, perhaps, but mechanically spoken.

“Where were you?”

His chest rose and fell.  “Brooding.  Pointless brooding.  It has done nothing for me and it has frightened my Olivia.  I am not doing well at all.”

“Come to bed,” she urged.

He only sighed.

“Then come and watch me while I sleep.”  She felt him consider that, and then his hand brushed her jaw in the darkness and he led her away to the caves they shared.

He lit a candle for her to undress by, then turned and crouched by the hearth, stirring at the ashes listlessly.  She sat in the pit with her sleeping bag pooled around her hips and watched him worriedly.  At last he clasped his hands and bent his head and said, “You aren’t sleeping.”

“You’re scaring me.”

There was a long, long silence.  When he looked at her again, she could not see his eyes.  “Terrible things have happened…and they are still happening.”

“Talk to me.”

“Bundel’s human is mad.  I realize now she will never come back to her own mind.  Sarabee and Karen are not much better; they sit, they cry, they do not eat if they are not fed, and they still fight their mates sometimes.  No season has come to Victoria.  There has been trouble over several of the humans that has nearly come to violence.  And there is this…Mojo Woman.”  He bared his teeth at the name.  “And no one has caught a spark.”  A long pause.  “Except Bolga.”

Olivia pulled her sleeping bag away and crawled over to join him at the hearth.  He let her put an arm around him, but remained rigid as stone.

“I’m not a fool,” he said.  “There are ways in which a female can avoid getting herself with child. I’m sure Murgull does her best to see such things are available to those with sense enough to take them, but what can be done with Bolga?  It is the responsibility of the Eldest to safeguard the women’s tunnels, but that law was made when it was expected that women could think for themselves…and that no man would want to prey upon those who could not.”  Vorgullum growled, low and hurt and angry.  “What am I to do with the man who bred Bolga?”  He lashed out with one hand, tore three long gashes in the stone floor and glared at them.  “The leader that came before me forbade coupling.”  He snorted.  “Forbade.  Some thirty gullan came in defiance of him.  Six survived.  Bolga is the last of them, and look at her.”

She held him, said nothing.

“Now I have brought a handful of humans to a tribe of eighty males.  As unpleasant as it can be to couple with them—forgive me, Olivia, but some of those with human mates do think so—at least those who possess a human have some release.  Day and night, they are free to rut…at my command, no less.  And all the rest must stand off, stealing half-satisfaction where they can or bartering time with one of the barren.  They see my hunters with their human mates and what is there for them to feel but resentment?  That is my doing also and there is nothing I can do to mend it.”

He lapsed into silence, letting her rub his arms and shoulders, but not looking at her.  He stared into the fire instead, and watched bleakly as it died.

“Well,” Olivia began guardedly.  “Feeling sorry for yourself is a pretty good short-term solution, but eventually you are going to have to accept the fact that you’re already doing everything you can, short of clapping the whole tribe in chains so you can let them out one at a time under your direct control.  Sooner or later, Vorgullum, you have to let people do their own thing.”

“Do I?” he muttered.

“Yes,” she said firmly, so firmly that he looked at her.  “You do.  And sometimes, it’s going to be the wrong thing.  The really miserable thing about a tribe is that it’s made up of all these individuals!”

“Heh.”  He flinched back at the sound of his own dry laugh and considered her with a strange light in his eyes.  “When you lived among the humans, did you advise their leader?”

She snorted.  “No.”

“You should have.  You’re good at it.”

“You’re just saying that because I sleep with you.”

“Also sound advice.”  He stood and stretched impressively.  “I think it must be nearing morning again, but I will sleep a little while beside you.  And tomorrow I will brave the wilds of the human camps and find more bedding, since you have thrown most of ours away.”

“My fearless mate,” she teased.

He gave her a weary smile.  “Oh, my fine Olivia,” he murmured. “I am filled with fear.”

5

She was alone when she woke up, but this was hardly surprising.  She didn’t have a working timepiece, hadn’t for some while, but he had lit a fire before he left and the log was now burnt wholly to ash, which meant Vorgullum had been gone at least four hours.

Olivia staggered out of the pit and lit a fresh fire.  The warmth and light combined to give her the necessary courage to brave the freezing water of the washroom, so she stumbled off to put herself in order.

It didn’t help much.  As she fingered a few lank strands of hair in one hand and weighed the lumpy mass of soap in the other, Olivia thought she’d probably come to the end of what grooming could do for her without another good soak in a hot bath.  That meant waiting for Vorgullum to come home and agree to carry her down the Deep Drop, and considering his mood lately, that was a big if.  She wasn’t even sure he’d come home at mid-day to bring her lunch.  He never had yesterday.

Thinking of lunch made her realize she was hungry.  Olivia put the soap down, dressed in her old clothes (not without a wince), and strapped on her claws.  Minutes later, she was stepping out into the main passageway in search of food.  The common cave was a good starting point, she thought; there was usually a guard posted there who would undoubtedly feed her if she asked him.

But when she got there, the only human she saw was the crazy lady with the saucepan, and the only gulla, her mate.  He glanced up with a weary eye when she entered the cavern, then returned his attention to the madwoman.  He was trying to feed her from a cup, a task made infinitely more difficult by her slow, steady rocking.

“Am I the first one here?” she asked, and immediately wished she’d asked a different way.  The crazy lady was obviously here before her and she still counted, even if she was crazy.

“Yawa came to take them to the women’s tunnels,” he replied, dabbing at a bit of brothy drool.  “To learn how to work.  I will take this one once she’s been fed.  Horumn doesn’t want her underfoot until the others are settled.”

The madwoman stopped rocking and stared down into the shiny side of her saucepan.  It made it marginally easier for her mate to pour a little more broth into her.  He had to stroke her throat to make her swallow, just like a dog being forced to take a pill.

“I know you,” Olivia said finally.  “Your name is Bundel.”

“Yes.”  He raised a listless hand without looking at her and kept feeding his mate.  If he was worrying about having his soul trapped in a candle, he hid it well.  There was nothing on his face at all, not even sorrow.

She watched, too uncomfortable to leave.

“You’re trying to think of how to tell me that you’re sorry, aren’t you?”

“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.

“I’m sorry,” she said, while his hunters shifted on their feet and looked awkwardly at their spears.  “I am.”

“Your words are always wise,” he murmured, combing his claws through her hair.  He gave her another brow-bump, right there in front of everyone, then gently disengaged and resumed climbing up toward daylight and all its dangers.

6

It was far too early to go back to bed just because she’d managed to screw things up so spectacularly.  Olivia trudged off down the mainway, knowing she had nowhere to go but back to an empty lair and nothing to do once she got there.  The common cave was still empty.  She didn’t think she wanted the company of anyone who’d overheard the fireworks anyway.

But another human face might be nice.  Amy’s, maybe.  Amy would probably point out that telling your man you shit on him in front of his whole hunting party was not the best way of engendering a lasting friendship between their two peoples, but that was all right.  If she could apologize to Vorgullum, she could hang her head a while in front of Amy.  She had to do something, anyway.  She just didn’t want to be alone.

So she walked herself down the winding mainway to the women’s tunnels, savoring the self-pity while she had it, knowing Amy would probably knock it out of her soon enough.  The darkness was good for depression.  The lanterns were lit, widely spaced, just enough to keep her oriented along the many crossways and side-passages, but they didn’t last forever and eventually she was obliged to bring out her flashlight.

Someday, this would all be familiar enough that she could walk it in the dark, like Murgull.  Someday, it would even feel like home.

She heard the noise before she saw the light spilling through the iron door that separated the women’s tunnels from the rest of the mountain.  She’d probably been hearing it for some time without noticing, too lost in her own depression, but a final metallic banging ended all her thoughts of Bundel and his mad mate.  The caverns and tunnels of Hollow Mountain had been carved wide and made smooth, but still, sound did not carry easily along its uneven surfaces.  Nevertheless, the sound of a giant iron pot falling empty to the stone floor could not be ignored, not even out here, not even by her.  Immediately following came a long, loud groan and then Horumn’s furious shout: “Don’t just stand there, pick it up!  Up!  Up!  Over the fire!  Not in the coals, you stupid girl, use the damned hooks!”

Hesitating now, Olivia made her feet carry her the last little distance, and each step forward brought her closer to the sounds of voices—gullan and human both—crushed together in the wordless rooba-rooba of crowd-speak, sometimes rising into a discernable, “Over here,” “Show me again,” “Now what?” or “Ouch!”  Beneath that were pounding sounds, rapid and arrhythmic, scraping sounds, blades chopping, metal clattering, and the omnipresent rush of running feet.

She reached the door.  It was unlocked and slightly ajar.  She opened it up and stared into chaos.

Olivia had never been back here without Murgull, and even though she’d strongly suspected the old gulla had ordered it emptied for their meetings before, to see it now in the full riot of its use astonished her.  She’d been told there were only forty gullan females; it didn’t sound like much, even with the human captives thrown into the mix, until she saw so many of them here and hard at work.  The closest thing she could think to compare it to was the kitchen of a high-scale hotel, except that all the work stations were on the floor:  One woman swept roasted nuts off the hearth stones for the woman who shelled them, who then dumped the meats into the bowl to be carried to the woman who ground them into a mealy flour.  At another station, another woman swiftly deconstructed cattails one at a time from a huge stack so that the leaves, tips, roots and stalks could all go to different hands.  All around her, things were roasted, chopped, plucked, boned and peeled, and as busy as it all was, Olivia knew they weren’t all here because there was a constant stream of gullan rushing in and out from the many back passageways.

Olivia hovered in the doorway, still holding onto the bars, overwhelmed by it all.  Through the press and flow of bodies, she could see people she knew—Amy, pounding away at some roots; Anita, mending nets at the far end of the room under a critical gullan eye; Liz, running full bowls of raw food to the cookpots and filling up the empties—but she couldn’t see how to get to them without putting herself in the way.

“Get in or get away!”  Horumn limped up to her, scowling, and smacked her hand so that she let go of the door.  “What do you want?”

“I was just looking for something to do.”

“Bah!  Croaking frog!  You are Murgull’s headache and you won’t find her here!”  Horumn glowered back over one hunched shoulder as a large pot slipped Beth’s hands and banged to the floor amid cries of annoyance and dismay.  “You would know better where to find her than I.”

The naked bitterness in those words made it a struggle not to squirm.  “Can I help out here?” Olivia asked weakly.

“Ha!  Help enough I have from your useless kind.”  But Horumn gestured for her to wait and then stumped over to snatch up a shallow tin bowl filled with cooking scraps: boiled bones, stale crusts, overripe fruits and wilted leaves.  She thrust this dubious fare into Olivia’s hands and said, “As you go, set this in the waiting place.”

“What place?”

Horumn gave Olivia a swift slap to the ear, then spun her roughly around and shoved her out through the open door.  “The place,” she snarled, “where people wait who are not welcome here!  Go!”

“What is it?”

“For Logarr.”  Distracted by a second crash, Horumn zeroed unerringly on poor Beth and yet another pot, this one now spilling stew merrily across three work stations, and shouted, “Curse your hands and your eyes and your hairless hide!  Out!  Get out!  Thurga, take this grease-fingered fool out to rake dung!  At least that she cannot break!”

Olivia retreated as well (not fast enough to miss Horumn’s incredulous, “Are you crying?  Sweet Mother of the Moon, someone get this mewling whelp a milking teat and get her out of my sight!”).  She made her way back up the dark mainway, swinging her flashlight from side to side until she saw a small alcove.  It wasn’t much, just a wide place cut into one wall, shored with rough timber and furnished with a simple stone bench.  She set the bowl down, took a few steps away, and then turned to go and shone her flashlight directly into a gulla’s face.

It was a male, not one she knew.  He didn’t flinch, didn’t raise a hand to shield his eyes, didn’t really seem to care.  He waited.

Slowly, Olivia lowered her flashlight.  “Are you Logarr?”

“Yes.”  He showed no surprise at the question, gave her no cue for how to proceed.

“Do I know you?” she asked, because he looked, to her eyes, remarkably fit.  His pelt was very dark and shone with good health.  His horns told her he was relatively young.  He was not as tall or as powerfully built as Vorgullum, but he was considerably fitter than either Beth’s mate or Amy’s.  If Vorgullum had paired the humans with the healthiest males, he certainly ought to have one of them.

“No,” he said after a moment, and that was all he said.

“Well…I think this is for you.”  Olivia gathered up the bowl of garbage and held it out to him.

He stood quite a long while before taking the two steps necessary to reach out and take it.  Seeing him up close gave her something of a start; his eyes were pale, neither blue nor grey nor green, but some pale and watery color for all that, when every other gulla she’d seen had black eyes.  It would have made her wonder if he was blind, except for the intensity in his quiet stare which told her indisputably that she was being seen.  Seen and measured.

But he did take the bowl, and as soon as he had it, he turned around and took it away with him back down the mainway.  He did not say any kind of goodbye or give her one of those open-handed salutes.  He just left, and let the darkness swallow him.

Creepy.  She wasn’t even sure just why it had affected her so deeply, but in the aftermath of this brief encounter, she was oddly loathe to continue on to Murgull’s secret room.  She sat down in the little alcove instead, the waiting place, shining her flashlight now and then in the direction of Logarr’s departure, although of course she saw nothing.  So great was her concentration, or her lingering unease, that she did not hear Murgull’s approach until the old gulla dropped onto the bench beside her, cackling at the shrieky little gasp this startled out of her.

“Lurking in dark places, eh?”  Murgull prodded at her ribs with a singularly sly smile.  “Sign of devious intent, that.  You must be a wicked woman.  Ha!  Old Murgull knew there was a reason she liked you!”

“I was just looking for you,” Olivia said lamely, rubbing her side.

“Lies,” came the comfortable reply.  “You are sitting on your slimy frog’s rump.  Ha!  But busy minds need rest.”  Murgull’s good eye narrowed in a conspiratorial leer.  “What goes on in your busy mind?”

‘Nothing’ seemed like the wrong answer.  She said instead, “Horumn is teaching all the other humans how to work.”

Murgull drew back, her hideous face contorting in an expression that was two parts contempt to one part doubt.  “And you hide here?”

This slur on her honor—as if she were a spoiled child dodging chores—stung deep and Olivia’s temper flared.  “I’m not hiding, she threw me out!”

Murgull grunted and settled back, now casting her scornful glare down the passage that led to the women’s tunnels.  “Miserable old bat.  So she sends you to me for work, does she?  Then work we shall do.  Come, little sister.”

That vise-like grip came down over her arm even before old Murgull had gained her feet, pinching off all protest—had Olivia been foolhardy enough to mount one—and they were off at once, moving at Murgull’s lurching run despite the selfsame’s immediate litany of physical complaints.  They did not go deeper into the dark either, not to Murgull’s secret room, but right back the way she’d come, to the women’s tunnels and through the unlocked door into Horumn’s riotous domain.

Some of the humans paused to watch them pass, but the gullan uniformly made themselves scarce if they could and small if they couldn’t.  Murgull cackled as she dragged Olivia across the cavern, leering at all of them and none of them, alive with that merry malice that so often defined her when things were going well.  “Work, you frogs!” she cried, simultaneously flapping one hand to dismiss the quality of that work.  “Hop for Horumn!”

And oh God, but there was Maria, rising out of a trio of gullan with all her mojo-markings smeared by sweat and resentment blazing in her eyes.  She threw down the rough stone she had been using to grind meal, threw it hard enough to send chips bouncing back behind it as it rolled away, and shouted, “Don’t you call me a frog, you ugly old bruja!”

Murgull stopped.  She eyed Maria with a crooked, close-mouthed smile, letting everyone see her inspecting the spirals and stars painted in lipstick and ashes over Maria’s bare arms and legs.  Then she released Olivia and gave her a dismissive shove away from her, clearing the battlefield.  “Is it not a frog that I hear croaking?” she asked, so mildly that at least a dozen gullan backed uneasily away.  “Use your tongue to catch flies, before it gets you into trouble.”

“You only think you know what trouble is,” Maria sneered, and raised her hand in that forked fist.  “But you are about to find out.”

There was no silence in the wake of this challenge.  There was instead a great many-voiced caw, not unlike a flock of crows (a murder of crows, Olivia’s brain commented, and yes, thank you, murder was just the right word) startled into flight.  Tools were dropped, labors abandoned, and gullan fled seemingly at random through every and any available egress.  In moments, there were only three left (Horumn, of course, and two others as ancient and unimpressed as she) and the humans, and Olivia didn’t know whether to be amused or dismayed by the apprehension she saw on too many of their faces.  It was not like a group of women about to see a good old-fashioned catfight erupt, but a group of schoolyard girls filled with the superstitious terror that comes from seeing one of their own step boldly on that mother-crippling crack, or begin the chanting summons for Bloody Mary.  Carla, Karen, Liz, even Beth—all shrinking back as from the shadow of the Devil Herself, and not from Murgull, who was at least sincerely horrible, but from Maria, from that big, fat, phony Mojo Woman.

But Murgull didn’t flinch.  Murgull didn’t move at all.  As humans and gullan alike scattered around her, Murgull regarded Maria with a tender smile beneath a cold and burning stare and only after it was quiet again (and here was the silence she had first expected, a whole cavern’s worth of held breath) did she speak.  “Do that, little frog,” she said.  “You do that.  We will see which of us has stronger magic.  There are so many things a little bald frog can eat, and drink…and breathe… and brush her little bald flippers against in Murgull’s dark mountain.  So put out your hand to me, eh?  Go on.  Speak my name.  Spit your curse at me, human, and let us begin.”

Maria lowered her arm, but not before Olivia—and hopefully everyone else—saw her hand tremble.  “I wouldn’t waste my time,” she mumbled, but she said it in English.  She edged back, found her grinding stone, and got back down on the floor, flushed and tight-lipped.

“And you, you lazy maggot,” Murgull continued, crooking her claws at Olivia.  “Did I tell you to rest?  You come with old Murgull now.  Time to see things, know things.  Make things, maybe, for little frogs to drink.”  She threw back her ruined head and groaned laughter, not even glancing at the other humans, then limped from the cave.

Olivia ran after her.  The last thing she heard as she followed Murgull’s rapidly receding form into the tunnel was Amy’s wry, “Here’s a little free advice for you, Mojo.  Never piss off a real witch.”

Murgull caught Olivia’s arm just outside and leaned on her a little as she trotted along.  She was still chuckling off and on, just this side of under her breath.  “Mojo old Murgull,” she kept saying, her tone one of faint wonder.

Olivia frowned at her with as much disapproval as she dared to show.  “Yeah, okay, she deserved that, but you scared a lot of other people, too.”

Murgull flapped her good wing, and Olivia couldn’t tell without seeing her face whether the old gulla were dismissive, apologetic, or merely pleased by the idea.  She rather expected the latter.

“You have your iron claws, do you?” Murgull asked, prodding rudely at the pouch belting Olivia’s waist and giving a satisfied grunt when she heard the metal spikes clank.  “Make ready, little sister.  You have climbing to do here.”

“I do?”  But then she could see it.  Daylight.

It lay in silverish smudges over the uneven wall at the end of this tunnel, so different from the pools of yellow light that glowed out of the regularly-spaced lanterns that lit their way.  Daylight.  Real light.  Not the mirror-shine that lit the larger caverns, but the dim, twilight haze of pure sunlight after it had fallen who knew how far into the close confines of Hollow Mountain.  Immediately afterwards, she felt the cool breeze of the cave’s own living breath upon her face, air so crisp and fresh that it made her smell her own unwashed body and that of the gulla beside her with cruel clarity. And then she saw two gullan females climbing side-by-side down the wall, each laden with baskets and backpacks tied to their bodies, and realized that if the mountain had a back door, she was looking at it.

And she was about to go through it.

Her heart leapt—foolishly, perhaps, since Outside did not mean Freedom, and certainly would never mean Home again—and just as quickly subsided as she glimpsed something else at the end of this tunnel, something scarcely hinted at by silver threads of light: Another iron door.

It stood wide open to allow the easy passage of gullan to and from the shaft, but as Olivia neared, she could see the solid black shape of the lockplate, and again, it was on the inside.  Her steps slowed.  She waited for the two females to hurry away with their burdens, and then reached out to touch the cold iron bars of the door.  She looked at Murgull, who looked mildly back at her, and said, “I don’t remember one of these at the other shaft.”

“And why should there be, eh?”  Murgull gave the door a good rattle in its hinges, then cackled and continued on.  “The leader who came in the age of the wasted ones forbade the taking of mates, but young were born, ha, and the Waste spread.  So the leader who came after, he who stood tallest before your mate, he forbade the act itself, save by his direction.  And when the first young came in defiance of his will, he set these barriers around us.  Did you think they were meant to keep humans from stumbling upon our home?  Ha!  They are shut against those who hunt their prey beneath the ground and not above it.”

“Still?”

“Oh yes.  And if your mate knew how often this door was allowed to stand open, he would have words to say.  Ha!  Words to bellow!  But what does he expect?  The Eldest holds the only key, and even young legs would have difficulty running so far and so often as to admit each woman who goes about her honest labor.  Stand aside.”

Olivia stupidly turned around instead, and was struck by the swinging weight of an empty basket as the two gullan females came running back.  One of them panted an apology of sorts over her shoulder and they both leapt up on the wall and climbed swiftly out of sight.

“He is young, your mate,” Murgull said musingly, helping Olivia right herself.  “And things have not been done as they should be for many long years.  He does well, I think, as well as any stag-headed man can do, but he cannot think of everything.  He does not think that even if these doors are always shut, still these iron bars are yet set wide enough apart to allow a stiff cock to pass, even if the man who grows it cannot!  Ha!  Old Murgull knows of no less than ten gullan walking now who were sparked through a locked door!”  She cackled, but her laughter was short-lived, and faded into a grim expression.  “Yet this was not the way of it with Bolga, eh?”

“Did she take the key?” Olivia asked.

“Bah!  That one!  She does not have the sense to steal!  I doubt she could use a key if you put one in her hand!  No.”  They had reached the end of the tunnel now, but rather than start climbing, Murgull merely stopped and turned to face her.  “No, Horumn surely left the inward door unlocked at night, and if your mate knew that, there would be a new hand around that key before the next sun rose.”

“Maybe there should be.”

“Oh yes?”  Murgull glanced at her, smiling thinly.  “I will not tell you to keep these words secret from him.  You stand tallest beside your mate.  You must decide how best to advise him.  But this I tell you also, if Horumn is not Eldest, she is nothing.  Too old to work, poor Horumn.  Too slow upon that twisted foot.  She eats now for all the doors she has locked in her long life.  Will you see her starved for the one door she left open?”

“I don’t understand you,” Olivia said, beginning to think she did.

“Hunters have the meat of all their kills, and give it to whatever mouths they will, but even when there is no meat, a hunter holds claim to a share of whatever food we women make, and their claim comes first, eh?  For if our hunters starve, there will never be meat again!  A hunter’s mate, as all you humans are so fortunate to be, holds a second claim, for it is through you that new life may come.  There are claims of food for our sigruum, our metal-maker, for old Murgull and her healing magic, and for all those men who our leader proclaims worthy for their labors scratching rock out of useless tunnels we do not need.  Only after do we women share out the little crumbs that are left.”

“That isn’t fair!”

Murgull’s open hand smacked up against her ear, and Olivia supposed she knew it was coming.  She rubbed at the sting of it, but she was thinking of the women’s commons, of the frenzy and the roar of all that work, and for what?  In her mind, she saw that room after the fires were out and day was done.  As Horumn locked them in for another night, a wide ring of imaginary women sat and broke up the few loaves that were left, just a few mouthfuls of tough, sour bread before sleep and the inevitable hour when they had to heave themselves up and do it again.

“It isn’t fair,” she said again, and took her hand away so Murgull had a clear shot at her ear.

The old gulla grunted and did not swing.  She aimed her good eye upwards, shuffled aside for the two gullan women climbing down, and said, “This is life, little sister.  Do you truly need old Murgull to tell you that bad things happen to those who do not deserve it?  Eh?  You, standing here with scent of gulla pressed into your hairless hide?”

“This means we shouldn’t even try to make things better?”

“What is not broken does not need mending.”

“It sounds plenty broken to me,” Olivia said, thinking of the bowl of scraps Horumn had given her for the one called Logarr.  “It sounds like the men get everything and the rest of you, the ones who made it all, get to argue over burnt crusts and bones.”

“Bah.”  Murgull waved her hand airily.  “Bellies are not so empty that we must gnaw bones, little sister.  Thin stew, yes, and too many bitter leaves for those who must live behind the iron door, but no worse than that.”

“But I saw…”

She stopped there, because after all she hadn’t seen Logarr actually eat anything she’d brought him.  And for that matter, Horumn hadn’t said the stuff was food.  She had no idea to what other use such leavings could be put, but then again, there were a lot of things she didn’t know.

“Saw what, eh?” Murgull pressed.

“Horumn gave me something for Logarr,” she began.  “I guess I just assumed it was a share of…Is he the sigruum?” she asked, thinking suddenly that the stuff might be used for magic or paints or something.

Murgull’s entire face screwed itself up into an expression of profound disgust, rendering her already gruesome features into a shocking caricature of itself.  “It is by your mate’s mercy that one lives at all,” she said, then turned aside and spat.  “He is no dream-talker.  He is not even tribe.  And a curse on Horumn’s lazy hide for sending you to meet with him!”  She started walking again, muttering sourly under her breath.

She knew she’d ought to let it go at that.  She knew it.

“What did he do?” she asked.

“No one knows,” Murgull answered ominously.  “But all can see how it marked him.”

They walked in tense silence, and finally Murgull heaved out an angry breath and said, “There is a tradition—tradition, ha!  A story, now!  A myth, a dream!—that allows for one of our young ones, upon the spear’s edge of adulthood, to go upon a sacred Journey.  Alone, without weapons or tools, they go into the human’s world, under the human’s sun, from full moon until full moon.  It is very dangerous,” she said, rubbing at her scars.  “But those who return are set above all others and permitted one request of the leader’s granting.  Gone are the days when such rewards had meaning for men,” she added, and spat.  “But still they make the attempt now and then, particularly when some new leader comes and they wish to prove themselves to him.  So it was with Logarr.”

“I don’t understand.  All he did was go on a journey?”

“All?  No, not all.  Full moon came fat in Urga’s sky, and Logarr did not return.  Many days and nights passed.  So, it happens.”  Another rasp of her palm over her scars.  “A second moon.  A third.  A sixth, a tenth!  His death was sung, his belongings portioned.  And more than a year after his Journey began, he returned with his eyes full of water and his tongue turned to stone.  Your mate brought him in, gave him welcome, gave him even his request as if it were well-earned, and what did he ask?  Eh?”  Murgull gave the folds of her neck a particularly violent twist.  “‘Never ask me to speak of it,’ he says, and that, for all these years, has been his only word.”

“That makes him less than tribe?”.

Murgull shrugged.  “Silence and secrets are a part of it.  His own will is the larger part.  He hunts for himself, shares no spoils, gives no token of honor to his leader, but takes, oh yes, takes his hunter’s share when his belly is empty, takes the hides made by tribeswomen, takes a new spear from the metal-maker when his own is worn.  If this were the tribe of the old leader, he would be cast out.  Ha!   If it were the time of the leader before him, he would be killed!  There is no place among us for selfishness, but your mate has made him welcome.”

Olivia, who did not think a bowl of day-old mountain greens was an overwhelming show of welcome, did not reply.

“Do not pity him, little sister,” Murgull warned.

“Pity is cheap, as a wise woman once said.”

“Ha!  Clever frog, but I choose which of my words are wise and when.”  She reached the wall of the shaft climbing up into the light, but stopped to poke at Olivia.  “You will hear me now, little sister.  All this tribe will bend its neck to you, and show you empty hands in respect, and stand aside when you pass by, yes.  But Logarr is not tribe.  His ways stand outside the laws of your mate.  He is dangerous, and you will not speak to him again.”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to go along with that,” Olivia said, trying to sound amused and not as annoyed as she really felt.  “I’m not going to shun him just because you tell me to!”

“Ha!  You raise your voice to me!  Even me!”  Murgull leered at her in good humor, then turned away and started climbing.  “You are too much like your stag-headed mate, to think you can change the world with roaring, roaring.  Follow, little sister.  Our time is too short to remake the whole world today!  Leave something for your tomorrow!”

Olivia scowled and pulled out her claws, watching Murgull climb with envious eyes.  She didn’t want another argument today, but anything that put off the struggle up this shaft was a good thing.  The fresh air and light of morning might be waiting at the top, but it still looked like a hell of a climb.  Not as much as the shaft at the other end of the mountain, maybe, not even as much as the Deep Drop, but still a mighty effort for her and her iron spikes.

Olivia cinched the last buckle tight and found the first well-traveled clawhold.  It was much deeper than those set in Vorgullum’s entry chute, which meant that she could clutch the wall with her fingers as well.  This made it a more secure grip, but also a more tiring one for the muscles of her forearm.  The last time she’d attempted anything like this, she’d made it all of ten feet.  That was just about high enough to guarantee a broken bone if she fell.

If.  Ha, as Murgull might say.  There was no Vorgullum here to scoop her up now.  There wasn’t anyone at all.  Even Murgull was almost halfway there and not bothering to look back.

No one was going to carry her this time.  Olivia started up.

It was easier.  That was the first thought that came to her as she made her cautious way up into daylight.  The women who had carved their clawholds into it had done so thinking of the burdens they would have to carry up and down and they had made their marks deep, not just a series of holes for her to grope for, but holes set into ledges she could see, ledges she could almost stand on.  It was really more like climbing a ladder than a wall, even if the rungs had been sized for gullan legs, and that did make it easier.

At first.

But the ladder went on and on and on, and having to reach six inches further than her body wanted to for each hand- and foothold, wore on her fast.  She kept her eyes aimed upwards, hoping that the sight of her goal coming ever closer would provide encouragement to her aching wrists and knees, but it wasn’t coming fast enough.  Murgull reached the top, gave her a grin and a cackle and moved away, out of sight.  She didn’t even bother to make fun of her.

She heard the scrape of claws below her soon after and hugged the wall to rest while the gullan women passed her.  One of them did, moving up and onward without so much as a glance her way.  But only one.

“Shall I carry you?”

Olivia made the mistake of looking down to see who spoke and saw, past the gulla with her backpacks slung over her arms and a basket strap digging into her forehead, a black abyss, bottomless with the light behind her.  Her stomach flipped over.  Her knees loosened and her wrists clenched.  She looked up, counting clawholds.

“Here.”  The gulla came quickly and easily up beside her and braced her wide shoulders.  “Take hold.”

“I think I can do this,” Olivia said.  Her voice sounded very breathy, very small.

“But I’m certain I can,” the gulla said, and turned enough to show Olivia a toothy grin.  “You have the rest of your life to be right.  Or wrong.”

Good point.  Olivia loosed her left claws and slung her arm around the gulla’s neck, then her leg around the broad hips, and finally let go her right hand’s grip and grabbed wildly for fur.  “Sorry,” she panted, settling herself on the uncertain terrain of the gulla’s back.  It had been a long time since her last piggy-ride.  “And thank you.”

“It is a small thing,” the gulla said cheerfully, her body rolling in strangely graceful lurches as she climbed.  “I’m Thurga.  Which one are you?”

“Olivia.”

Tension like a stony wave rippled down through Thurga’s body; she hesitated between clawholds, seeming to teeter.

The other gulla was coming back, her packs and baskets filled.  “Lazy-paws!” she called good-naturedly, passing them.

“Ouch,” said Olivia, looking after her.

“That was meant for me.”  Thurga started climbing again, but not with the same surety as before, as if Olivia’s name had come with another hundred pounds of weight.  “Are you really?”

“Am I really what?”

“Olivia.”  Her name was hushed, almost a whisper.  Or a prayer.

She couldn’t help the laugh that came out of her then, or the blush that rose in her cheeks.  “I hate to think what you must have heard about me,” she said, knowing firsthand the sorts of things Vorgullum had told his hunters.

“That you are our leader’s mate,” said Thurga.  She reached the top and climbed out onto the ledge, crouching so that Olivia could dismount.

Olivia did.  Thurga stayed crouched.

“So you finally arrive, eh?”  Murgull heaved herself up from the sunny rock where she had been sitting and came back into the mouth of this open cave.  Thurga scrambled back as the old gulla drew nearer, and Murgull paid her absolutely no mind at all; no doubt she was used to people scrambling to get out of her way.  She dropped her leathery hand over Olivia’s arm and began to tow her into daylight, cheerfully berating her for all the time she had been waiting, just as if it had been hours in the rain.

“Thank you for your help,” Olivia called.

Thurga ducked her head, watching her go with awe-struck eyes.

“Help, is it?”  Murgull laughed and shook her head derisively.  “And thanks for it, ha!  You are the leader’s mate.  Necks should bend to you.”

“I’m not better than she is.”

“No.  You are taller.  Enough of your human chatter.  You are here to learn.  Look there!”

She looked, and saw the sun for the first time since she had seen it going down the night she had driven home from a normal day at work to be abducted out of her bed in the night by monsters.  It was white and round and brilliant in a sky bluer than any sky had ever been.  Olivia pulled her arm from Murgull’s grip and moved out from the shadows into warmth, such warmth.

It was beautiful, the way it had never been when she had been free to walk carelessly under its light, but she didn’t start crying.  Her heart didn’t swell at the sight, she didn’t fall to her knees in wonder.  It was beautiful, like a dream, and the dream was over.

Gradually, she became aware of Murgull beside her, watching her.

“It isn’t the same,” she said.

Murgull grunted and rubbed at the scarred half of her face.  “Nothing ever is.”

“So…”  Olivia looked out again, not at the sky this time, but at the mountainside itself.  She saw a thin fall of frothing water pouring out of the rock into a deep pond and on down the mountain in a gushing stream; large baskets hung anchored in the current by ropes; the banks of the pond were black and stinking with fertile soil.  There were no fields, not even a patchy square for a garden, but some effort had been made to bring plants in close to the cave: she could see half a dozen different kinds of berry bushes from here, and thick tangles of growth by the pond where leafy things of all description grew in clumsy rows.  Trails worn flat by generations of feet looped out and around in all directions, and she could see several gullan women moving around in the distance, but Murgull appeared to be in no great hurry to join them.  “So what are we doing here?” she asked.

Murgull crooked a clawed finger at her and limped over to the pond and to the small jungle that surrounded it.  “Here are my tools, little sister, and it is time for you to know them.  Goldenspray, here,” she said, stroking at the flowering leaves of a tall-stalked bush.  “Young leaves and old blossoms make strong tea, good for the waters, and for matters of digestion.  A poultice can be made of boiled stems and torn leaves, to help all burns, sores, and other wounds heal clean.  And here, sweetsleep.”  She moved to indicate another tall shrub, this one with puffs of tiny pinkish-white flowers like miniature umbrellas all along its crowning stalks.  “A powerful medicine to ease the nerves and make sleep.  Not as good as tharo, but good, eh?  Safe for sucklings and their mothers when you use the leaves for tea.  The roots are stronger and last forever, but can kill a child so use it sparingly.  Here, dugwort.”  This one was little more than half a dozen branches jutting from a central stalk, sparsely fringed with soft, tumorous-looking growths that split along the tops to leak a milky sap.  “Foul stuff, but strong.  Crush the roots to make a paste good to heal infections or abscess of the teat, eh?”  She gave Olivia’s left breast a friendly poke, then moved on to a new plant.  “Here, bellyroot—”

“Murgull, I can’t remember all this!”

Murgull sighed, dropped her arm, then turned around and slapped Olivia in the side of the head.

They looked at each other.

“Bellyroot,” Olivia mumbled, rubbing her ear.

“Dig up in spring for best medicine,” Murgull continued, turning back to the plant.  “Good to settle bad stomachs, eh?  Best for sparking women.  The magic lasts perhaps one year, then give it all to the kitchens.  They put it in bread and such, bah.  And here, goatsbeard…”

7

It was not difficult work, but it was tiring, combining all the mental stress of a college cram session with the physical drain of standing out under the summer sun.  She couldn’t even complain, because every time she looked around, she could see Thurga and her friend hurrying along the steep slopes, gathering packs from the foragers and carrying them away at a run.  The foragers had it even worse: digging up roots, climbing trees, or just hiking however far they had to go to find the things they needed in amounts sufficient to feed the entire mountain.  Back and forth they went over the same stubborn territory, naming the plants, reciting their uses, moving on to the next one, until at last the sun began to sink.  Only then did Murgull release Olivia—exhausted, sweaty, dirt-smeared, and sunburned—to return to the cool welcome of the cave.

There she sat, leaned up against the unfriendly face of the rock, to stare at the shaft dropping down into the women’s tunnels.  Her arms were okay—they’d had all day to recover from the climb—but her legs already felt like they were about to fall off.

“Shall I carry you?”

Thurga again, crouched submissively beside her with a shy smile.

“I would be tremendously grateful,” she said honestly.  “But won’t I be too heavy?”

“You?”  Thurga looked as though she wanted to laugh, and didn’t quite dare.

“I don’t want to make more work for you.”

“I would be honored to carry you.”

“Oh for—Look, I am not that special.  I’m the complete opposite of special.  I’m clumsy and weak and fragile and an incredible nuisance, and it’s okay to tell me so.  You’re the one who’s been working all day, running back and forth under the hot sun to haul food when the most strenuous thing I usually do in a day is eat it.  In fact,” she went on, really warming to her own sense of self-disgust, “I ought to be the one offering to carry you, except that I can’t even haul my own tired ass down that wall.”

Thurga stared at her, her snouted mouth hanging open.

“Plus, I’m all sweaty,” Olivia went on morosely, raising one arm for a tentative sniff.  “So not only would I be a heavy nuisance, I’d be a smelly one.  I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”  Thurga recoiled as from a slap and stammered, “You are our leader’s mate!”

“So?”  Olivia looked at her, at all of her.  She sighed.  “You’re not hunched over like that for me, are you?”

Thurga started to straighten, then crouched even lower, utterly unpinned.

“Please don’t, if you are.  He picked me out entirely at random, you know.”  Olivia laughed a little.  “It’s like worshipping one of his loincloths.”

Slowly, Thurga stood up.  After a moment, she even smiled.  And then laughed, covering her mouth with one hand.  “His loincloth.”

“Same general purpose,” said Olivia, and Thurga laughed again.  “If you want to give me a ride down, I’d appreciate it.  But if you don’t, you really shouldn’t have to.  You don’t owe it to me just because I’m with Vorgullum.”

“I think I like you,” Thurga said.  “Let me carry you.”

She put out her hands this time, instead of bending.  Olivia chose to mark that as a victory of sorts, even if it did mean holding herself chest to chest against Thurga for the ride down to the ground, with her legs wrapped around another woman’s waist.

At the bottom, Thurga went on ahead, giggling to herself and muttering, “His loincloth,” under her breath.  Olivia pulled out her flashlight and clicked it on, then followed.

The women’s commons was almost empty.  All of the humans were gone and only a handful of gullan remained at the hearth, speaking quietly amongst themselves as they cleaned up and put things in order for the next day’s work.  Horumn sat on a bench beside the tunnel that led to the mainway, her robe hitched up so that she could rub at her bad leg.  She grunted when she saw Olivia, but was apparently too tired for insults.  She merely limped on ahead to unlock the door and lock it up again after Olivia had passed through.

In the familiar mineral-rich air of the mountain, the heat and stink of Olivia’s body seemed twice as bad as it had been in the open air outside.  It clogged her senses with the smell of sweat and fecund earth, of flowery perfumes and the nectar of plants that lured in bugs with the reek of rotting meat.

She really didn’t want to go home like this.

Olivia stopped, turned around, and set off for the depths.  She walked, hoping in vain that she might bump into some friendly gulla who would offer to swoop down and let her get a bath, but it was getting late and she met no one.  Soon she was standing at the lip of a hundred-foot drop, fingering her metal claws and wondering just how badly she wanted that bath.

“What are you doing here?”

Olivia screamed and nearly dropped her claws over the ledge.  She spun and saw Cheyenne’s captor about twenty feet away.  He was holding a Power Rangers backpack in one hand and an unlit candle in the other, and looked faintly irritated at her reaction.

“I was going to bathe,” she stammered.  “But I don’t think I can climb all the way down and back.”

He blew a grunt of exasperation and came over to the ledge, tossing the backpack and candle carelessly to one side.  “I’ll carry…you.”  His nostrils flared slightly and he blinked several times as he neared her.

He recognized her.

“Don’t bother, I’m sure I’ll manage,” she said nervously, and backed away from the ledge.

His teeth bared as if by reflex when she spoke, then he seemed to shake himself and focus hard on her face.  He glanced at the chasm and growled as she knelt down again.  “No,” he said, sounding angry.  “I’ll carry you.”

“I mean it, don’t bother.”

“You are not climbing down this wall, I mean it.”  He put out his hands firmly and glowered at her.

Olivia thought of putting her life into those hands.  That brought her the inevitable image of him throwing her off the chasm.  She thought of running.  It ended the same way.  Her screams wouldn’t carry much further beyond this cavern and she’d passed no one on the way in who might hear them.

‘The longer I stand here, the more suspicious he’s going to get,’ she thought.  She lifted her arms and held still.

He came up and took her, lifting her by waist to hold against his chest.  “Hold on to me,” he said.

If he were anyone else, she’d have slung her legs helpfully around his hips to help support her weight.   Instead, she put her arms around his neck, touching as little of his flesh as possible.  Her fingertips brushed the stiff bristles at the crown of that funny mane he had, and she thought of him again, straddling Bolga on the bench.  It was him, had to be him.  No other gulla she’d seen had that same mane.  What was she doing, for God’s sake?  How could she put herself here in his hands?

He wasn’t moving.  She could hear him breathing.  His claws flexed in her waist minutely.  She looked up and he immediately looked straight ahead.  She saw the glint of one sharp tooth beneath his curling lip.  Then he leapt off the chasm.

She’d known it was coming, but still she crushed herself against him, forgetting every reservation as she wrapped her legs around his waist and dug her fingernails into his back.  He wobbled in the air, then hit the ground hard.  His whole body shuddered at the contact; his arms tightened, yanking her full against him, and stayed that way.

“All…right?” he said in a drugged voice.

“Fine,” she said timidly.  What the hell was wrong with him?

He continued to hold her, not looking at her.  In growing horror, Olivia became aware of his swelling erection digging against her thigh.  His hands, still on her waist, trembled minutely.  Suddenly, he reared back and half-flung her from him.  “Get your bath,” he ordered, eyes dark with disgust, strangely unfocused.

“You don’t have to—”

“I’ll wait.”

“No, really, you—”

His head whipped around so that his snapping stare could stab at her.  “I’m not going to watch you,” he said, speaking very clearly and with undisguised bitterness.  “I will wait here.”

She scrambled up and had to force herself not to run as she left him there.  She could scarcely recall the way; her feet moved independently, taking her down the winding passage to the low-ceilinged cavern with the pools like mirrors scattered across its floor.  She stripped, shivering, and plunged herself into the first tepid bath, scrubbing blindly at herself with the greasy lump of soap left by some other bather and expecting at any moment to see him.  She never should have come this way, never should have left the women’s tunnels, never should have left Vorgullum’s lair at all.  No one was here, no one to hear her if she started screaming, no one to stop him if he decided to come back and just nudge her underwater a little.

Before or after he pushed her up against the wall of the bath, that was, and let her have all of what she’d felt pushing at her on the way down.  There was that, wasn’t there?  She thought of him and Bolga, his hand splayed open on her face, shoving her body back and forth on the bench in those quick, brutal thrusts.  The gullan word for fuck: pounding with a rock.

Olivia dunked herself, came up sputtering, and tried to think.  There was no other way up from the depths than the Deep Drop.  She knew that, because otherwise, how could the wasted ones have been kept here for so long?  So she couldn’t run, and if she hid, God knew, she might not ever find her way back out again.  If she waited here long enough, someone else might come down to bathe.  Of course, he might get tired of waiting and come in after her.  That seemed a lot more likely.  She had no weapons, not even a loose rock.  Not even a rock, and here she was, in the middle of a damned mountain!  Olivia wailed laughter and dunked herself again.

She was trapped.

‘All right, you know what the problem is,’ she thought, thinking in her new tough voice.  ‘Now come up with a solution.’

She couldn’t run.  She couldn’t hide.  She couldn’t wait.

She had to go back to him.

‘And if he kills you, it will be your own stupid fault,’ she told herself.

True.

Olivia climbed out of the pool and went into the side-cavern for something to dry herself with.  There were towels, blankets, pieces of cut-up canvas tents, and tablecloths all on one table for just that purpose. Elsewhere, heaped in baskets, were clean clothes—mostly loincloths and gullan robes, but a few human things.  Her own tie-dyed t-shirt was there, she saw.  Cleaned, dried, and thrown back in the stacks.

She pulled it out possessively and put it on.  She wanted pants to go with it, pants with a zipper which had the talismanic property of preventing her forcible undress, but there weren’t any in the baskets.  She was forced to settle for a skirt.  A nice, breezy, easy-access skirt.

God.

Unable to put off her return any longer, she reluctantly turned and took herself back to Cheyenne’s captor.

He was waiting for her, his back turned to her, facing the chasm wall, but gullan ears were very good.  As quiet as she was, she’d taken only one step into that vast high-domed cavern, just one, and he turned around.  He looked at her, then at the wall of the chasm, and back at her.  His face underwent a myriad of expressions, beginning with reluctance and ending with resignation.  “Come here,” he said impatiently, holding out his arms.

‘Look on the bright side,’ her inner voice said.  ‘Either he’ll kill you or he’ll carry you up.  Either way, it’ll be over and done with in just a minute.’

What a ray of sunshine she’d turned into.

His head cocked, his eyes narrowing.  She realized she was smiling.

Well.  She might as well get it over with.  She went to him, let him put his hands on her and lift her; she even put her legs around him, because the sense of dangling over the depths when she didn’t was so unpleasant, and anyway, he’d either do it or he wouldn’t, right?

He started up, moving in awkward, rigid jerks very unlike a gullan.  He didn’t look at her, kept his eyes fixed on the next clawhold, expressionless.  His breath came in hard, methodic pants, in perfect rhythm with his climbing steps and heaves.  She could feel his chest expanding with the force of them.  She could feel his heart knocking at hers.

And then he stopped.

Smack in the middle of the Deep Drop, he stopped.  He did not look at her.  He did not speak.  He hung on the wall and breathed in once, deeply.

Her arms around his neck began to tremble.

He pulled one hand out of the stone and slowly lowered it to her back.

“Can we…keep going?” she asked shakily.

His only response was a soft, thoughtful growl.  His hand slipped over the swell of her buttocks and pulled at her, pulled her taut against his body and then down until she could feel the hot bar of his erection pressing up at her.

Oh Jesus, here?  Right here?!

“I have to go,” Olivia said unevenly.  “Vorgullum is expecting me.”

“Yes,” he murmured, and did not move.

Her claws were in her belt pouch, pressed flat between them, like her flashlight.  She had no other weapons.  Well, she supposed she could always take a stab at clawing his eyes out, but really, what good would any of that do?  She might take him with her, but she’d be just as dead.

He shut his eyes, bent his head.  Now his slow, strained breaths were blowing down at her, hot against her cheek and neck.  It was too much like sex already.

She wanted to say something, but the only thing she could think of to say was, “Don’t do this.  Please don’t do this,” and the thought of begging like that filled her with an hopelessness too great to swallow.  If she begged, it was already over.  If she begged, he would know it was over, too.

She said nothing, just clutched his neck and waited, expecting at any moment for his hand to move.  It wouldn’t take much.  Her skirt was already hitched up.  He only had to pull his loincloth loose and shift it to one side, and he’d be in her.  She could scream, but he’d only put that hand over her mouth and push, like he’d pushed the idiot cries of pleasure back into Bolga’s mouth, he’d push and push and when he was done…

She looked down into the echoing black of the depths.

He stirred, not his hand but his head, giving it a shake like a man coming out of a light sleep.  He lifted his chin, opened his eyes.

Then he took his hand off her body and sunk it back into the wall.  He kept climbing.  His cock pressed and rubbed at her with every step.  She imagined she could feel it swelling.  And then she wondered if it was really her imagination.

When he reached the top, he placed her on the ledge, waited until she had crawled back, then joined her and straightened up.  There, he studied her seriously.  “You should go home,” he said at last.  “And you should stay there.”

Olivia didn’t care what he thought of her now.  She turned and fled.

Back through the winding tunnels, fumbling her flashlight out on the way and following its bouncing light back to the safety of the mainway, she ran.  Now there were people, oh sure, now there would be, and they gave her plenty of startled looks as she tore past them, but no one tried to stop her.  She ran until she reached the chimney to Vorgullum’s lair and stopped only long enough to get her claws, biting on the fastens and looking frantically behind her until they were on and she could clamber up into safety.

Vorgullum was in the sleeping room, spreading new sleeping bags on her side of the pit.  He looked up as she ran in and had enough time to straighten up before she crashed into him.  “This must mean I am forgiven,” he said, bringing up his hand to stroke down her hair.  “What—”

Then he stopped.  She heard him take a breath, a deep one, and hold it.  His claws flexed, digging at her back.  He thrummed.

“Oh God, I’m in season!” she blurted.  Thoughts of Cheyenne’s captor, his hand on her ass and that awful emptiness on his face as he’d pulled her down against him, took a sharp turn in her mind and clicked into a far better place.  She’d been in season and it’d had nothing to do with anything except dumb animal pheromones.  Laughter came pouring out of her in a shaky rush of relief.

The sound of it snapped whatever had a grip on Vorgullum.  He shoved her back, already tearing at his belt, fangs gleaming hungrily in the firelight.

“No, wait!”

He didn’t.

She tried to say his name, tried to back up, to make him take a moment, see her, something!  But he lunged at her first flinching step away, seized her, threw her down and fell on her.  He didn’t care about her clothes; the skirt tore a little as he shoved it up and out of his way, but apart from that, he showed no sign that he even knew she was wearing them.

‘It’s the shirt,’ she thought as he grappled her thighs open.  The curse of the tie-dyed t-shirt.  She was never wearing it again.

Then he was there, snarling into her face as he punched into her, pushing her back over the smoky-smelling sleeping bags with the force of his first penetration.  She tried to be ready for it; there was no being ready for it.  He split her, tearing the breath from her body, and then he was fucking her, the gullan fuck, pounding at her with the stone of his uncaring cock until he had battered his way all the way inside her.

She tried not to struggle and struggled anyway, screaming his name in bursts broken by his powerful thrusts.  Out and again, he plunged into her, his movements growing more ragged and more violent with the passing of every eternal second. She could hear nothing but the sounds he made, snuffling and grunting over her like some great rutting beast (‘Elk are passionate, right?’ that detached, laughing part of her said), could see nothing but his chest and the straining cords of his throat as he arched his back.  Whatever there was in him that was Vorgullum was gone.  Whatever was left, reveled.

She could feel it when he came.  He kept on thrusting as savagely as ever, even as his cock jerked in the throes of release; there was nothing in his snarling face to indicate pleasure or even awareness of his orgasm, only that mindless animal grin.  If anything, he pumped even harder, shaking her beneath him with greater ferocity until the last fit of his semen hammered at her bruised womb and he fell heavily atop her, as still as death but for the rapid panting of his breath against her ear.

But it was only the first time, and he was already hardening again.

Olivia caught him by one ear, twisting it until he opened his burning eyes and looked at her.  “You claw me again and I’m leaving you,” she said.

His lips curled back in an uncomprehending animal snarl.  He reared back, yanked her with him, and drove at her again.

8

In the aftermath, Vorgullum rolled with great effort onto his back and said, “You are magnificent.”

Without opening her eyes or attempting to draw herself out of the sprawl in which he’d left her, Olivia replied, “And you’re a prick,” in toneless English.

He got up.  Soon, she heard the soft scrape of flint and steel and then there was light behind her eyes and the smell of burning animal fat in her nose.  He came back to the pit.  She could almost feel the scratch of his eyes on her overused body as he peered down at her.  “Are you all right?” he asked.  “I tried not to hurt you so much…I think I tried.”

“Am I bleeding?”  It did not seem worth the agony of movement to check for herself.

He prodded gingerly at one thigh, sniffed a few times.  “No.”

“Then I’m not hurt.”

He did not reply, and the silence gradually took on weight until Olivia had to raise her head and look at him.  He at once looked away.

Damn it.  Damn him.

“I’m not hurt,” she said again, and tried to sound like she meant it, in spite of her sore muscles, in spite of the scratches cut into her arms, back, and shoulders, in spite of the pure hell he’d set in the whole of her insides, in spite of everything.  She even managed a smile.

He nodded once and turned away, using as an excuse his need to set the candle down, but even after he’d done it, he only stood there and faced the wall.  At last, quietly, he said, “I wish things were not as they are.”

But they were.  And so he was thinking of healthy young.

Olivia bit down hard on the rest of that bitterness before it could root too deeply.  “You’re a good man,” she said instead, and settled back into her new sleeping bags, now rumpled, torn, and soaked with sweat and semen.  “Thank you for the new bedding.”

He continued to stand beside the pit, watching her, perhaps.  “Shall I take you to the baths?” he asked finally.

As if he actually thought she could walk all the way to the Deep Drop.  Olivia bit down some more and answered, “Later, please.  For now, sleep is better.”

“Sleep is always good, Doru says.”  He came a step down into the pit, bent to brush the back of his hand along her bare shoulder and arm.  “You are a good mate to me, my Olivia.”

She smiled again, her eyes shut and jaw tight, and patted at his hand.

He left her and Olivia slept.

She woke some time later (without the sun or television to help her, her sense of time was grossly unbalanced.  The stuffy headache and twinge in her back indicated she’d been asleep for hours, even as her sandy eyelids swore it had been mere minutes only) to see him come in through the doorway with a fresh jug of water.  He saw her push herself partway up and made a hushing noise in her direction.

“It is night,” he said.  “Sleep.”

“Thirsty,” she muttered, and he gave her the jug.  When she had taken several swallows, she handed it back, saying, “How is everyone out there?”

He shrugged his wings and began to undress.  “We have had no kills since my last hunt, but there has been some meat from our traps.  There are no injured, no dead.  And Horumn says Bolga is doing well.  So far.  Murgull asked after you.  She passes along her hopes that you are this moment spawning a thousand bald, winged frogs.”

“How considerate,” Olivia yawned.

“So I said.”

“I was with Murgull all day,” she said, falling back into the sleeping bags.  “Why didn’t she tell me I was in season?  Is that really the sort of thing you people like to be surprised by?”

“Females can’t smell another female’s season,” he answered, as if the idea itself were ludicrous.

And males couldn’t smell it when a woman got pregnant, the way Murgull apparently could.  Pheromones.

Vorgullum pinched out the candle, casting them both into the black.  He came down into the pit to join her, his body warm and fur-soft against her back and his arm a welcome and familiar weight across her sore side.  “Olivia, my mate,” he murmured.  “May I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said, expecting something Murgull-related, perhaps to know what she did during her hours alone with the tribe’s most feared and infamous gulla.

He surprised her.  “What is that thing you are wearing on your wrist?  Almost all of you have one of some color and shape.  What is it?”

“We call it a ‘watch’.  It measures time.”

He digested this for a while, then brought her out of a light drowse by saying, “What is the measure of time now?”

“I don’t know,” she said sleepily.  “Mine is broken.”

“Oh.”  He sounded disappointed.  “Why do you keep it, then?”

She shrugged as best she could, lying down.  “It reminds me of home.  It reminds me of a world that needs time to be measured.  It makes me happy.”

“Would it not make you happier if it worked?”

“Yes, it probably would, but since it does not, I have to be happy while it’s broken.”

His breath blew soft against the nape of her neck, steady and slow, lulling her easily back toward sleep.  And then:

“Olivia?”

“Mm?”

“I want you to be happy.”

“I know.”  She yawned, reaching back to pat comfortably at his thigh.  “I would be happy if I were sleeping now.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

She was aware of him lying awake even as she fell steadily towards oblivion, but now, at least, he wasn’t trying to talk to her.  Olivia passed into a deep, suffocating sleep and dreamed once more of the moon, never really certain whether she was watching it, or it watching her.  It disturbed her, enough that she was almost grateful to be jostled out of it for the second time by Vorgullum trying quietly to light a fire.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” she groaned, dragging part of a blanket over her head.

“I was asleep,” he replied, scraping away with that stupid flint and steel.  “Now it will be morning.  Late morning.”

She uncovered her eyes.  “Seriously?”

“You can sleep if you like, my mate, but I should be hunting with the others.  The forests are full of humans now, which means the game will be in pockets easy to find.”  He paused to blow fire gently up over the mossy log until it caught, then leaned back and looked at her devilishly.  “But dangerous.”

She sat up, playing along, although she was in no condition to seduce anyone at the moment.  “Oh, my mate, you brave and fearless hunter, to fly so boldly into the very claws of danger!”

“Antlers, I think you mean.”

“Whatever, as long as you come back to me in glory.  There is nothing I love so much as my mate hot with victory.”  And on that romantic note, she tossed back her covers and limped off to the bathroom.

“I really wish you would stop doing this to me just before I have to leave,” he called.  “You have no idea the things people are saying about me.”  He muttered for a moment, and then raised his voice to her again.  “What will you do when I become so distracted with thoughts of you that I’m mauled to death by a bear?”

She reappeared in the pit room door and draped herself against it provocatively.  “It would never happen.  My great and daring hunter would surely defeat anything so paltry as a bear and bring me a belt of its teeth and claws.  ‘This is the work of mighty Vorgullum,’ I will say.  ‘How much more savage is my mate than this lowly beast!’”

He paused in the act of gathering up his loincloth, his head cocked on side to study her with a singularly thoughtful eye, and was about to reply when a male’s booming, laughing voice reached them, shouted up from the mainway.

“Vorgullum, does she have you chained to that damned pit?”

He jumped, flustered and snarled a wordless reply, then hurriedly donned his loincloth and ran out.  She heard him cursing and landing quite a few muffled blows between the ribald laughter of his fellows.

“Enough of that, are we going hunting or not?  Where is my spear?”

“I believe Olivia had it last, ask her!”

“Yes, use your mighty spear, Vorgullum!  You can scare the deer to death!”

Their voices receded into the distance, leaving Olivia laughing under her breath as she dressed.  Climbing spikes in hand, she dropped down the chute and entered the mainway.  Although a bath (and the opportunity to clean and dress her pit-wounds) was high in her priorities, the reality of the Deep Drop was still a daunting one, and she made her way first to the commons, where the hunters were gathered to give Vorgullum a hard time before heading out, and where she also saw three gullan females and several humans sitting in a circle.

Curious, Olivia started for them.  As she drew near, she saw they were arranged around a huge tin tub, which appeared to be filled with narrow strips of bark soaking in water.  The smell was quite pleasant, woodsy and strong, and made her think oddly of the pet supplies aisle at the Shop-A-Lot she frequented.  Or used to frequent.

“Mind your pull!” one of the gullan warned, reaching across two others to call a flustered Ellen’s attention to something in her lap.  “You are too loose.  Tightly, tightly!”

“I don’t want to break it,” Ellen protested, but Olivia could see her tugging at the spray of bark strips in her hands.

“If it breaks, it breaks,” the gulla shrugged.  “Best to break it by learning the right way than to make all a basket in the wrong way.” She glanced around, saw Olivia, and started.  “Oh, it’s you!”

“Hello again, Thurga.”

All the women looked up, but their hands were too busy to wave.  “We missed you yesterday,” Tina remarked.

“I was busy,” Olivia replied.  She figured she could just leave out what she was busy doing.  “What are you working on?”

“Not working,” one of the gulla replied smartly.  “Horumn has been chewing nettles all night and all day, so here we are, pretending to work and keeping out of her reach.”

“I see.  May I join you?”

The women stopped what they were doing long enough to expand the circle to accommodate her, and Olivia sat down.

“Everyone knows you,” Thurga announced, gesturing at the rest of them in turn.  “But this is Rumm and Crugunn, and these are Ellen, Karen, Carla, Tina, Tobi, Anita, and Victoria.”  She stumbled only a little over the human names and grinned hugely when she finished.

“We’ve all met,” Victoria said in an icy tone.  She gave her young basket a particularly vicious twist.

“Not all of us.  So you’re Tobi!” Olivia exclaimed.

Tobi, a lean little thing with spiky tufts of platinum hair streaked with nightclub colors and growing in as dark as Olivia’s own, looked up from her own clumsy basket.  “Um, yeah?”

“I’ve met your Doru.  Sort of.”

“Yeah?”  Tobi looked tickled.  “Nice guy, ain’t he?”

“I liked him,” Olivia agreed, thinking of the disembodied voice’s soothing growl that night in the tunnels when she’d lost Vorgullum, and of the gentle strength in his massive hand.

“Lemme tell you, fucking him’s a real hoot.”  Her voice deepened into a slow exaggeration of a male gulla’s rich baritone, funnier to hear in English, “‘Lie down with me, my Tobi.  Tonight, I am for you.’  Which sounds really sweet until he pulls out that fucking cannon and aims it you!”  She gave Tina beside her a friendly nudge to the ribs, giggling.  “Not that I’m what you call shy about heavy artillery, but damn!”

The gullan were studying her curiously, plainly wondering what on earth she was saying to make the other humans laugh.

“He’s like, extremely glad to have me around.  And Jesus, well, you met him, he’s big as a fucking house.  I can’t even touch my hands around his chest, he’s that fucking big.”  Tobi came to the end of one strip of bark and started weaving in another.  “He thinks he’s crushing me.  I swear to God, he’ll be humpin’ away and suddenly he’ll stop and go—”  Her voice deepened again.  “‘Are you still breathing?’”  She shook her head, grinning.  “Other than that, he’s really cool.  I’d never fucked a guy before.  He can be pretty intense.”

The gullan apparently decided the humans were never going to revert to gullanese without a subtle reminder.  “Did your mate meet with the other hunters?” Thurga asked slyly.

“Eventually,” Olivia replied straight-faced.  “They had to beat me back with a stick, but they did manage to pull him away, the six of them.”

“Such a handsome, handsome male,” Rumm sighed.  “When I see him in the baths, I could just cry, thinking of that fine body wasted on a human.”

“Believe me, sisters, no part of him is ever wasted.”

“His loincloth,” murmured Thurga, and giggled.

“Evil little frog,” Crugunn said, shaking her head.  “How I wish things were not as they are.”

“You’re not the only one,” Karen muttered.

“So!” Crugunn began brightly.  “You are Murgull’s apprentice.”

Thurga offered Olivia one of her shy smiles, but Rumm looked alarmed.

“That’s true,” Olivia said.  “I can’t begin to say how surprised I was.”

“She does tend to trap one into doing things,” Crugunn agreed.  “But if you ask me, she should have taken an apprentice years ago.  And all respect to you, Olivia, but I don’t know how I feel about having a human for a healer.”

“You know,” Tina began slowly, in English.  “I’ve got a bachelor’s degree and four years medical school, the last two with a residency in the ER.  I think I’m a bit more qualified to hang a shingle down here than a…?”

“Receptionist,” Olivia supplied, unoffended.  “And I think you’re right.  After lunch, we’ll go see Murgull together, and you can tell her yourself.”

Tina worked at her basket in silence for a while, then shook her head.  “No,” she said, and huffed out a dry laugh.  “I honestly believe I’d rather let a glorified phone jockey work me over than go tell old Murgull anything at all.”

“What was that?” Thurga asked when she was certain the conversation was concluded.  The humans stumbled over a rough translation, which left them all more confused than when they started, and Thurga nodded wisely.

“Bolga,” Rumm said bluntly, and they all looked at her.  Rumm looked around crossly. “Well, I want to talk about it.  No one says anything except how horrible it is that the poor idiot should be bred.  Of course, we all think that’s terrible,” she added, including the other gullan in her statement.  “But it was no unforgivable crime until the male that rutted with her refused to name himself.”

“Why should he?” Karen asked.  “Bolga isn’t going to say anything, so why should he hang himself?”

“It’s nice to know that being a dickhead is a universal attitude,” Tina added in English.

“Don’t you speak batty?” Anita asked her.

Tina shook her head.  “I’m working on it.  I understand it okay, but I just can’t make my damn mouth obey me.”

Tobi snickered and gave Tina a friendly sock to the arm.  “I had the same trouble,” she said.  “So Doru came up with this great plan where every day I spoke nothing but bat, he’d go into town and get me some real food.  Supermarket food, right? The very first time I got a Ho-Ho and a beer, I started getting my growl down, you’re fucking-A.”

“Now that,” Tina said, grinning, “is a real good idea.  But Gullnar would never go for it.  His idea of encouraging words are, ‘What the hell’s wrong with you now?’”

“I think I’d crawl naked to hell on a road of jagged glass for a cup of coffee,” Karen remarked.

“Chocolate,” Ellen said dreamily.

“Pizza.  Sausage and mushroom, extra cheese, thick crust, piping hot, with a side order of buffalo wings,” Anita sighed.

“Anything from McDonalds,” Carla put in.  “I personally hate McDonalds, and I’ve only eaten there ten times in my entire life, but I’ve been fantasizing about them lately.  You know, the fantasy where you go in and the place is empty except for a giant burger, and you roll around naked on the sesame seed bun and paint your body with special sauce?”

“What do you mean, ‘fantasy’?” Tobi asked, and they all laughed.

“Me?” Olivia said, sitting down.  “I’d like to eat my way through a Chinese restaurant.  Start with the egg roll and work up to Moo Goo Gai Pan.  Just suck it down.”

“Why Chinese?” Anita asked, screwing up her face in revulsion.

“Because an hour later, you’re hungry, and you can do it all again.”

“Is that all you miss?” Thurga asked curiously.  “Food?”

“Hell, no!”  Karen gave her basket a particularly vicious twist.  “I miss my fucking bed!  A real mattress, with sheets and blankets instead of sheepskins and old tents.  Waking up every night with zipper tracks all over my face…”  She trailed off, muttering.

The gullan couldn’t understand all of this, but they understood enough to nod and murmur wisely.  “Miss your bed,” Crugunn mused.  “Miss the mate that warmed it with you, yes?”

Karen rolled her eyes.  “Believe me, the last thing I miss is sex.”

“Sometimes I do,” said Ellen after a moment.  “At least, I miss hairless chests and foreplay.  But after the string of mistakes I have made up there, I have to admit, my guy down here really doesn’t seem so bad, you know, once you get to know him.  He is kind of a dickhead sometimes, but only sometimes, which is actually something of an improvement for me.”

“Dick…head,” Rumm repeated in awkward English.

“A derogatory term,” Olivia supplied helpfully.  “It means, someone with his brains in his loincloth.”

The gullan “aaah”d in unison, each with the same expression of pensive enlightenment.  Olivia got the feeling that by the end of the day, a new word would be penciled in to the gullan dictionary, if there was one.

“Remind me to thank you for adding vulgarity to our splendid new lives, dear Olivia,” Victoria muttered.

“Oh dry up, darling,” Ellen returned.

“Already has,” Carla murmured and smirked at Victoria’s glare.

Thurga cleared her throat casually.  “Ellen, may I ask you a question, from one woman to another?”

“Yes, of course.”  Ellen put down the basket she was mutilating and gave the other her full attention.  “What is it?”

“What is it like to couple with Mudmar?”

All three gullan looked at Ellen expectantly.

Ellen leaned back and considered the question.  “Well,” she said after a moment.  “It’s different.”

“From what?”

“From humans, for one.  Gullan are heavier, and, um, bigger.  At least, mine is.”  Ellen was beginning to blush.  “It feels different, too.  I…I don’t know how to answer, Thurga.  I’ve never been with another gulla, I don’t have any way to compare him.  Why?”

Thurga fussed with her basket for a while, then put it down and looked up seriously.  “I tried, once, to seduce him.”

The other two gullan looked quickly at her and away.

Thurga shrugged and returned her attention to her hands.  “Yes, I couple, although I’m always careful about it.  But I have wanted Mudmar for many years and he would not have me.  Would not have anyone.  I just wondered…”  She trailed off with a wistful sigh and picked up her basket again.

Crugunn showed a slip of fang in a sly gullan smile.  “I wouldn’t say he would not have anyone,” she remarked.

The other two gullan stared at her.  “No,” Thurga said, plainly meaning, ‘Tell me more.’

But Crugunn only shrugged.  “I don’t spread rumors.  I say only that Mudmar and a certain woman have been known to find work in the same abandoned lairs and passageways on several interesting occasions.  But it is not for me to say that they are meeting to couple.”

“So long as they are careful,” Rumm said mildly, and reached out to give Thurga a sympathetic pat on the knee.

“If ya’ll ask me,” Anita began, “it’s stupid to expect a whole tribe to abstain from sex.”

Carla snorted, whether in agreement or scorn, it was difficult to say.

“What is this, abstain?” Crugunn asked, laughing.  “It just takes more effort.”
“That, or one of Murgull’s awful potions,” Rumm agreed.  “Unless you want a thrashing with Augurr.”

Karen obviously had trouble with that translation.  “Want a what?  With who?”

“Augurr,” the three gullan women said together, then looked at each other and giggled.

Rumm continued alone, smiling toothily.  “Augurr could not keep himself from rutting with the women, even after the old leader forbade it.  Child after child he fathered and punishment after punishment he suffered for it, but if a woman offered, he couldn’t help but rut with her.  In tunnels, in the growing place, through the doors, even in the baths!  Finally, the old leader took him up to a high place and gave him some human drink.  When Augurr’s head was heavy, the old leader took out his hunting knife and whacked off his stones.”

“His…” Ellen’s eyes grew huge.  “Oh gross!”

“Harsh,” Tobi agreed lightly.  “But what can you do, right?”

“Oh, it was a terrible secret at the time!  Augurr was not the only male to breed without consent, you see, and I suppose he was afraid that he would not stand tall if enough of the tribesmen disagreed with his decision. Besides, Augurr was a full-moon’s child, and to kill one is a terrible offense to the Great Spirit.  But as it happened, after Augurr recovered, the old leader was shocked to see that Augurr’s appetites had not diminished.  In fact, he was tumbling females twice as often as before, because now there was no threat of sparking.”

“No way,” Karen said, not wonderingly but in a tone of flat disbelief.  “You can’t get it up without balls.”

“Sure you can,” Tina replied, by all appearances more interested in basket-weaving than her argument, which was delivered with her customary lack of delicacy.  “Although it’s unusual for a man to retain his libido after castration, it’s perfectly possible for him to have sex.  Historically, eunuchs were employed not to guard harems, but to keep the girls satisfied while ensuring that no one but the king fathered any children.”

“No way!” Karen said again, but now she was only astonished.

“Totally true.”

“How do you know this stuff?” Ellen asked in a marveling tone.

Tobi laughed.  “She knows everything.  Accept it now.  It’s easier.”

“So where is Augurr now?” Karen asked, glancing toward the hunters at the far end of the cavern.

“Oh, you won’t find him there,” Thurga said, laughing scornfully.  “His many eager women keep his belly full for him, so he has not hunted for many years, but he can always be found if one looks hard enough.”

“Particularly if the one looking is female, eh?”  Crugunn flapped her wings suggestively.  “And human.”

“What difference does that make?” Karen asked.

The gullan exchanged giggling glances, but it was Carla who answered, saying, in English, “Huge difference, apparently.  They’ve all got this mystical bullshit idea that us humans are all descended from some sort of succubus or something.  Plus, you know how they’ve all got such huge dicks, so think about it in reverse:  All us humans are the tightest fucks they’ve ever had.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Victoria snapped, and bent over her basket.

“How do you know they’ve ‘all’ got huge dicks?”  Karen asked, smirking.

Carla glanced at her coolly and kept weaving.

“If you’re curious,” Crugunn said, once the English had stopped, “I think Vorgullum has ordered Augurr to work in the new tunnel.”

Victoria’s lips had been growing progressively thinner with every word.  Now she put down her ring of precisely-woven bark strips and stood up.  “This conversation,” she said frostily, “has degenerated to adolescent perversity.  You may continue without me.”  She turned and stalked off.

The three gullan bristled, teeth bared, watching her go.

“Excuse me,” Rumm said darkly, “but did she just call me a pervert?”

“Called us all perverts,” Thurga growled.  The short, spiky hairs on the back of her neck was standing straight up in outrage.  “That slimy, naked maggot called me a pervert!”

“Move in,” Crugunn commanded.  “Let’s not leave a space for her.”

They all shuffled in slightly and took up their baskets again.

“This may sound silly,” Olivia announced without warning, “but I’m really enjoying this.  I haven’t been able pass more than a few words with another woman since I got here.  Well, Murgull, but she’s not a female as much as a force of nature.”

“Agreed.”  Rumm nodded at Olivia, then at the door.  “Speak of the storm, and the winds will rise.”

“Huh?”

“Here you are!”  Murgull’s gruff, cantankerous voice split the air like thunder.  “Old Murgull calls outside your chambers until her poor throat bleeds, and you are here!  Like she-goats chewing cud together.  Fine sight for Murgull!  Murgull who works, Murgull who slaves, Murgull who has no rest and no food! Put down that foolishness, and come with me!”

“I was on my way to see you,” Olivia began, scrambling up.

“On your way, is it?  On your way!  On your way on your round, hairless bottom with your hands full of basket!  If you had a wing, I would twist it,” Murgull fumed, and gave Olivia a sharp swat to the backside.  “Hop, frog!”

Olivia jumped ahead of her and set off down the passage, with Murgull at her heels and laughter ringing in her ears.

“First, you will show me how much you remember of the plants that grow, and then I will teach you how to turn plants into medicine.  If I use words you do not know—” Murgull began and stopped.  “Look there,” she said quietly, staring off down a side passage.

Olivia turned back and looked where Murgull was facing.  At first, she didn’t see anything, but then she saw a huddled figure against the wall.  “Who is that?” she asked, almost as if she expected Murgull to know.

Murgull shook her head.  “It is one of your kind.  Not well.  How pale she is, how still.  You, human!” she called.

No response.

Olivia raised her voice, called out in English.  “Who’s that?  What’s wrong?”

A shockingly pale face lifted out of folded arms.  Eyes like burnt holes in a blanket stared vacuously back at them.  “Olivia?”

“Liz?”

“Olivia, I done a bad thing.”  Liz did something supremely disturbing then.  She reached up with one shaky hand and put her thumb in her mouth.

“Liz, honey, come on out of there.”  Olivia reached out in what she hoped was a coaxing manner.  She felt ridiculous talking to a grown woman as though she was a child, but doubted Liz would notice. “What’s wrong?”

Liz looked up into the narrow chute leading to someone’s private chambers.  “I killed her.”

9

They proved unable to move Liz by themselves, and neither Olivia nor Murgull wanted to bring anyone else into this until they knew exactly what was going on.  Olivia climbed up the chute first and into a small entry room with three chambers leading off it.

“Holy God,” she said, reverting to English without thinking.  She looked around, recognizing this place.

Murgull heaved herself up into the room beside Olivia and looked around.  “Brown human lives here, yes?”

Olivia swallowed and heard a dry click.  There was a lump of pure horror in the back of her throat that would not go away.  She felt her legs moving her into the pit room.

Judith was lying in the pit, arranged as though she were sleeping.  In the dim light cast by the dying coals, she almost seemed to be breathing.

Almost.

Judith’s eyes were closed, but not even the flickering firelight could disguise the too-pale cast on her lifeless flesh.  Her lips had turned blue.

Olivia crawled into the pit and knelt slowly beside her.  She felt for a pulse, expecting, and finding, none.

“What happened here?” Murgull uttered a low, groaning cry and slumped down onto a bench.  “Ah, Lorchumn!  Great Spirit, how he will grieve!”

Olivia looked back at Murgull with huge, panicked eyes.  “What happened to her?”

“Poison,” the old gulla said bluntly, and pushed away further questions with impatient flaps of her hand.  “Do not ask me which, it was not one of mine.  Only look at her.  This is no sleep, no sickness.  No, there is a bottle of death in this room and we must find it, quickly, before Lorchumn returns.”  She sat forward suddenly, her good eye narrowing.  “That child below, she knows something, I think.”

“Liz,” Olivia said numbly.

“Go and see to her.  Make her understand.”  Murgull stood and shuffled over to have a closer look at the body.  “To do this to the mate who hunts for you,” she murmured.  “Little human, was your fear so much?”

Olivia climbed back down the chute to kneel beside Liz.  “What happened?”

“I want my Mommy.”

“Stop that!”  She’d used the same words with Cheyenne once, in the same tone, and now she got the same result: a flinch, a wince, and finally a fading of that tight shine of panic, and she knew that she was being heard.  “I can’t do anything until I know what happened, so if you know something, you need to tell me.”

Liz gazed up at Olivia, her eyes shining with tears.  “I didn’t mean for it to happen.  She told me she was having trouble sleeping, and I…oh God, I have some pills.”

“You have what?”

“He s-said I could bring s-something with m-me and so I grabbed my p-purse and—”

—like, half the contents of my bathroom cabinet.  She remembered now.  And apparently that meant a little more than change for the phone and dental floss after all.

“What were you giving her?” Olivia asked.  She couldn’t believe how steady her voice was.

“H-Hycodan.  It’s…It’s the purer form of hydrocodone, f-from Canada.”

“Jesus, Liz!”

“She said she was h-having trouble sleeping, so I just gave her a few.  Just a few, whenever she asked, you know, b-because we don’t see each other every day.”  Her voice broke and she began to cry in great, gulping sobs.  “I didn’t know!  I didn’t know!  I’m sorry!  Oh, I want to go home!”

A gulla put his head around the corner and cleared his throat awkwardly.  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Yes,” Olivia said.  “Something is terribly wrong.”

Two more gullan appeared behind the first.  “What’s happened?” one of them wanted to know.

“Someone is dead,” Olivia replied.  “And this one found her.”

They stared at her, gape-mouthed and horrified.  “Oh no!” one of them breathed.  “Where’s Lorchumn?”

“He’s gone with the hunters.  They just left,” another said, and turned to the third.  “Go find Vorgullum or Doru.  Let them tell Lorchumn.  Go, run.”

“Is anyone up there now?” asked the first as the other bolted away down the tunnel.  “You shouldn’t leave the dead alone.  Just in case.”

“Murgull is with her,” Olivia answered, and held up her hand to forestall more questions, switching back to English and dropping her voice to a whisper just in case one of them understood that even a little.  “Have you given pills to anyone else?”

“No!  Just…Just some Midol for Beth and Sarah, and a couple sleeping pills once for the other Sarah.  Just regular ones, not scripts.  And…And some peppers for Carla once in a while.  They’re mostly caffeine, I swear!” she burst out.  “They’re totally legal!  I get them at the gas station!”

Olivia turned and beckoned to one of the nervously-watching gullan.  He came forward with his hand out, ready to take Liz and her hysterics away, but she said, “Go get Tina, right now, please.  She should still be in the commons.”

He was away at once.

“I’m okay,” Liz said in a quavery voice.  “I am, re—”

“Tina is going to walk you back to your lair,” Olivia told her.  “And you’re going to hand over your purse, your pills, and your whole little pharmacy, you get me?”

Liz hesitated, wiped at her eyes, and haltingly nodded.  “I didn’t know,” she said, without strength.  “I didn’t, I swear.”

“I believe you.  But Tina’s a doctor.  It only makes sense for her to have any medications, right?”

Liz’s second pause was even longer than the first; her nod, noticeably more reluctant.

“At this point, the only one I’m going to tell is Tina,” Olivia said in her hard new voice.  “But if you make me, by God, I will tell Vorgullum.”

Liz burst into fresh tears, bringing the hovering gullan a few steps closer.

“What happened?” one of them asked.  “How did she die?”

“It was a sudden sickness,” Olivia replied.  Liz’s sobs doubled in volume.  “There was no way to know.  No way to prevent it.”

“Poor Lorchumn,” the gulla said.  “He suspected she’d sparked.”

Olivia only shook her head, helpless and heavy with sorrow.  She held onto Liz and wished for Vorgullum to come back and handle all of this.

10

Judith’s mate came back fast, roaring down the mainway in a storm of grief.  His friends tried to hold him back, but he raced up the chute to his chambers to see the body for himself, knocking Olivia into the wall without even seeming to see her.

Two gullan helped her to her feet, though she scarcely noticed them.  She felt like a puppet whose strings were being pulled, as far removed from her own body as if she had chuffed her soul into a rocket and shot it into space.

He screamed.

It was a ghastly sound, a wordless, bone-shaking bellow that seemed to grind through the whole mountain.  Those standing near his private passage heard the whooping gasp he made just before letting out another primal howl of agony and grief.  Again.  And again.  Once more, and then he fell to broken, mindless sobs that were even more terrible than the screams had been.

Murgull climbed out of the chute and sagged against the wall.  Her eyes met Olivia’s, searched inside her for a long span of seconds, and then she nodded once, as if she had asked her questions and heard them answered.  She limped away.

Vorgullum’s hand fell on Olivia’s shoulder.  “How?” he whispered.

“She fell suddenly ill,” she told him, not daring to look at him and show him the lie.

He squeezed her gently once, believing her at once and without reservation, then released her and started for the chute.

A moan rose out of the sobs, hanging in the air for an inexpressibly long time before dropping away again.

Vorgullum stopped and just looked at the chute.  “Lorchumn,” he called, without much strength.

“My beauty,” Lorchumn groaned.  “My treasure.  Ahhh, curse you, spirits!” he screamed, this time in rage.

The gullan flinched back from the raw pain in his voice, looking at each other nervously.

“I curse you!  Lorchumn curses all of you!  I spit on you, Great Spirit!  I piss on you!”

“Lorchumn!” Vorgullum called, louder.

Lorchumn let out a shriek, pure fury now, and screamed, “You killed my loved mate, you shit-sucking worthless bag of maggots!  Face me in the flesh, Great Spirit!  I’ll rip out your man-root and piss down your throat!”

Vorgullum scrambled up the chimney.

From within came sounds of battle.  Lorchumn screamed and cursed and struck out wildly, but there was a final, heavy thud and then nothing but broken sobs.

“Olivia.”  Another hand fell on her arm.  She looked around into Wurlgunn’s sick face.  “Come away from here.  You look awful.”

She nodded gratefully and went with him as far as her own chambers.  He wanted her to come with him and stay with Beth that night, since it was unlikely Vorgullum would be back soon, but she refused and climbed up the chimney to sit alone in her room.

She took out the photo album and turned the pages slowly, hating the silence, the emptiness.

I should have suspected something, she thought.  I knew something was wrong.  Why didn’t I say something? Why didn’t I know?

Something rustled and Olivia lifted her head and saw Cheyenne standing in the doorway.

“I just heard,” she said quietly.

“It’s awful,” Olivia whispered, staring down at the ground.

“It’s great,” said Cheyenne.

Olivia jerked her eyes back up, stunned.

Cheyenne came swiftly over to Olivia’s alcove and hunkered down.  “Everyone is going to be all caught up with this death thing.  Now is the perfect chance for me to escape.”

“What are you saying?”

“Meet me tomorrow in the back, where the chicks live.  I’ve got to do community service or something.” Cheyenne regarded her with a cold, distant expression.  “If you don’t want to help you don’t have to, but just hear me out.  I know you don’t care or anything, but it is my life after all, and I thought you’d have at least a little sympathy.”

“I—”

“Just say you’ll be there.”  Without another word, she withdrew and left Olivia alone by the smoking coals.

Olivia buried her head in her knees again.  She started to rock back and forth, but it reminded her distressingly of Liz, so she stopped.  The silence of the empty chamber was overwhelming at last.  She got up and left.

She called half-heartedly to Beth from outside the private passage that led to the chambers she shared with Wurlgunn, and Wurlgunn appeared above her in a moment.  He looked relieved as he stretched out a hand and hauled her up.  “I was hoping you would change your mind.”

“How is Beth?”

“Dazed, but well.  I think she wants to talk, but she won’t say much to me.  She needs a human.”  Wurlgunn walked with Olivia into the pit room and gestured at Beth, who sat cross-legged in a pile of bedding, looking at the fire.

“Beth,” Olivia said.

The young blonde looked around incuriously.  She didn’t say anything.

“Are you all right?” Olivia asked timidly, in English.

“Horumn came around and told everyone,” Beth replied dully.  “Really, Olivia, do I look all right?”

Wurlgunn’s eyes were darting back and forth from each woman, nervous but unwilling to interrupt.  Now, as the conversation uncomfortably lulled, he hesitated, “They say she was sick.”

“Yes,” Olivia said.

“Was it the White Fever?” he asked anxiously.  “Did Murgull see her?”

“It was, wasn’t it?” Beth said dully.  “Just like Tina said it would be.  And now they’ll all get polio and we’ll all die.”

“It wasn’t fever,” Olivia answered, and reached out to grip Beth’s shoulder, speaking carefully in gullan.  “It was a human sickness called ‘overdose’.”

Beth recoiled, started to speak, looked at Wurlgunn, and was silent.

“How did she catch this sickness?” he asked, and immediately and frantically followed with, “Could my Beth catch it?”

“No,” Beth said.  “It…It isn’t a sickness you can catch.  Jesus, Olivia, are you sure?”

She nodded.

Baffled, Wurlgunn dropped onto another bench.  “But, why didn’t she tell someone?  Murgull could have given her a potion to make her well!”

“No,” Olivia said.  “I don’t think anything could have made her well.”

Wurlgunn looked from one to the other of them, and then firmly said, “Lorchumn should know this.”

“He won’t want to hear it yet,” Olivia replied, rubbing her temples.

Wurlgunn considered her for a long time in silence, then said, “I think you’re wrong, Olivia.  He needs to hear someone tell him there was nothing he could have done.  No one who could have helped.  Many of his own kind will be saying these things to him, but he won’t listen to them.  He may listen to you.  Will you go and see him?”

Olivia gaped at him.  “What?  Now?”

He looked back into the fire.  “Tonight, her body must be prepared, made ready for release into the world of spirits.”  He met Olivia’s eyes grimly.  “He was her mate.  He has to make her ready and he has to do it alone, but no one knows how humans are delivered to the dead.  Lorchumn loved his Judith.  He has to be terrified right now.  You must teach him what should be done.”

“But I—”

“Olivia!”  Wurlgunn stood up and grasped her hands tightly.  “Who else does he have?”

Olivia hesitated, but couldn’t find a way out, so she pulled her hands out of his grip and stood up to go.

“If he curses at you, leave,” he said, “but remember that he is grieving.”

Olivia nodded and let herself out.  She walked back down the tunnel until she came to Lorchumn’s passage.  Some gullan were still standing here, but although none of them moved to stop her, they all looked as though they wanted to.  She moved past them and stood below the entry chute.

“Lorchumn,” she called.

A broken sigh issued from within.  “Olivia.  Come.”

She climbed up, surprised at how calm he sounded, and how willing he was to admit her.

He was sitting in the pit beside the body, simply looking at it and touching its hair.  He pulled his gaze away long enough to give Olivia a piercingly pleading stare.  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“Let me.”  She put her hand on his shoulder.  “Let me do it for you.”

He put his arms around Olivia’s waist and buried his face in her side.  “What did I do to deserve this?” he cried, his voice muffled against her.  “How could the Great Spirit hate me so much?  Why did he lead me to her just to take her away?”

Olivia knelt and put her arms around him.  “Oh, Lorchumn.  This wasn’t a punishment.  Judith was sick and no one could have known it.  Even she might not have known how sick she was.”

He pulled back just far enough to gaze up hopefully into her eyes.  “Was she…Do you think she was carrying my child?”

“No, Lorchumn,” she answered, as gently as she could.  “Murgull, Judith and I all agreed that she could not be carrying your child.”

He scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand, looking down at Judith.  “I tried to make her happy,” he said.  “She could not forget the world she came from, but I had thought she was beginning to like me, a little.”  He wiped again at his eyes.  “And she was my whole world.”

She said nothing, only kept her arms around him.

He stood and clasped Olivia’s hands in his.  “Will you stay with her while I make a grave?  Please.  I have to do this right.  I have to do that much.”

She nodded and he embraced her again before leaving, taking one last look at Judith before he went.  Alone with Judith, Olivia felt the depression she had been struggling with all night settle over her.  She wanted nothing more than to walk away from this whole mess, or failing that, go sit in the corner and stare at the fire.  But she had promised to make Judith’s body ready for burial, whatever that meant, so she set about it.

Judith’s body was still locked up in the grip of rigor mortis, and still could not be moved or adjusted.  Olivia had no idea how long these effects would last, but she thought she should begin by washing her down.

She pulled the bedding off of the body and put it to one side. The jeans Judith wore came off after a short fight, but the position of her arms and the rigor of her death-hard body made it impossible to remove her crudely-fashioned tunic.  She struggled with it for a short time, but her efforts were lackluster at best and soon, Olivia retreated to the entry chute, climbed down, and wearily faced the clustered gullan.

“I need a knife,” she said.

Vorgullum stepped forward at once, drawing his own hunting dagger and placing it in her hands.  That he did so without hesitation struck her as faintly touching on some level.  It was yet another show of faith, of trust, here before all those who had gathered to bear witness to this tragedy.  She wanted to hug him, needed to, but it didn’t seem appropriate with Judith lying dead just behind her, so she took the knife, touched Vorgullum’s shoulder, and then went back up to the body.

It was still a struggle.  She had to turn the corpse over and cut the tunic’s back, sides, and sleeves, then roll the body back onto its back and alternately pull and cut until she had the clothing away.

Olivia was tired now, and she didn’t want to touch the lifeless flesh, but she didn’t see a choice.  She took one of the larger rags from the tunic, and wet it with stale water from a jug by the hearth, and began to wash Judith’s body.

By this time, the corpse had taken on a bluish-bleached cast on top, and had turned a sullen purple below, where the blood had settled.  Her back and buttocks, where they had been pressed against the bottom of the pit, were yellowish-white.  Her lips were blue, and her mouth, half-filled with a yellowish scum of dried vomit.

Olivia scrubbed at the body, amazed to see a film of sweat and scum over all of Judith’s flesh.  Clearly, she hadn’t been bathing lately.  She worked at Judith’s fingers and especially her feet, the soles of which were black with caked-on dirt.  Carefully, she used the knife to pare the toenails and fingernails so they looked less ragged, then searched through Judith’s things in the corner until she found a comb.

It was a pretty thing, nicer than her own, made of small ribs made hard by heat and bound with sinews to a carved wooden haft.  Something this nice…it wasn’t just an object of necessity.  It was a gift from a man who had sincerely wanted to make his mate happy.  Had Judith ever been able to see that?  Had she ever been able to look at Lorchumn and see anyone except a monster?  She’d called him her abductor, even after all this time.  He wasn’t her mate or her man or even just her guy, but her abductor.  He was her nightmare, and not all the pretty little gifts in the world could change that for her.

And still some tiny part of Olivia’s mind whispered, Why should it?  He is a monster.  She was abducted.  This was her nightmare.  And this was the only way she had to wake up.

She shivered once, and then got back in the pit.

Olivia wetted Judith’s hair and worked the comb through it until the ratty tangles were gone and it could be braided.  She put the corpse back on its back, and after a moment’s thought, arranged the braid over Judith’s breast.

Olivia retreated to the nearest stone bench, sat down, and studied the corpse.  It was clean, white, and had nice hair.  She felt rather proud of it, actually.

She supposed she should pray for Judith now, but she was not religious herself, and had no idea if Judith was or not.  She went back to Judith’s things and looked through them again.

Although Lorchumn’s lair was quite small in comparison to Vorgullum’s, he had still made an effort to give his human her own space.  Judith had only a corner for her own, but that corner had been softened with a woven mat, its walls painted with the mate-markings of welcome, and all her things arranged there—two well-worn magazines, a number of flowers in various stages of death, a flashlight with dead batteries, and a woman’s purse.  Inside the purse were several cosmetics, a set of keys, an unopened package of nylon stockings, an address book, a checkbook, two ballpoint pens, an old shopping list, an empty box of Tic Tacs, an empty package of cigarettes, an empty bag of cough drops, and a wallet.  The wallet held forty-two dollars and seventeen cents, a library card, two video cards, three credit cards, a health club membership card, a driver’s license, a voter’s registration card, a small assortment of business cards and two photographs of a sandy-haired smiling man.  David, she supposed.  Judith’s husband.

Judith’s life.

Olivia sat and stared in fascination at these things.  The empty package of cigarettes had not been pressed flat, but had been blocked and preserved.  She lifted it to her nose and breathed in deeply, getting only a faint whiff of tobacco, which nevertheless filled her heart with nostalgia and filled her eyes with tears.  The empty box of Tic Tacs still smelled faintly of mint, and now she was crying hard.  The empty bag of cough drops still had that tart mediciny smell, and when she licked the inside of the bag experimentally, she could taste it as well.

At last, Olivia put all of these things away again and arranged them neatly back in the purse.  She wiped her eyes and returned to the stone bench to sit and collect herself.

She had no idea how much time had passed by now, but suspected at least two hours, and maybe three.  She didn’t know when Lorchumn would be back, but doubted it would be for some time.  Digging a grave was difficult work, especially in the hard, rocky ground this far up the mountain.

Still, he was probably expecting Olivia to have accomplished something, so she wracked her brain to think of what.  After a minute’s unease, she went to Judith’s purse and brought back the cosmetics.  She didn’t intend to apply any make-up, since she knew she wouldn’t do a very good job and she’d end up making the body look creepy.  Instead, she began to paint Judith’s body, using sweeping lines of lipstick and powdery eyeshadow in designs she hoped looked sufficiently mystical.  It worked for Mojo Woman; she thought it would work for Judith, too.

The result was actually quite striking, she thought, leaning back to admire her work.  Judith still looked very dead, but her serene sleeping expression coupled with the ritualistic markings applied all over her body gave her a funereal air.  Olivia pulled the braid around her neck and draped it back between Judith’s breasts, then arranged her hands on her belly.  She put Judith’s legs together, toes turned inward, and decided she was ready for burial.

As if on cue, she heard Lorchumn call her name tentatively from the entry chute.

When she answered, he climbed up into his lair and came to stand over her, looking down at Judith with a mixture of grief and resignation.  She realized that in his eyes, the ritual markings over Judith’s body made it easier to accept that she was dead, and she was proud of herself for thinking of it.

“I brought something to wrap her in,” he offered hesitantly, after he’d gazed on the body for some time.  “Is that…permitted?”

She had been expecting more camping equipment, or perhaps a tarp, but what he gave her was a set of king-size bed sheets, still wrapped in plastic with a price tag in the upper corner.  They were a crisp white in color, with a black trim and border.  As sheets went, they were very nice, and very expensive, too.  She couldn’t help but imagine Lorchumn smashing the display window at Mattress Town and picking his way casually through the sheets until he found a set appropriate to bury Judith in.

Noticing her stunned expression, Lorchumn shifted uneasily.  “I stole them,” he said.  “Of course.  There is a place where things like this are gathered.  There are big, soft benches, wrapped in blankets and other fabrics like this.  I know she didn’t like what I had here.  I thought…she should have something better for…this.  I wish…”  He sent the sleeping pit and its sorry heap of tents and fleeces a miserable glance.  “I wish I had done something sooner.  I knew she didn’t like the bedding I had.  I knew—”

“Stop, Lorchumn.” She touched his arm, then his cheek.  “Please.”

He turned his head slightly into the cup of her hand and that was all for a long time.  Finally, he took her wrist and moved her gently aside.  “I need to get some rope,” he said dully, and withdrew to let Olivia wrap the body.

Olivia used the knife to open the plastic wrapping, and pulled out the set of sheets.  One top, one fitted, two pillowcases.  She wrapped the pillowcases up with Judith, first in the fitted sheet, then in the top sheet.  By the time she was finished, Lorchumn was back. She bound the body at the shoulders, the waist, the knees and the ankles, and that was all there was to do.

“Thank you.”  Lorchumn bent and gathered the body up easily in his arms.  He stood, looking down at Olivia with naked agony.  “I know you didn’t want to come here, and I know it was hard for you to stay and do what had to be done to release my beloved mate’s soul.  The meat of my kills are yours.”

The last thing in the world she wanted was to take food out of his mouth on his first night of mourning, but she realized that he was close to tears, and to avoid having to see them, she gave in. “Because it means so much to you, I accept.”

He nodded once, then turned and carried Judith away.

Olivia stayed behind, gathering up the bedding which had been fouled by Judith’s last hours.  She didn’t take it all—just two tents and one sorry scrap of fur—because she wasn’t at all sure if there were a clean stack somewhere in the mountain to replace what she took, but Lorchumn shouldn’t have to come home to the stains and smells of death.  So she took the worst of it, dropped it down the chute, then climbed down herself and started to gather them up again.

“You did a good thing, Olivia,” she heard someone say.

She thought it was Vorgullum’s voice at first, but it was just a little off.  Turning, she saw a gulla just a little too short, a little too broad, and a little too…off to be her mate.  In other words, a gulla who was probably nothing like Vorgullum at all, and that was just how badly she wanted to see him.  “I had no choice,” she said, bending again to gather the bedding.

“Of course you did.  You could have refused to come here, like all the other humans.  Instead, you came and performed the final service for that poor woman.  No one here will forget that.”

“Do I know you?” she asked irritably, holding the wet, smelly fabric in her arms.

“Let me take that,” he said, and did without waiting for agreement.  “My name is Sudjummar.  I’m the tribe’s metal-maker.  You’re wearing my claws.”

“Oh,” she said in a little voice.

He smiled at her.  “I don’t expect you to know that.  I don’t expect you to know me at all, except that I have seen you once in the mines, and twice in the tunnels.  Vorgullum talks about you, but he hasn’t mentioned your bravery.”

She gave a very unladylike snort and tried to look around him.  “Where is he?”

“Waiting for you, I should think.  The others are at home with their mates, trying to comfort them and explain.”

“Then you should be with yours,” she said.

He smiled at her.  “I have no mate,” he told her, and turned away down the tunnel.

She saw why immediately.  Even in the dim light, she could see the knobs of his malformed spine pushing against his thin skin through balding patching of hair.  His wings were askew, atrophied, and blotchy.  When he walked, it was with a light, strangely graceful limp.

“I have no mate,” he said again, lightly now, “so I have more time to think.  And I have thought about you quite often.  For many days, all we knew of you humans was that you were here.  We heard some names, and a very few stories, none of them pleasant…then, you all came out together, and suddenly all we hear are tales of Olivia.  Olivia, Murgull’s apprentice.  Olivia, who gentles the angry hearts of her kind.  Olivia, who praises and pleases her mate.  What is it about you that makes us want to tell you our true names?  What is it that makes us listen to your words?”

“And what have you decided?” she asked, following him down the mainway towards the women’s tunnels.

“Nothing, yet.  But I’m glad I met you.  I see a sadness inside you and yearning for things you will never have again.  But I also see a strength and a sense of purpose, and that is something none of the others have.  Even Mojo Woman, who seems to think she has some power over us, has no real sense of purpose.  And Cheyenne, who is very strong, has nothing inside her but rage.  You’re different, Olivia.  You are truly a leader.”

“No, I’m truly not,” she told him.  “And I never wanted to be.”

“What does that have to do with anything?  I never wanted to be a metal-maker.”  He reached Horumn’s ‘waiting place’ and set the ruined bedding down on the bench inside the alcove.  He went on ahead to the iron door, struck at it with a small hammer he had hung on his belt, and said, “I just wanted to be special enough for someone to want to keep me fed.  Discovering that I actually had talent at it came as something of a pleasant surprise.  Hold a moment.”

Sudjummar paused to exchange a few low words with whoever had answered his knock.  When he came away from the door, gesturing comfortably for Olivia to follow him, she did.  “They will see it all properly burnt,” he told her.  “And have fresh things brought before Lorchumn’s return.  You were the only one who thought of that, you know.”

“I was the only one who had to see it,” she reminded him.  And smell it.

“Have it your way,” he said mildly, and went on.  “I began my work as the clumsy fool who hauled rock for the old metal-maker, and by the first snows of the following year, I had surpassed him.  Good for Sudjummar, eh?  Are you wondering yet why I’m telling you all this?”

“Yes,” said Olivia.  “Very much.”

“It’s to tell you that fate is seldom found in the first place you look for it.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” she sighed.

“You don’t like that one?  All right, try this:  Once you turn rock into metal, you can never make it back into rock,” he said.  “By tomorrow, all the tribe will know what you did for Lorchumn tonight.  By tomorrow, we’ll know that you don’t simply stand tall beside your mate, you stand tall all on your own.”  He gave her a sly, sideways smile.  “That should lead to some interesting moments.”

“Thank you,” Olivia said, not at all certain if she’d just been paid a compliment or a warning. “And thank you for walking with me, but I see my mate’s lair just ahead and I need to go back to him.”

“I had my own selfish reasons for keeping your company,” Sudjummar said.  “But if ever you wish to speak with me again, I can always make myself available. I do very few things well outside of my forge, but I can listen.”  He raised his hand in a gullan salute, then walked back the way they’d come, leaving Olivia to climb up into Vorgullum’s lair.

Vorgullum was in the sleeping room, hunkered down before the fire, stirring it with a poker.  She made a deliberate soft sound and he looked around.

“Are you well?” he asked quietly.

“I hurt,” she answered.  “It was very hard for me.”

He nodded, rising and stood aside as she undressed and climbed into bed.  “Do you,” he began awkwardly, “want to be alone?”

“Never, Vorgullum.”

He crawled into the pit beside her and stretched out, warm and solid next to her skin.

She rolled up close against him, put her arms around him and felt his arms close around her.  The weight of the last twenty-four hours eased away from them, and she slept.

11

Olivia was jostled awake only a few hours later when Vorgullum rose.  He moved slowly and quietly, unaware that she was not asleep, and left as quickly as he could.  Olivia considered going back to sleep, but remembered that she had agreed to meet with Cheyenne.  It was the last thing in the world she wanted to do this morning, with Judith’s death still fresh in her mind, but she had promised and even if she hadn’t, she felt compelled to go to the women’s tunnels and help where she could.  As a hunter’s mate—the leader’s mate, even—she wasn’t obligated to do so, which only made the urge that much stronger.

So she got up, heavy heart and all, to use Vorgullum’s private washroom, don the climbing claws that no one else had, go freely down from the leader’s lair, and do her part to fit in with the other humans of Hollow Mountain.  To lead them, no less.

The hunters were gathering in the commons when she passed it.  Vorgullum himself was not in evidence, but several others saw her as she peeked in and raised their hands in salute.  She waved back, somewhat uncertainly, and moved on.

Although early morning (if the grey light shining down from the mirrors in the commons could be trusted), the mainway was not entirely deserted.  She walked close to the wall where she couldn’t trip up the few hunters running to meet up with the others, and found herself forming a slow-traffic lane with the older, less-able gullan on their way to clear Vorgullum’s shift-work tunnel.  Now and then, a female would hurry past—filling and lighting lanterns, hauling bundles of fuel or water jugs, delivering supplies, or simply rushing about their own mysterious business—and Olivia could not help but notice that these laborers were invariably aged and unattractive specimens of gullan femininity.  More than one cast a curious glance Olivia’s way, surprising her not a little with their seemingly sincere lack of resentment.

When she reached the women’s tunnels, she found Horumn standing just on the other side of the locked door, gripping onto the bars for balance as she bent and rubbed the misshapen mass of her left leg.  She straightened up fast when she caught the splash of Olivia’s flashlight, then saw her and made a predictable face.  “What do you want?”

“I’ve come to help.”

“Help?  All the help we need from you can be got in your own lair with your naked legs open!  Go away!”

Olivia felt herself blushing and that embarrassment, more than the crudity of Horumn’s sneer, made her usually mild temper flare.  “Am I forbidden here?” she demanded.  “Because if I am, then I’ll leave you in peace, but I will know the reason why from my mate!  And if I’m not,” she went on as Horumn stepped back with a narrow frown, “then open this door and stop giving me trouble!”

Horumn shifted her eyes away, aiming her scowl behind her into the riot of the women’s commons, and back again.  “So.  You would use him as a spear against me.”

“And you!  You would force me to use a spear just to open a damned door!  You don’t have to like me.  You don’t even have to be civil to me, but don’t make problems for me and expect me to slink away!”

Horumn grunted, made as though to spit, then thought better of it and simply unlocked the door.  “Do what you will then,” she muttered, standing aside.  “But do not expect me to hold your hand.”

Olivia bit back the first retort to spring to mind (and the second), and went on.  Inside the commons, the chaos she remembered had been dramatically reduced, mostly because there were only three other humans working here alongside the gullan, but she supposed that would change once they’d all awakened.  It was still awfully early.  All the same, she headed over to where Amy was hard at work peeling and chopping roots, tapped her on the shoulder, and asked if Cheyenne had been by yet.

“Yeah, she got dropped off about ten minutes after I did.”  Amy sent a swift glance upwards, careful of the sharp blade at work in her hand, and politely said, “Why, out of curiosity, in the blue blazes would you want to waste your time with that rabid bitch?”

“She wants to talk to me.”

“I’ll bet.  You realize she wants your help escaping?”

“I figured,” Olivia said glumly.  “But what am I supposed to tell her?  ‘I’m sorry you’re not enjoying your captivity as much as I am, now get bent?’”

“I did.”  Amy gave her chin a toss towards one of the far passages.  “She went off down there with Shugruth and Borra, so unless the tunnel loops around and comes out somewhere else, which is always possible, she’s still there.  I’m not going to tell you what to do with her,” she went on evenly.  “But I am going to ask you to remember that with every word she says, her ultimate goal hasn’t changed.  I have a lot of sympathy for people like Karen and Carla, who are probably never going to be happy here no matter what, but I also have a lot of sympathy for an entire species tottering on the brink of extinction.  Cheyenne doesn’t care about either one.  She’d slit a gullan throat if she had the chance and go right over the top of the twitching corpse if it meant she got out of here, and I’m not a hundred percent sure she wouldn’t do the same to one of us.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not—”

“Are you?” Amy cut in sharply.  She stabbed another glance up at her, her knife hand steadily working.  “Are you sure?”

And Olivia found she could not answer.

“Go on then,” Amy said.  “Get it out of the way early so you have the rest of the day to get the taste out of your mouth.  Yawa’s going to take a bunch of us topside to have a look at what they’re doing for a garden here.  I personally have ten brown thumbs, but Sarah B. and Anita both sound pretty excited about it, and I gotta say, just being outside has a certain appeal.”

It was true, and it hadn’t been very long ago at all that Olivia had been frantic to feel natural sunlight on her bare hands herself, but not now.  Cheyenne was waiting for her, and until she got that unpleasantness behind her, the only anticipation she could seem to feel was of the low and dreadful kind.  Olivia gave her friend a small wave, received a distracted nod in return, and went on her way down the indicated passageway.

It was not a long walk, and she didn’t have to go far at all before she didn’t even need her flashlight.  She could just follow the smell.

At the end of a steeply sloping rise, the narrow passage opened into a cramped chamber, one roughly the same size as the kitchen back in her apartment, made even cozier by the addition of an enormous bubbling cauldron, two robed female gullan, Cheyenne, and now Olivia.  The cauldron hung from an iron rod running wall to wall, and had a notched lip indicating it was meant to be poured where it stood and not carried away.  The fire burning under it had burned to a low bed of deep red coals, and the heat trapped in this tiny space was positively infernal.  A chimney of sorts had been fashioned from hammered sheets of what certainly appeared to be tin (patched in places with flattened soda cans, no less; most were charred beyond recognition, but she could clearly make out two 7-Ups and a grape Shasta), but its benefits were nominal; every surface came coated with its own thick layer of greasy soot.

“Stirring helps,” the older of the two gullan was saying, even as she ran a thoughtful eye over Olivia.  “There are always some lumps, of course, but the trick is to melt it all as evenly as possible.  You may have to add more water to keep it from burning.”

“How the hell am I going to know if it burns?” Cheyenne demanded, giving the contents of the cauldron half a turn with a bit of branch just as old and gnarled as the gulla instructing her.  “Does it start to smell better?”

“It smokes,” the old gulla answered.  “And it will be ruined, which wastes time, fat, and my narrow patience.  Are you lost?”

“No, I…”  Olivia gestured weakly towards the cauldron.  “I came to help, if I can.”

The old gulla waved her closer while the younger one (and only minutely younger at that) apparently decided that was one body too many for the sweltering cavern and departed, mumbling something as she went about checking on the other humans.

“What is it?” Olivia asked, looking queasily down into the simmering, distorted depths of the malodorous cauldron.

“Cattle fat.  Some elk.” The old gulla eyed her as she took the branch from Cheyenne and gave it a stir, then said, “You are our leader’s mate?”

“Yes.  Olivia.  And you are…?”

“Borra.”  She raised one hand in a perfunctory salute, then pointed down into the cauldron.  “This will be ready to pour today.  You will watch it closely, and when it has melted as much as it can, one of you will come to fetch me.  What shall we make of it?” she concluded, looking at Olivia.

Cheyenne’s stare scratched at her.

“Um, what were you going to make before I came along?” Olivia asked.

“Soap.”  Borra shuffled her folded wings in a gullan shrug.  “That would be most difficult, because we would have to prepare the ashes also.  Candles.  Tallow blocks for our stores, perhaps.  That would be quicker and far easier to teach, but the others are more useful to know.”

“Candles, I guess.”

“Good.  Takes all day, but occupies empty hands.”  The old gulla gave Cheyenne a cool glance, then returned her gaze to Olivia.  “I have work to do.  You will stay together, so that one can come to fetch me while the other stirs.”

“I promise,” she said, and on the other side of the cauldron, Cheyenne grunted some sort of agreement.

Horumn raised her hand again and left them.

“I thought she’d never leave,” Cheyenne remarked. “And to be honest, I was afraid you weren’t even going to find me.  I’m sure they look for the most out-of-the-way places to stick me, precisely so I don’t get to talk to anyone.”

“How did you get past your guard?” Olivia asked, stirring.

“I didn’t.  Short hands in the hunting parties lately.  A good guard is tough to find.  So for the next few days, I’m Horumn’s problem.  Are you actually going to stand there all day and stir that shit?”

“I don’t want it to burn,” Olivia said.  “If you’ve got something to say, you’d better get on with it.”

“I’m not asking you to commit murder, you know, I just need a little help.”  Cheyenne moved around to check the empty tunnel, then came back, dropping her voice.  “Horumn keeps the back door locked, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, she never takes off the key.  That means the only possible way out of this mountain is through the front door, at night.”

Olivia shook her head, dumbfounded.  “You haven’t got a prayer!”

Strangely, Cheyenne didn’t seem offended.  “Most of these furballs still turn out the lights and go to sleep when the sun goes down, and the ones who don’t will be Doru’s night-hunting party, and they’ll leave.  Either way, the tunnels will be empty.  It’ll be a risk, especially if the hunters actually catch something and come home, but it’s my best shot.”

“But your guard—”

“Goes away when my male oppressor comes home at night,” Cheyenne finished calmly.  “Not very smart of them, I agree, but those are his orders.  If the guard stuck around, it might be a tough for him to fuck around, you see.”

Olivia frowned.  “I guess it would.”

“He comes home a little before dark to check on me, and if I’m asleep when he does, I can pretty much guarantee that he’ll slip away to his girlfriend.  I guess he got spooked after this thing with Bolga, because whoever he’s meeting with now, he’s meeting her in the depths.”

“What, in the hot springs?”

“No, further back.  Where they used to keep the wasted ones, I guess.  It’s a good place for a forbidden fling,” she added.  “Everyone else thinks it’s haunted or something.  He doesn’t exactly stick to a schedule, but he’s never been gone less than an hour or more than three hours.  And that’s not enough time.  I mean, I’m a strong woman, but I still have to climb out by hand.”

Olivia drew back suspiciously and Cheyenne gave a hard, brittle laugh.  “I’m not going to ask for your damn spikes.  Although they would come in pretty handy, they’d also ruin your alibi.  All I want you to do is delay my male oppressor for a few extra hours.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Olivia demanded.

“I can’t help but notice that you carry a lot of weight with these furballs, especially since yesterday.  Even my male oppressor grunted something about you after you went up to deal with the stiff.  I’m sure he’s a little paranoid of what you might or might not know about him, but I don’t think he out-and-out suspects you anymore.  So say you head down the Deep Drop the night I escape and kind of loiter around where he would have to walk over the top of you to get back up.  Right outside the baths, say.  He might allow himself to be distracted, especially if you come on a little strong about little old you and the big, scary ghosts down there.”

“And you honestly think that would work?”

Cheyenne shrugged.  “Why wouldn’t it?  He’s like every other guy.  He loves to get his ego stroked.  Getting a mental hand job by the infamous Olivia will probably be enough to make him forget about me, at least long enough to make it possible for me to get out of this damn mountain.”

“And do what?” Olivia asked.  “Bring back the cavalry?  What is that really going to accomplish besides—”

“Getting you all killed,” Cheyenne said irritably.  “I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over seeing these furballs catch lead, but I’m not dumb enough to trust Uncle Sam with my welfare after he finds out I’ve been living with fucking subterranean bat-monsters.  And I wouldn’t want to see any of you guys rescued from the furballs just to get locked up in a bunker for the rest of your lives, either,” she added after a short pause.  It would have been perhaps unfair to say she said it as an afterthought.  “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

Olivia was already shaking her head.

“Look, I’ve spent eight years volunteering at the women’s shelter downtown,” Cheyenne pressed.  “I know all about the value of a new identity, and I’ve put a lot of stuff aside, just in case I should ever need to disappear.  I’m betting it’ll work just as well when I need to reappear as someone else.  Olivia, listen to me.  You have my word, my word, that I will not tell anyone anything about this place, but I can’t live here.  Maybe you can, maybe you all can, I don’t know.  I’m not going to judge you all for that, but I am in hell.”

“I—”

“He hits me.  He chokes me while he’s screwing me.  He sits on me and burns the soles of my feet with coals.  When he can’t get it up, he puts things in me and fucks me that way.  Does that sound like a life to you?  What do you want me to do, just wait for him to kill me?”  Cheyenne’s eyes narrowed while she watched Olivia gaze helplessly back at her.  “You need to help me,” she said finally.  “I can’t trust anyone else with this.  You need to help me, and if you can’t do it, then tell me now, because I am not going on like this if there’s no hope at all.”

If it was a suicide threat, it was an angrier one than Olivia had ever imagined.  Might Cheyenne attempt to kill her gullan captor?  That was a distinct possibility, and one that could cast suspicion over all the human women.  She could think of a few others, like Victoria and Maria the Mojo Women, who might be in serious trouble if that happened.

On the other hand, if Cheyenne didn’t make it out of the mountain, she might leak Olivia’s name, and that would destroy Olivia’s hard-won reputation.  Hell, Cheyenne might do that whether or not Olivia agreed to help.

But maybe if Cheyenne made the attempt and it failed, she would be forced to reassess her position here, and come to a kind of truce.

On the other hand, there was a slim chance that Cheyenne might actually escape, or die trying, and either would probably suit Cheyenne fine.

And if she did escape, she still had to get off the mountain before she died of exposure.

But if she did…miracle of miracles, if she did, could Olivia really trust her to keep her word?

Cheyenne heaved a sudden sigh and said, “All right, look.  Judith’s timely leap into oblivion means that her lovin’ fuzzball has the next five days to howl at the moon or whatever these fuckers do when one of them dies, and my male oppressor is going to want to show his concern with all the other raping bastards, if only to keep up appearances.  As soon as his routine goes back to normal, I’ll set down a day and let you know.  Think about it until then.  I can do this without your cooperation,” she added, somewhat ominously, “but I prefer not to.  So what do you say, will you at least think about it?”

Olivia chewed at her lip and looked down.  The bear fat bubbled sullenly.  She could see through it all the way to the bottom of the cauldron.  “I think this is ready to pour.”

Cheyenne crossed her arms, her knuckles white where they gripped her powerful biceps, and waited.

“I’ll think about it,” Olivia said, doing her best to ignore that ugly, sinking sensation in her stomach.  “And I will have some kind of answer for you in five days, I promise.  But if it’s not the answer you want to hear, you have to promise not to keep after me, okay?  I’m having a hard enough time making a life down here, I can’t be responsible for yours, too.”

Cheyenne shrugged again and headed on out, presumably to find Borra.  “Whatever you say.  If you need to hear the magic words, then I promise.  One way or the other, that’ll be an end to it.”

Olivia waited to feel better and didn’t.

12

Olivia had gotten as far in the candling process as cutting a thin sliver of reed from one of the rushes Borra brought in to be wicks, she hadn’t even dipped it yet, when Murgull came in barking her name.  She was dragged away by the scruff of her neck as women of both races stopped their work to gape at her, and she was not allowed to straighten up and stand on her own until they reached Murgull’s secret workroom.  Once there, she was allowed to make apologies for ‘wasting’ her time doing ‘frivolous things’, and she made them for at least twenty minutes before Murgull finally condescended to accept them and put her to work.

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.”

As crass as she had found Vorgullum’s suggestion, Olivia began to seriously consider setting Lorchumn up with a female gulla.  Hesitantly, she began, “You don’t need to be lonely, Lorchumn.”

“I know.  The others share my grief as much as they can, but it’s not the same as…as…”  He trailed off, then turned a horrified stare on her.

Puzzled, she ran her last words back through her mind, then blinked and let out of peal of nervous giggles, inappropriate as they were.  “I’m sorry if that sounded like an offer, but I wasn’t offering me,” she explained, trying to cover her mouth.

Relief deflated him.  He smiled at her weakly, and then returned her giggles with a shaky laugh of his own.  “Naturally, I would be flattered, but do you know what your mate would do to me?”

“Actually, I was thinking in terms of one of the gullan women.  Vorgullum tells me there are some younger females who are, um, available.”

He nodded, distractedly.  “Yes, as a matter of fact, there are several.  One of them is even attractive, but Judith taught me all I know of coupling.  It would be strange to be with a gulla.”  He shook his head and glanced back at her.  “You must think me perverse.”

She did think it was an odd way to feel, but shook her head anyway and then changed the subject.  “Are you going with Bundel when he goes to return his…that woman of his?”

Lorchumn put Judith’s comb into his belt pouch and stood up.  “He asked me to go with him.  Tonight is my last day of mourning.  I’ll be free to leave the mountain then, and I think I want to.  What do you think I should do?”

“I think some fresh air would do you good,” she answered neutrally.

“Yes.”  He seemed about to say something more, then stopped and looked down at his empty hands.

Olivia waited, listening to the fire eat Judith’s possessions.  She stood up and moved to face him, laying the back of her hand along his arm.  “But…?”

“The others expect us to return with new mates.  Vorgullum expects it.  We won’t need tharo to take just two.”  Lorchumn lifted his eyes to hers with effort.  “And I should do it.  I owe it to my people.  I owe it to them because I have a strong body and a little wit.  But what do I owe Judith?”

“What do you want to do?”

He panted out a single breath of sad laughter.  “I want to bring her back to life.”  He shook his head.  “I can’t even look at a human without thinking of her.  It hurts.  I used to laugh at songs like that.  There’s nothing funny about it.”

“No,” she agreed.  “What is Bundel planning to do?”

Lorchumn threw a brooding glance at the wall, as though he could see through the layers of stone to Bundel himself.  “He didn’t want to take a human in the first place, and he has spent all this time since then caring for a mate who is full of stars.  This tribe will be lucky if Bundel ever takes another mate in his life.  He is not young and he is not encouraged.”

“I can see his point.”

Lorchumn sighed.  “So can I, but I don’t share it.  I want a mate, more than ever I want a mate, but it feels so much like replacing my Judith…replacing her, like a worn-out spear head.”

“Then don’t.  But go with Bundel, because he’s going to need someone like you, someone who won’t urge him to take a mate he’s not ready for either.”

“You are the first person who hasn’t told me to finish grieving and get on with my life.” He started to walk away, then hesitated and turned back.  “I’m glad you’re here.  I’m sorry if that hurts you, but I am.”

She found herself smiling at him, and it was an honest reaction even if it wasn’t entirely free of regrets.  “Would you like me to sit with you today and share your grief?”

“Yes.  But I won’t ask.  You are our leader’s mate,” he said, walking away without her.  “And I envy him.”

14

Olivia stayed in Vorgullum’s lair for a while after Lorchumn left, but couldn’t face the day with only herself for company.  She went to Murgull’s secret room in the hopes of doing something useful with her day while she hid from Cheyenne’s captor, but it was empty and its hearth cold.  She tried the women’s tunnels next, but found Horumn guarding the door in a foul mood.  When she asked for Murgull, she got instead a fine view of Horumn’s remaining yellowed teeth in a particularly sour sneer, even for her.  “Not here,” Horumn told her.  “Off to make mother’s magic for that pinch-faced Victoria-maggot.”

“May I come in to wait for her?”

“Wait where you are.”

“But I can help!”

“I have had enough of human help!” Horumn spat.  “The rest of your foolish kind are gathered in the hunters’ commons!  Go be a nuisance to them!”  And then she limped away, slamming her staff into the ground extra hard to punctuate her annoyance with all humankind.

Olivia started away, but had gone less than a dozen steps when a sharp whisper brought her back.  Cheyenne was at the door, gripping the bars like a convict in an old prison movie and looking back over her shoulder to track Horumn’s movements.  When she decided they had as much privacy as they were going to get, she motioned Olivia closer and hissed, “They’re saying that crazy lady is being let go tomorrow and the whole mountain is all keyed up about it, so there’s bound to be night hunts for a while.  It needs to be soon, but tomorrow is too risky—”

“Do we have to do this right now?” Olivia demanded.  “Right now?”

“Dammit, you promised you’d have an answer for me!”

“Fine.  I do.  Two things, up front,” she said, and Cheyenne’s eyes turned to slits of distrust.  “Number one, I am not going to lie, so if anyone asks me directly where you are and what my part is, I’m going to tell them.  Number two, I am not going to detain your guy at the risk of jeopardizing my own life.  If I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, I’ll scream the mountain down.  If you don’t agree to either of those conditions, too bad.  You made me a party to your escape just by telling me about it, and I resent that like hell.”

“Fair enough,” Cheyenne said after a minute of slow silence.  “But is that a yes?  Because I’m losing my patience with all your angst-ridden indecision.  I need to know whether or not I can count on you to be where you say you’re going to be.”

“Yes,” said Olivia, tight-lipped.  “I’ll be your distraction, nothing more.”

Cheyenne nodded once and her hands where they wrapped the iron bars of the door eased up a little.  “Then meet me at the hot springs as soon as you can get away day after tomorrow, after dark.”

“And if this doesn’t work, you’ll stop,” Olivia pressed.

“It’ll work,” Cheyenne said grimly, and retreated in answer to Horumn’s furious bellow.

Olivia watched her go, her stomach tying and untying itself.  Being part of Cheyenne’s escape attempt, whether fated to be successful or not, made her feel sick.  If she went through with it, she was betraying Vorgullum.  If not, she was betraying Cheyenne.  If she did it, didn’t that mean she owed it to try and help all the others who wanted out?  And if not—

God, she couldn’t think about this anymore.  Her angst-ridden indecision was giving her a cramp.  Murgull would be busy for a while…It was time for a bath.

Olivia made her way through the winding, rarely-frequented tunnels that led to the Deep Drop, and they were, as usual, completely empty.  It made her wonder, and not for the first time, what the gullan did for baths when the wasted ones occupied the depths.

Probably the same thing they did without flushing toilets:  Used a bucket.

Shaking her head, Olivia donned her claws and started down.  She’d been doing this long enough now that she wasn’t terribly worried about falling (even though it was just a tremendously long way to fall…she’d probably have enough time to scream twice before she hit…and she could only hope the impact would kill her right away because lying there with two hundred broken bones for even a few minutes was too horrible to contemplate), but she did find herself idly wondering about the climb back up.  The last time she’d done this, she’d had someone to carry her, even if it had been Cheyenne’s someone, and even if he had taken the opportunity to molest her along the way.

Olivia’s foot, questing for a new foothold, hit the ground instead.  She looked down, surprised, and sure enough, she’d reached the bottom.  Her arms were only a little tired, too.  They didn’t hurt at all, not even her wrists.

“Well done.”

Olivia shrieked and jumped straight into the Deep Drop wall, rebounded painfully, and would have fallen if not for the sudden lunge from behind that caught her up at once in a powerful gullan grip.

She looked up into the eyes of Cheyenne’s captor.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Her mouth worked.  Nothing came out.

His brows drew together just slightly. “Why do you flinch whenever we meet?” he inquired.  “Do you think I mean to eat you?”

She remembered the glazed look in his eyes as he stopped with her halfway up the chasm.  Remembered how his hands crawled over her body, pulling her against him with single-minded resolve.  And then she remembered his fierce, contemplative gaze as he watched her across a sea of gullan as pregnant Bolga was held up before them.

“No,” Olivia managed.  “Of course not.  I’m just not used to people who sneak up behind me in the dark to grab me.”

He released her, opening his arms and fully expanding his wings with a slow, deliberate courtesy that could not help but seem sarcastic.  “I apologize,” he said.  “On our next meeting, I will stand politely by and watch you fall.”

“I wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t frightened me,” she said, and immediately wished she hadn’t admitted to fear.  There was no way to take it back, so she tried to turn it into a joke, blurting, “You need to wear a bell.”

“Do I?”  He smiled, but had far too many sharp teeth to pull it off in anything like a friendly fashion.  “But then I would lose so many opportunities to have women throw themselves against me.”

“I’m certain you restrain yourself admirably,” she said, looking for some way, any way, out of this conversation.

“I’m a man of iron,” he agreed, making it a pun.

“Iron bends, you know.”

His smile widened.  “Not after it has been tempered at the forge.”

“Temper iron with too much heat and it breaks.”

“Let it sit idle, and it rusts,” he answered.  He stepped back, gesturing behind him at the empty, lamp-lit passage that led to the baths.  “Shall we go?”

There was no way to contain the whole-body flinch with which she met that cordial invitation, no way to stop her mouth from echoing, “We?” in undisguised horror.

“To the baths.”  He showed her his teeth again.  “I could use one.”

“Together?”

“Why not?”  He advanced a step, coming to take her arm

She backed up.

He stopped.  Slowly, his brows knit.  “I have no intention of leaving you alone down here,” he said.  “It’s easy to get lost in the depths, as easy as to lose one’s footing on wet rock, and a cry for help will not carry in this part of the mountain.”

“Thank you for your concern, but I’ll manage.”

“Why are you afraid to be alone with me?” he asked bluntly.

And good God, what was the right answer to that?

“Why are you afraid to leave me alone?” she countered, hoping his sharp gullan ears weren’t good enough to hear her heart pounding.

He looked at her for a long time, silent.  Then: “You know who I am.”

It was not a question.  Olivia did not answer it.

He looked away, gazing without expression back into the depths.  “I don’t know what you are imagining,” he said, and then faced her again.  “But I am a man.”

“With a man’s needs,” she finished for him.  She hadn’t meant to say anything at all, but the cliché caught her so entirely by surprise that it just popped out.  I’m a man, just like that excused the whole thing, just like that made perfect sense.  I’m a man, so I get to screw poor, dumb Bolga and beat on Cheyenne and grab Olivia’s ass on the Deep Drop climb because I’m a man!

He seemed taken about by her words, although she was quite sure she hadn’t let any of the outrage she’d felt while speaking them escape into her tone.  He looked behind him again, then up, as if concerned about eavesdroppers, and then finally directly at her again.

She couldn’t do this.  She couldn’t afford to make him suspicious of her again and she sure couldn’t afford to be openly antagonistic.

“I didn’t come here for a bath,” she lied.  “I only meant to practice climbing.”

“Practice?”  He managed, with some reluctance, to tear his gaze away and give the Deep Drop his attention.  He frowned.  “You should start with shorter heights.  The wall of the commons would suit your efforts better, I think.  It’s where all the young ones learn to climb.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

He hesitated, then looked back at her.  “Climb, then.  I will follow, and if you tire, I’ll be there to carry you.”

Or pull her off the wall halfway up and drop her.  Or, heck, finish what he’d started the last time he’d carried her up this particular climb, and then drop her.  How in the hell was she going to get out of this?

Twin blurs of dark fur came swooping suddenly down, landing with muffled slaps and gulla-deep giggles on either side of them.  They straightened with a few leathery snaps as they primly folded their wings—two females, Crugunn and one other she didn’t know—and each raised their hands in salute.

“Hello, Crugunn,” Olivia said, enormously relieved and not at all unmindful that Cheyenne’s captor had taken two swift steps backwards at the first instant of this interruption.

“Hello, Olivia!  And hello to you,” she added with a gullan smirk at Cheyenne’s captor.  “How lucky to find you here.  I looked for you in the waiting place, but I suppose you got tired of waiting.  Horumn wanted me to tell you that Chugg is available now.”

The other gullan female giggled again.

His wings twitched, tightening against his back in an embarrassed way.  “Thank you,” he said stiffly.

“Are you for a bath, Olivia?” Crugunn asked.  “Will you join us?  I told Melurr what you humans look like naked, but she doesn’t believe me.”

The other gulla, presumably Melurr, clapped both hands over her small snout and giggled some more.

“I must go,” Olivia said.  “But trust me, Melurr.  We are very ugly.”

She started climbing even while the two of them loudly and insincerely protested this description, and soon they had taken themselves and their schoolgirl giggles away.  She climbed, and no, it wasn’t long at all before her arms began to get that ominous burning sensation, but at least she could do it without looking so much like she was running away.

“Tell me if you need help,” Cheyenne’s captor said, at the very first split-second flag in her ascent.  He was directly below her.

And he could probably see right up her homespun skirt.  She hadn’t had underwear for months now.

Olivia’s thighs clenched.  It took real effort to relax them enough to find the next foothold.  “Do I look like I need help?” she asked, and God in His heaven chose that exact moment to give her left toe a nudge.

All her weight dropped with a snap onto her wrists as her feet fell out from under her and suddenly she was dangling by Sudjummar’s metal claws and not a damned thing more.  She kicked twice before she could stop herself, and then a gullan hand came slapping up, covering her entire bottom in one mighty skirt-cushioned spank that shoved her a good eighteen inches upwards, enough not only to take back her footholds, but to find new clawholds as well.

Olivia hugged the wall and did not give a damn that his hand stayed on her ass.  Not one nickel-plated damn.

“Th-Thank you,” she managed at last.  Her teeth were chattering.

“I am going to carry you now,” he said firmly, and soon his hand was gone, replaced by the whole of his body.  He climbed up over the top of her, covering her entirely with the mass and heat of his body, then put his hand back on her, not over her ass this time, but right between her legs.  He scooped her up and pulled her against him, hiked his leg up into a new foothold so that she could sit on his thigh, then pulled her around so that she could grab onto him.

Which she did.  With disgusting zeal.  He wouldn’t have to listen for her heartbeat now.  He could just feel it hammering wildly against him.

“Hold on to me,” he said, and resumed climbing.  “You did very well.”

Laughter squeezed itself out of her in a disbelieving gust.  “Sure, until I nearly died.”

“Until then.”  He sounded as though he might be smiling.  “Look down.”

Her grip clenched tighter around his neck.  “No!”

“Then look up.”

She did, and to her uneasy surprise, saw that they were maybe only twenty feet from the top of the chasm wall.

“You did very well,” he said again,.  “But shorter heights might suit you better.  Like the wall in the commons, where all the rest of us learned to climb.”

This time, she did not protest.

He helped her over the ledge, kept a hand on her until she had rolled well away, and then climbed up and hunkered close beside her until she had the strength to stand up.  He made a point of not looking at her while he did this.  He hummed a little under his breath now and then, not the toneless thrumming that Vorgullum did when he was wanting sex, but something with a melody; it was the first gullan song she’d ever heard.

He had not saved her life.  Olivia’s claws hadn’t slipped a bit.  In another moment or two, she’d have gotten her feet up and she’d have been just fine.  Shaken, but totally fine.

And if Crugunn and Melurr hadn’t seen the two of them starting up the Deep Drop together just minutes earlier, he doubtless would have let her fall.  If she had fallen.  Which she’d been in no real danger of doing.

She really did not understand this man.  It was like even he couldn’t decide whether he wanted her dead or not.

“I’ll be fine,” Olivia said, finding her feet.  “You don’t need to stay.”

“Are you certain?  We can sit awhile, if you like.”

“You’re expected,” she reminded him.  “Chugg, was it?  Chugg will be waiting.”

His wings tightened up again.  He ducked his head, reaching up to scratch self-consciously at the side of his snout.  “Yes,” he said, not looking at her.  “I suppose she will.”

He walked away without a goodbye, or one of the salutes, or even a backwards glance.  His back was very straight.

I’ve embarrassed him, she thought, watching him go.  It was a curious thought, and the most curious thing about it was the sense of dismay that it came with, until she remembered that he was not a nice man.  Regardless of whether he had or had not spared her a deadly drop today, he’d still fondled her the last time they’d met.

I was in season then, she thought uneasily.

And he’d gotten Bolga knocked up.

Maybe.  I never saw his face.

She’d seen his back, and that spiky, silver-tipped mane-thing was one-hundred-percent identification, and besides, he was beating Cheyenne up every single night.

I have never seen a single bruise on her, thought Olivia, and that was a jolt because she hadn’t.  Not one.  Not ever.

So he hit her where it didn’t show!  Hadn’t Cheyenne said that herself?  For God’s sake, if she’d been covered with bruises from head to toe, someone would have surely said something about it!  He was careful, that was all!  He was a cunning, careful, evil man!

Olivia shoved herself forward, away from the depths and away from these awful, stomach-knotting thoughts.  She’d promised to help Cheyenne.  She’d promised.  She’d seen Cheyenne’s captor with Bolga.  She’d seen it.  And he’d groped her on the Deep Drop that time.  That she had undeniably felt, his hand squeezing and pulling at her ass, as hard and hot and real as his erection pressing against her belly, so there.

So there.

15

She took herself to the commons, because home was just too cramped a place to share with doubts, and because Horumn had said she’d find the other humans there, and she did.  Not all of them, oddly.  Taking Sudjummar’s words to heart, Olivia had spent the last five days urging ‘her’ humans to keep busy and it had seemed to her that they’d been grateful for the distraction from Judith’s death, even if it was work, but they weren’t all here now.  Maria and Victoria were the most obvious absentees, but they weren’t the only ones.  Two groups of women had made themselves as comfortable as possible on stone benches—six humans and two gullan were hard at work making nets while Carla, Karen, and Liz made up a smaller group over by the hearth, just talking.

Leaning against the wall and enjoying a light meal as he kept easy watch over them was easily the biggest gulla Olivia had yet seen, taller and broader even than Vorgullum, who was no slight specimen of gulla-hood himself.  Like Vorgullum, this male was the picture of perfect health, with strong wings, glossy pelt, and huge horns arching back from his brow in two impressive swoops of bone.  He raised a casual hand toward her, sniffed, and smiled.  “Olivia,” he said comfortably.  “Have a mushroom.”

She recognized the voice at once, realized that she knew this gulla, and gasped.  “Doru?  Gosh, Tobi said you were big, but—”

He looked surprised, then laughed.  “Oh, that’s right, you couldn’t see me.”   He pushed himself off the wall and flexed for her, his wings billowing out like sails, filling his chest with air and setting his huge feet far apart to gore at the stone floor.

“You go, baby,” Tobi called, and there were startled gasps and catcalls.

Doru relaxed and leaned back again, glancing over at his mate with an amused expression strangely touched by something else, something sad.

“How are you?” Olivia asked, helping herself to a couple of mushrooms.

Doru shrugged, not with his wings but with his massive shoulders, a human gesture that startled and delighted her.  “Nothing in our traps but a half-eaten hare, but the herds are always moving.  I mean to give it three days, and then we go after the goats.  I hate to do it so early—”

“I meant, how are you doing?” she said, smiling a little.

“Me?”  He looked down at himself, brows raised, then up again.  “Well enough.”

Olivia watched the net-makers for a while, then turned to Doru suddenly and asked, “Who’s Chugg?”

Doru started to laugh, choked on his bread, and bent over, coughing.

She pounded him on the back, waited until he was breathing normally, then repeated the question.

He sniggered, took a long drink from a jug of water, and passed it to her, grinning.  “Chugg, Golgun, and Furluu are the three younger females proven to be barren…safe to mate with,” he explained.  “Chugg is the…friendliest.”

“I see.”

“Also the ugliest.”

“I see,” Olivia said again, raising her eyebrows.

“Hunchbacked, balding, mottled fur, crooked teeth, and fat as a maggot.”  He shook his head and let out another volley of subdued guffaws.  “And she barks.”

“Barks?”

“Barks,” he agreed, propelling his hips in exaggerated sexual thrusts.  He fanned his wings rapidly, the gulla equivalent of wiggling one’s eyebrows.

Olivia burst out laughing, and Doru joined in, covering his eyes and howling with mirth.

“Here now, here now,” she said suddenly, poking him in the chest.  “How would you know that she barks?”

He grinned sheepishly and shrugged.  He seemed about to say something, then noticed they were not alone here, and pulled her off into a sub-chamber.  “I was coming back from a lone hunt,” he began, and then checked to make sure no one was coming after them.

“This is going to be a good story, I think,” she said, grinning.

“It is,” he said, sitting down.  “It had been a long hunt, a night hunt, and I hadn’t found anything except what was being stored in the human food chests.  I had helped myself liberally to what they had, however, which included a half-full bottle of thumperjuice.”

“Thump-what?” she interrupted.

“Thumperjuice,” he repeated.  “Good stuff, but it makes you silly and it makes your head thump like hammers in the evening.”

“Ah yes, thumperjuice.”

“It wasn’t even the kind I liked, and it made me very drunk,” he finished.  “I flew back to the mountain and forgot to slow down, so I slammed into the wall pretty hard, and fell most of the way down the shaft.  But the Great Spirit watches over drunks and damn fools, so I picked myself up and staggered down the passage.  I was so full of thumperjuice that I got lost in my own mountain, and ended up… here, I think.  And there was the most beautiful gulla in the world,” he said.  “She turned around, and there I stood, drunk as hell and swaying like a willow in the wind, with my loincloth floating in the air towards her.  I took a step toward her and she threw me down on a bench.”

“Remember any of it?”

“Aside from the barking, not much,” he admitted.  “And the worst was still to come, because I passed out and when I woke up, I was lying flat on my back on the bench with hunchbacked Chugg flopped over on top of me, drooling on my chest.”  He shuddered, and she didn’t think it was an affectation.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I screamed and threw her off me, then ran like hell back to my own lair,” he said, as though the answer should be obvious.  “I passed six gullan in the tunnels, and didn’t notice until I was safely burrowed under my bedding that I was still naked like a baby bear.”

“How horrible,” Olivia tried to say and broke up laughing again.

“It was horrible,” he agreed, fanning his folded wings rapidly for a moment.  “Golgun isn’t much to look at, but she’s clever and fun just to be around, and Furluu is quite attractive if a little dim, but all Chugg has is enthusiasm.  It takes a brave man to seek her out.  Poor, desperate bastard.”  Doru groaned, still grinning.  “Great Spirit, I haven’t thought about Chugg in years.  I am going to have such nightmares tonight.”

16

The night of the hunt arrived at last.  Lorchumn and Bundel returned the mad woman and her saucepan to the parking lot of the apartment complex where she had been taken from, then met up with the others in the foothills.  The great hunters returned with two bull elk, most of a case of beer, and a package of hot dogs.

Olivia was sitting in the common cave with the rest of the tribe, awaiting the return of the hunters.  Vorgullum came in grandly, bearing the front half of a litter that carried the largest elk.

“I bring meat,” he announced, “for my people.”  His eyes locked onto Olivia with piercing heat, and he hefted the meat off his shoulder and set it on the ground.  Three gullan women immediately sprang up to begin preparing spits for roasting, while others quickly put away their work to listen.

“We stalked a roving herd across the high hills,” he began, spreading out his wings to their full length and flapping them once, dramatically.  “A bull and his harem and their young get.  We landed to take account of them and I saw tracks in the soft ground, tracks as big as my hand.”  He spread his clawed fingers out and showed it to the audience.  “Looking, I saw ravaged bark hanging from a tree, the leavings of a rogue, frustrated and alone.

“I left the party and flew on, unaccompanied, to confront the bull.  I chased my prey through the forest, never able to coax it out from the thick cover of branches, never able to fly in close enough to attack.  Finally, I dove in ahead of it, and as I landed, it reared to fight!”  Vorgullum flung back his horns in an impressive imitation of a charging elk, even as he brought his spear sweeping sharply forward, playing both parts at once.  “I charged beneath its drumming hooves and struck, alone, one thrust perfectly through its fierce heart!”

The gullan women, listening raptly, erupted in a chorus of howling cheers like the yelps of high-strung dogs.  This spurred a few of the humans to applaud.  Vorgullum slowly straightened up and took the first prepared spit.  He carried it with obvious pride across the cave and placed it in Olivia’s hands.  “For you, my mate.  For you and forever.”

Behind him, Wurlgunn cleared his throat and raised a hand at Beth.  “I killed the other one.”

“You big, strong hunter, you,” she said, plainly surprised.

He lowered his hand slightly.  “To say truth, I didn’t mean to.  I was supposed to be flanking it for Doru, but, um…”

“He crashed into it,” Doru remarked, preparing another spit.

Beth smiled.  “I’m sure you crashed bravely, lover.”

“I nabbed this chest of thumperjuice for you, Liz,” called a hunter, in thunderous mockery of Vorgullum.

“Give me the first trophy, my mate,” she called back, holding out her hands.  He tossed her a beer and she popped it open and pulled a long swallow out of it.  “Oh, noble hunter,” she sighed, and passed the can into the eager hands of Karen, on her right.

“I have no idea what these are,” said Karen’s mate, Bodual, offering her the package of hot dogs.  “But I got them for you.”

“Gross,” said Karen, and had another drink of beer.

Amy sat down on her mate’s lap and put his arms around her waist possessively.  “And what did you bring back for me, my proud hunter?”

He smiled self-consciously.  “Only myself, little Amy,” he admitted.

Amy wiggled on his lap.  “Let Olivia have her elk, you can use your mighty spear on me!”

He stood up and slipped his arm around her shoulders, both of them leaning into one another with a natural ease and quiet pleasure that drew far more envious eyes than Vorgullum’s boasting.  They left together, his right wing half-unfolded and curled protectively around her.

Olivia put her spit over the coals and listened to the fat pop and sputter.  The smell of meat roasting began to rise as the hunters found their mates among the assembly and settled down, each telling dramatic tales of daring, and each sounding as though they had all managed to nearly bring down some fantastic game, if not tonight, at least at some point.  Bundel and Lorchumn left together, raising their hands to Vorgullum and Olivia on their way out.

Vorgullum offered Olivia a can of beer, but one sip made her screw up her face, so she passed it back.  He took two swallows, and then gave it away.  “I thought you humans liked thumperjuice.”

“I used to.”  She turned the spit impatiently and inhaled the scent with longing.  “I guess I just forgot how nasty it tastes.”

Two females, Crugunn and another, came up to ask Vorgullum how his kill was to be portioned out, both of them flirting outrageously, but “Prepare whatever remains from this feast for our winter stores,” was his only response.  Crugunn rolled her eyes at Olivia with a sigh as she walked away, plainly unsurprised.  The other female seemed more genuinely disappointed by this rejection.  Both went to work without any sign of umbrage that they had not been invited to share the feast.

“They should have some,” Olivia said, watching Crugunn strip the rest of the hide from the butchered elk with a few expert cuts and one mighty heave.

“They can have the offal,” Vorgullum said distractedly.  A glance back at him showed his attention had slipped somewhere beneath her clothes, where his imagination wandered at considerable leisure.

“Want to leave?” she asked wryly.

“I do, but I’m starving.  For some unexplained reason, I keep missing meals,” he added, throwing her a dark look.  Then he reached out, took her by the waist and pulled her tight against him.  “But after I have had my fill,” he growled into her ear, “I will take you to my lair and fill you full. And if I have to tie you down to keep you from having your pitiless way with me, I will.  I—”

His grip on her tightened briefly, and then he released her and stepped slightly in front of her, his wings fanning out without unfolding.

A male gullan she did not immediately recognize had approached during their embrace.  Now he raised his hand in a salute and hunkered down before them.  “A word with you, Olivia?”

Vorgullum’s ears pricked and he glanced from the gulla to Olivia, looking at once surprised and faintly pleased by the request.  He brought his wings back in and sat down.

Somewhat apprehensively, Olivia took a step forward. “I…Of course.  How can I help you?”

“My name is Thugg.  You must know my mate, Victoria, very well,” he added dryly.  “She speaks of you so often.”

Yeah, I’ll just bet she does, Olivia thought, and said, “I know her.”

“She’s had no blood in all the time she’s been here,” Thugg said, his eyes narrowing.  “No blood and no seasons, and Murgull swears to me she hasn’t sparked.  I begin to wonder if she might be too old to bear young.”

Olivia looked away, hunting for Victoria in the crowd so she wouldn’t have to meet Thugg’s eyes.  She hadn’t spent much time with Victoria, but it didn’t take much time to know that, plastic surgery and hair dye aside, that lady couldn’t possibly be a day under fifty.

“I see her head-fur coming in grey,” Thugg was saying.  “But what of that?  Most the humans I see here have many colors in their fur.  Look at Doru’s Tobi, for Urga’s sake.”

“I’m not sure I know what you want me to say,” Olivia hedged.

Thugg tapped his talons against the stone floor as if thinking how best to phrase his next words.  “Will you ask her if young may come of her or not?”

“Haven’t you asked her yourself?”

Thugg bared his teeth in a sneer that would have done Horumn credit.  “That one,” he growled.  “I have not.  I speak to her as little as I can.  She is ice, cold and hard and unyielding.”  As if to cushion the hostility of his words, he added, “I’ve met enough humans to know that she’s different, but she’s bound to bite the person who asks her such a thing and I have to live with her.”

“All right, I’ll ask.”  She glanced at Thugg sympathetically.  “But she’ll probably chew my head off.”

Thugg growled and nodded.  “Doubtless.  But that is nothing compared to what she’ll do to me when she learns I had you ask her.”  He rose and tossed his horns, eyeing Olivia with naked envy before turning and striding away.

“Ha,” growled Vorgullum, popping the top on his second beer.  “My wise Olivia.  My tribe comes to you for advice.  Snap your teeth at me, Thugg.  Ha.”  He chortled, took another two swallows, and passed the can on.

“What will happen if she is too old?” Olivia asked, thinking not of Victoria, but of young Beth.

“That depends on many things,” Vorgullum replied.  “And I would not want my answer to taint your reply to me.”

“Are you suggesting I would lie about something like this?”

“I think you would,” he said carefully, “if it meant you could do better for your friends.”  When she opened her mouth to protest, he said, softly, deliberately staring straight ahead, “Will you tell me now that you hold no secrets from me?”

She shut her mouth and stared at the spit of meat in her hands, her appetite gone.  At last, for want of something to bridge the gap between them, she asked, “Did you really kill this elk by yourself?”

He nodded, relaxing slightly, and said, “And Wurlgunn really did kill his by crashing into it.  My aching eyes, I couldn’t believe it.  ‘Fly behind him,’ Doru shouts.  ‘Surround him.’  And Wurlgunn swoops boldly down at full speed directly into the thing’s head.  I heard a splintering crack like a tree falling and they both went down.  We all thought his head had finally been broken, and we landed hard, but suddenly, he sits up, fumbles for his knife and stabs the elk in the side.  The damn fool could have torn his wing or broken his back, but there he is, sticking his little knife in the dead beast while the rest of us stand back and try to pick out which of the two of them is the biggest, dumbest animal.”

“Poor Wurlgunn.”

“His head is a big, empty space, occupied by a few, rattling little rocks,” Vorgullum grunted.  “I tried to give mates to the fittest gullan, but when I look at him, I think of a lair full of stumbling, bumbling babies and just cringe.  Can you imagine?  Walking into walls and dropping off chasms?  Learning how to fly?”  He shuddered, and reached into the fire for a skewer of meat, hissing with satisfaction as it spit hot fat at him.

Olivia looked at him for a moment, trying to imagine a child born to both of them.  It would be more gullan than human, she guessed, but it might have her human eyes instead of his whiteless ones, her human face instead of his snout.  She imagined herself pregnant, laboring, delivering, even nursing, but couldn’t quite picture the child. It remained an emptiness in her mind, an emptiness that seemed to spread in a vague, echoing way all through her.

“What are you thinking?” Vorgullum asked, tearing a bite-sized piece of elk from the spit with the very tips of his claws.

“I think I want a baby,” Olivia said, not without some surprise.

He looked up, his dinner sizzling and utterly forgotten in his hands.

Olivia frowned, lightly touching her own chest as if she thought she could gauge the depth and meaning of this subdued yearning from her heart.  Slowly, she nodded.  “I do.  I want a baby.”

“Heartless woman,” he said, giving the spit in his grip an anguished look.  “I want to eat, curse it!”

“So eat.”

He didn’t.  He continued to stare at her while the meat cooled untouched and dripped its juices down his wrist.  One minute.  Maybe two.  And then he threw it back into the fire.

A great many of the hunters remaining in the commons let out a chorus of groans when he stood up, but beneath their teasing, Olivia could hear real frustration from more than one throat.  “For pity’s sake, woman!” one of them called.  “He’ll be useless in the morning!”

“Are we going to see you for the second hunt?” Doru asked mildly, setting the last spit.

Olivia reached up behind Vorgullum’s back and scratched lightly at the sensitive patch of skin just between his folded wings, where Murgull said such touches had the best effect.  Vorgullum, caught unawares, arched his whole back hugely, his wings snapping out and hips bucking forward.

“That would be a ‘no’,” Doru mused.

Vorgullum seized Olivia’s arm and propelled her rapidly ahead of him out of the commons as laughter and howls chased them.  “You’re driving me mad,” he told her.  “I’m going to starve away to a stick and a scrap of fur and will you be satisfied?”

“I certainly hope so.”  She reached back to cup him through his loincloth as they walked, giving the solid bulge she found a friendly squeeze.  “And so will you.”

“Again, with you!  Again, and right here in the mainway!” he growled, and caught her wrist, walking with her just a little faster until they reached the chimney to his lair.  There, he pushed her into the shadowed chute, crushing her to the wall with his body, and pulled her thighs up fast around him.  His hips ground against her, letting her feel him as he hardened through the layers of their clothing, and all the while his black eyes bored down into hers.  “You will be the end of me and you are not even a shadow of sorry, are you?”

“Are you?” she countered, pushing her hand between them to firmly grip and stroke his stiffening cock.

Vorgullum’s neck arched, his eyes shut tight as he hissed in breath and let it out as a ragged thrumm.

Voices in the mainway.  He swore again, stabbing a glance behind him before he caught her up and climbed with her into the private dark of his lair.  He took her no further than the wall beside the chimney, though, not even to the bench which she knew could only be less than a dozen steps away.  No, he got rock under his feet and then he put rock behind her back, at once resuming those slow, strong, thrusting movements while he hummed against her neck.

Her fingers slipped along the knot of his loincloth, and his came at once to the ties of her shirt.  It brought a strange sense of synchrony to their play, to tug at his belt and feel her own clothing gently pulled and loosened.  Claws gave him the advantage with unfamiliar modes of clothing; in moments, she was bare from neck to toe, and all she’d managed to get away was his belt pouch.  Laughing, she gave up and cupped his head in her hands instead, pulling his mouth to hers.

All his body stilled as she kissed him.  Concentrating, no doubt, on just how it was done.  When she broke the kiss at last, he took it back with confidence, nipping at her lips and thrumming as he breathed for her.  And while he kissed her, he did nothing else at all, but when, after thorough exploration, he concluded, he lifted her easily into his arms and carried her to his pit.

In that perfect blackness, every sound became its own dimension, every touch struck echoes beneath her skin.  When he lay down beside her, she felt each soft point of his fur like a hot pin driving over her and into her and through her to her very core.  His fingers found her in the dark, caressing briefly at her hip before piercing her, driving himself in so deeply that his palm ground with exquisite force against her clit.  Olivia gasped, then sucked in breath and hummed it out, raggedly and too high, she thought, but it was all the encouragement he needed to work faster, harder, saturating the air around him with the wet sounds of her greedy body and the heady perfume of her pleasure.

“Heartless woman,” he growled, a thrumm in every word.  “Do you know what they say about me?  Do you know what they’re saying right now?”

“How much they wish they were you,” she panted.  Olivia reached down, taking hold of the hard shaft that throbbed between them and began to stroke him firmly.  He shivered, pumping into her fist, breathing in coarse, hot pants.  At last he reared back, shaking her off like water only to seize her hips and bury himself hard and fast inside her.  She muffled a swift scream against his chest, then gathered in the heady scent of him as the pain receded to be replaced by welcome heat and the thrill of his tight, fast friction.

Unexpectedly, he bent and licked at her breast.

Olivia arched with a cry of surprise.  She’d never thought of her breasts as particularly sensitive before, but they reacted to his tongue as if to an electric charge after all these months ignored. His mouth moved on her as fiercely as his cock moved inside her, and it was through a haze of moaning pleasure that she reached to claw again between the base of his wings.

They snapped out at her touch, knocking some unseen and half-remembered jug of water crashing to the floor, almost unheard beneath his bellow.  Then he was driving at her with abandon, his claws digging at her thighs, bringing pain to illuminate the pleasure forking out from her like bolt after bolt of carnal lightning.  She was dimly aware that she was shouting, sound bursting out of her, shoved out of her, with every thrust, and it wasn’t at all the sort of thing she had ever believed herself apt to say during lovemaking, but a frenzied, gullan roar of, “Fuck me!  Yes!  Oh, fuck me!”

They could probably hear her all the way back in the commons.

Olivia shut herself up the only way she could, by seizing Vorgullum in both hands and biting down hard on his shoulder, just exactly where he liked to press his thrumming mouth during what he considered foreplay.

He howled, withdrew, slammed back as deep as he could go, and she felt his seed batter at the wall of her womb in a spastic fury.  Then he dropped, crushing the breath from her body with the full, sudden weight of him.

They lay there, scraping one another’s ears with the sound of panting and the shocked sort of silence that always seems to follow the best and wildest bouts of sex.  She knew he had begun to come back to himself when he remembered to shift a little, let her breathe.

“So,” she said, before he could anything stupid, like ask if she were all right.  “It was a good start.  Are you ready for more?”

“Heartless woman,” he growled and, to her laughing surprise, fell over her again.

17

Much later, Vorgullum reached out one foot and prodded Olivia in the ribs.  “Tell me,” he said lazily.  “What is it about a good hunt that sends everyone tumbling backwards into bed?”

“You flatter yourself,” she told him.  “After five days of mourning for Lorchumn and Judith, we all needed some release.”

“Truth.”  He crunched up one wing painstakingly and rolled onto his side so he could scratch his stomach.  “I hoped he’d return with a new mate.”

“He knows, but he wasn’t ready.”

“It is soon,” Vorgullum agreed.  “And his grief must still be strong, but I wasn’t thinking just about breeding.  It would have given him someone to hunt for, and a reason to keep coming home.”

“Eventually, perhaps, but first it would have given him another frightened, hysterical woman he couldn’t communicate with.  That is not what he needs to help him heal.”

“Hm.”  He lay there quietly, thinking about that.  “Perhaps I should permit him to take a gullan mate.”

“When you forbid all the others?”

He grunted again, thought some more.  “I could order a woman to meet with him in secret.  One I can trust not to catch his spark.”

“If he was ready for that, he wouldn’t need you to make such arrangements,” Olivia pointed out.

Vorgullum dismissed that with a flap of his hand.  “Lorchumn doesn’t know what he needs.”

“And you can’t solve the entire tribe’s problems with sex.”

“Yes I can,” he said, and rubbed idly at her naked hip.  “What is the matter with Kodjunn?”

“With who?” she echoed sleepily.

“You must know him, the way you stare…His mate has red hair with a dark stripe down the center.”

“Kodjunn?” she repeated, becoming a little more alert.  “Is that his name?”

“I don’t know what to do about it,” he murmured.  “They don’t get along, that’s no secret, but this goes well beyond that.  He has to set a watch over her whenever he leaves his lair, and now I hear he is locking her in the women’s tunnels.  All the other humans have settled…to some degree.  All but that one.”

“He’s not a good mate to her,” Olivia began hesitantly.

He snorted.  “She’s not a good mate to him.  Great Spirit, but the things she has done to him!  Her very first night in this mountain, she threw a lit lamp at him, tried to suffocate him with bedding, and beat him with the fire poker.  She missed his eye by a hair’s breadth on that one, and he was unconscious nearly two days.  And that was just the first night!”

“Vorgullum…you have to understand how frightened and angry she was, how we all were.  I can’t blame her for fighting back.”

He shifted uncomfortably, then got up.  “I’m not blaming her, Olivia.  I know what we did to you.”  She heard him at the hearth, and then sparks struck and soon he was lighting candles.  “But Kodjunn is a good man.”

“He hits her.”

“She hits him.”  He snapped his folded wings in a tight, gullan shrug. “The wind blows both ways.”

And this was exactly the way she’d always believed this conversation would go, but her heart still sank.  She sat up in the pit, pulling her sleeping bag up over her breasts like a shield, wondering how much to tell him, how hard to try and make him understand, when all it could possibly bring her was that steely glint in his eyes and the ghost of those terrible words: Think of healthy young.

“He hurts her when they mate,” she said softly.

He frowned at her.  “What do you mean?”

“She says…”  His expression was so dark and serious that Olivia’s throat tightened.  It actually hurt to speak, but she swallowed past the constriction and said, “She says he hits her.  He hits her and that’s what makes him…ready.  He hits her where it can’t show, and then he…he mates with her so that it hurts as much as it can.”

Vorgullum stood there as the candle in his hand slowly tipped, spilling wax in unnoticed rivulets over his fingers and onto the floor.  “I do not believe this,” he said at last, as calmly and conversationally as if he were telling her the color of her eyes, or the condition of the weather.

“She told me she’s afraid he’ll kill her.”

He continued to stare at her for a long time, and then he looked away, towards the fire.  “Olivia,” he said, “don’t be angry with me, but I cannot believe that.  Not of Kodjunn.”  He looked back at her hopefully.  “Could she have meant that he coupled with her against her will?  None of you were very willing, in the beginning, but that’s not the same as violence.  And…And I have hurt you.”  It was not an easy admission for him, and he could not meet her eyes afterwards.  “Without wishing to, I have hurt you terribly.  Perhaps it was her season.  It’s not always possible for a male to be…careful.”

Olivia took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “She hasn’t been in season every night, Vorgullum.  But she tells me that every night he comes to her, he beats her.  If that isn’t enough to make him ready, he uses other things inside her.”

He flinched back as though slapped and gaped at her.  “I…I will order someone to listen outside his lair.  If I can confirm this, I will remove her from him and…and see him punished.”  He stood there, stunned and a little ill-looking, then turned away and put on his loincloth.  “Kodjunn.  Kodjunn!”

“Thank you,” Olivia said softly.

“I am glad you told me,” he answered, distracted.  “This never should have gone on so long.  Kodjunn.  Wait here.”  His claws tapped away and she heard the faint scuffling sounds as he climbed down the chimney and was away.

Olivia drowsed until he returned, and listened to him ready himself for bed again.  He slipped into the pit with her and lay his hand on her hip.

“All right?” she asked.

“Doru will keep an ear on him tonight.  However…”  He trailed off, then inched a little closer.  “Mudmar and Ellen have chambers just beside them.  I spoke to them both, in confidence.  Mudmar says he has heard her angry voice often, but no sounds of violence.  Ellen says she hasn’t seen marks or bruises on the woman’s body and they’ve bathed together several times.  Neither one came out and said, ‘She is lying’ but I think both believed so.”

Olivia considered this, her own head spinning, then rolled over and looked at him, troubled.  “Why would she lie about something like that?”

He shook his head, frustrated.  “She wants to see him punished, I suppose, but if that’s so, why go to you instead of me?”

“Well, if it is true, she’d be afraid to go to you, because you’re a male and she might think you’d only laugh at her.”

His expression darkened.  “If not throw her down and rut with her.  But why not go to Murgull?”  He considered his own words more closely.  “Murgull would have been able to provide potions to dull Kodjunn’s passion, or make him sleep all day.  If not kill him.  There is no surer means of killing a rutting man than with old Murgull’s wrath.”

“Again, if it is true, she may not see any gulla as her friend.  And Murgull is pretty scary.”  Her own words sounded feeble, though.  She tried to run her conversations with Cheyenne through her mind, but kept arriving at the same question:  Had Cheyenne come up with this story of violence just to convince Olivia to aid her in her escape?

She ran the episodes with Kodjunn back through her mind, but aside from that business on the chasm wall, there wasn’t much to go on.  Oh, he was sensitive enough about his love life, but as for this business with Bolga…well, had that been Bolga she saw that day?  She had been so certain of it once she’d seen Bolga standing in full light in the commons, but might it not have been Chugg?  It had been pretty dim, and hunchback and balding hair are easy to hide when one is flat on one’s back on a bench.

But barking isn’t, and if Doru could be believed, Chugg barked.  Bolga had been moaning pretty loudly, at least until her mouth had been covered, but not barking.  Anyway, Chugg was ‘safe’, wasn’t she?  Why would Kodjunn need to meet with a safe female in the middle of the night when he could walk down to the women’s tunnels in broad daylight (so to speak) and ask for her?

“I am so confused,” she said aloud.

He hugged her close, looked equally uncertain.  “I hope you’ve been misled, Olivia,” he said.  “I hope that with all my heart and soul.  But be assured that if you are correct in your suspicions, justice will be done.”

“That’s comforting,” she replied, but it wasn’t.  One way or another, it was all about to become a moot point because Cheyenne intended to escape.

With Olivia’s help.

Just what I need.  More angst-ridden indecision.  Olivia squeezed her eyes shut, counted one hundred breaths, and tried to let it all go.  Even so, it was a long time before she found her way into a thin, troubled sleep and the last thing she heard before it happened was Cheyenne’s voice saying, ‘One way or the other, that’ll be the end of it.’

18

She spent the day with Murgull, but her efforts at potion-making were disastrous.  No matter how she tried to concentrate, thoughts of Cheyenne kept stealing in.  After dark, she’d said, and every minute took her that much closer to the escape which Olivia had promised to be part of.  She burned herbs, spilled tinctures, dropped jars, and finally was thrown bodily out through Murgull’s hidden door with both ears ringing to find her way back to her lair alone.

Vorgullum was there when she arrived, but he was only dropping off her dinner.

“Won’t you stay?” she asked, knowing already that he wouldn’t.

“I have a tribe of nearly two hundred to provide for,” he replied, yawning.  “Two elk are not enough, and it is already getting hard to find apples.  Our stores should be half-filled with nut-mash and instead, they are all but empty.  There will be hunts every night until the snows come, I think.”

“Is it night already?” she asked, apprehensive.

He nodded, rubbing at his eyes.  “I’ll try not to wake you when I come home.”  He came to kiss her, then took up his spear again.  “I brought you a book to read while I’m away,” he said in parting, pulling open his belt pouch and tossing a newspaper into the pit beside her.

She thanked him, reaching for it, and by the time the shock of the headline had fully sunk in, he was gone.

CULT BLAMED FOR MYSTERIOUS MASS DISAPPEARANCES

Two men were held for questioning Friday afternoon in relation to the mass disappearance of seventeen women from High Hill Apartments in Canby.  Larry Kruegun, 41, and William Sanderson, 18, claim to be disciples of an unnamed cult leader whom they refer to as “the Messiah”.  The two men turned themselves in to police after receiving instructions to do so “in code, over an antennae implanted in our molars.”  In an earlier interview with this paper, the suspects have claimed that the women are alive and being held on Jupiter’s fourth moon as the Messiah’s wives.

The Canby Sheriff’s Department has released a statement pertaining to the arrests, stating that while all leads are being investigated, there is no evidence connecting the men to the missing women.  “At this point, neither of (the suspects) were able to pick out any of the ladies from a photo line-up, and they were trying.  There are a number of discrepancies in their story, and there is the issue of credibility,” said Deputy Thomas Hatcher.

The women vanished from High Hill Apartment on July 13, between the hours of midnight…

The article continued on another page, but Olivia was laughing too hard to bother looking for it.  She folded the paper and set it down on the bench before going into the washroom to clean herself up for the evening.  After spending most of the day worrying about Cheyenne, Kodjunn, and where Olivia fit between them, the ridiculous news item was just what she needed to get herself geared up to face the night.

She dressed, ran a comb through her hair, and found herself a working flashlight in the candle-bin.  She wasn’t certain how long this thing with Cheyenne and Kodjunn was supposed to last, but she made sure the fire would still be burning for at least four hours.

This completed, she took a final look around the pit, steeling herself for what was certain to be unpleasant one way or another, and left for the hot springs.  It was late, and the mainway was as busy as it could get with such a small tribe inhabiting it.  The gullan she passed raised their hands to her, either on their way to their lairs for sleep or on their way out to join the night-hunt, but as soon as she turned off the wide tunnel into the winding passage that led to the depths, she was alone.

Just as well, really.  She would have welcomed a ride down to the bottom of the Deep Drop, but didn’t want company once she was there.  She only wanted to get this meeting with Cheyenne over and done with.

She could feel her arms aching by the time she’d climbed only halfway down, however, and it worried her.  How was she going to get back up with the whole mountain asleep or off chasing deer through the forest?  She supposed she could make that part of the distraction, but she really did not want to be trapped in his arms again.  Sure, she’d been in season the last time and maybe he couldn’t help himself…but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen again.

Never mind.  She’d have a few hours at least between now and the climb back up.  Plenty of time to rest her arms.  And who knew?  One of the hunters might come down for a bath.  In either case, she didn’t want to think about it now.  Tucking her climbing spikes back in her pouch, Olivia walked down the silent passage and into the hot springs.

Cheyenne was pacing back and forth against the left wall.  She threw Olivia a murderous expression and came quickly over.  “It’s about time,” she snarled.  “I’ve been waiting over an hour.  Come on, I’ll tell you how to get—”

“Just a second,” Olivia interrupted.  She wasn’t sure what she was going to say until she said it:  “Show me a bruise.”

“What?”  Cheyenne stopped pacing and stared at her, incredulous.  “I don’t have time for this, God damn it!  He could be back any min—”

“Show me a bruise,” she repeated.  “Any bruise.  Show me where he hits you.  Show me—”  Olivia heard herself laugh a little, high and unhappy and angry, and she guessed she knew what she was saying after all.  “Show me where he chokes you.  Show me the burns on your feet.  Heck, show me just one claw mark on your ass, just one, and I’ll do this.”

There was no explosion, no outrage, no tears.  Neither did Cheyenne wrench up her shirt to display proof.  She only leaned back a little, her expression quieting into one which was merely thoughtful.

“Why the bullshit, Cheyenne?” Olivia demanded.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

The knowledge that she had been manipulated from the start, fooled by a string of lies and a few tears into risking Vorgullum’s trust and the life that she had made for herself, struck up against Cheyenne’s calm and congealed all at once into cold fury.  “Bullshit!” she spat, her face inches from Cheyenne’s.  “All that crap you fed me about rape and beatings!  All the tears you turned on and off for me so I’d jump when you snapped your fucking fingers!  That bullshit!”

“Oh,” she said when Olivia was done.  “That.”  She shrugged. “I had to say something to get you on board.”

And then her hand flashed out and caught Olivia by the throat, her foot knocked Olivia’s legs out from under her, and Cheyenne expertly bent and slammed her into the rocky floor.

Olivia scrabbled at the hand that locked the air out of her lungs, croaking like the frog Murgull always accused her of being.

“If it makes it any easier for you, I didn’t lie about everything,” Cheyenne continued conversationally.  “He really does have a limp dick.  Of course, that may have more to do with me knocking the snot out of him whenever I get the chance than anything else.  According to you, he’s perfectly capable of getting it on with the other furballs here.”

Olivia scratched wildly at Cheyenne’s face, but the other woman merely batted her hands away.  Her struggles were weakening; all of her blood vessels were throbbing in chorus, making her feel thick and cold at once.  Her tongue protruded slightly.  She made a final plea, which emerged as a rattled gasp.

Cheyenne’s eyes were cold as she straddled Olivia’s stomach and leaned on her hand.  “And he likes you,” she said in that same even tone.  “If he knew what I’m about to do for him, why, he’d probably thank me.”

Light was exploding behind Olivia’s eyes, obscuring the image of her assailant.  She was distantly aware that her heels were drumming on stone and her hips were bucking wildly, but it didn’t seem to inconvenience Cheyenne, and Olivia was beyond being bothered by anything as she fell backwards through stone and into silence.

19

Olivia was dimly conscious of being carried, but could not say where or how long.  She could only feel herself swinging, her chin smacking steadily into the hard curve of Cheyenne’s back, until the moment when she was dumped unceremoniously on the ground.  She uttered a raspy groan, and Cheyenne chuckled softly somewhere above her.  The darkness was complete here.  Even when Cheyenne touched her, Olivia saw nothing.  She had to check her eyes to be certain they were open.

Olivia tried to speak, but emitted nothing more than a cracked whistle.

Cheyenne whistled back, mockingly.  “Gol-lee, I bet that smarts,” she whispered, and the sound hissed and flowed in the empty tunnel.  Cheyenne hooked her foot under Olivia’s ribs and flipped her onto her back.  “I said you were going to be a help to me, and one way or another, honey, you are!”

“…heh.” Olivia sucked in breath like razors and tried again.  “…hep…!”

“Hey, shout as loud as you can.  We’re deep in the wasted tunnels and the only one who would possibly hear you is the one I want to find you.”  Cheyenne dropped to one knee beside Olivia, reached into her pouch and pulled out the climbing spikes.  When Olivia mewled miserably, Cheyenne hushed her and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get them right back.”

She stepped away and Olivia felt one of her bare feet lifted into the air.  A heartbeat after she realized what was going to happen, Cheyenne jabbed the spike into Olivia’s sole, just below her big toe, and yanked the serrated edge down to her heel, deep enough that Olivia could feel the rough iron scrape against her bones.

Olivia felt her skin rip open, and tried to scream.  All that came out of her ruined throat was a whooping, raspy, “Haah!”

Cheyenne dropped the foot, and picked up the other.

Olivia kicked at her, and Cheyenne reared up and slammed her fist into Olivia’s stomach.  Olivia gave a groggy belch and tried to curl up, but Cheyenne yanked her leg out straight and carved another jagged line into her instep.

Gagging, weeping, Olivia tried again to roll over.  This time, Cheyenne let her.

She tossed the spikes onto the ground next to her.  They clattered loudly, disguising the pathetic sounds of Olivia’s distress.

“He’s going to trip right over you,” Cheyenne said.  “But just in case he’s tempted to run and get help right away…”

Olivia heard a muted popping noise, and then she was being doused with something wet.  She thrashed, trying to get out from under the trickling liquid, but it landed everywhere—her skin, her hair, her clothes.  There wasn’t much of a smell, but what there was seemed familiar.  Musky.  Like boiled down she-goat piss.

“I sure appreciate you giving me this stuff,” Cheyenne remarked.  “I hope it works.”  She started to crunch away down the tunnel.

“Don’ lee me!” Olivia whispered scratchily.

Laughter was her only answer and soon, even that was gone.

Olivia rolled over and felt blindly for her climbing spikes.  The tunnel swam and buckled around her, unseen.  Finally, her fingers brushed against cold iron and she pounced on it, fitting the haft into her palm and clenching around it.

A weapon.

She found the other within seconds and then tried to stand.

Her mutilated feet shrieked out in agony and she shrieked with them—horrible, empty rushes of air that the tunnel tossed back in her face as though laughing at the futility of it all.

Olivia started crawling, dragging her heavy, throbbing feet behind her, but the uneven stone surface soon weakened her knees until they wouldn’t support her either.  She lay on her side in the tunnel, sobbing with fear and pain.

A sound.  A stealthy rustle.  She turned her blind eyes towards it, and tried to speak.  “Help,” she rasped.  “Help me!”

Pain shocked up her right leg as unexpectedly as a bolt of lightning in clear skies.  She kicked without thinking, struck something small and hot, and heard a squeak.

All the considerable horror in her very young life congealed into a single, cold clump.

Rats.

She screamed her scratchy scream and stabbed at the sound with her climbing spikes, yanking her feet up behind her.  She struck sparks off the cavern floor, jarred her arm up to the shoulder, and was bitten at the same time near her left hip.

Olivia thrashed in the blackness.  They swarmed on her, biting and screaming their ratty war cries.  Olivia scrambled back until she struck the wall, trying to gather her feet up beneath her where they would be protected.  She slashed and struck, beating wildly at the stone, sending up a raucous din as her iron spikes struck and struck at the stone.

Suddenly, her spikes punched through living flesh, and the rat sent up a shrill cry, scrabbling and biting brainlessly at the rock.  Its struggles waned and stilled.

Olivia continued to press on its body, listening desperately for the others.

Slowly it occurred to her that there were no others, at least not now.

She yanked the rat off her spikes and flung it away.  It smacked wetly into the other wall and Olivia began crawling again, her panic lending new strength to her knees.  She had managed maybe twenty feet when she heard a new sound, that of blunt claws tapping on the tunnel’s floor.

The feet slowed, then stopped.  Silence.

Olivia froze, not breathing, sensing the other out there listening as hard as she to determine what was in the tunnel.

Good God, she thought suddenly.  What am I keeping quiet for?

She sucked in breath, concentrated on her voice, and let out a ragged croak.  “Help!  Help me!”

“Who—?”  Kodjunn’s voice abruptly silenced, perhaps because the answer didn’t matter, and he started forward rapidly.  “Where are you?  Keep talking!”

“Here, I’m here!” she gasped.  Her voice was a little stronger, but not much.  “Rats!  Help me!  Help me, I—”  She stopped as the image of Cheyenne rose up in stark relief against the ragged backdrop of her mind.  Despite her disbelief and self-disgust, she heard her own tortured voice saying, “I got lost, I dropped my spikes and stepped on them.  I can’t walk, and there are rats!”

He reached her, fumbling his hands clumsily over her head in the dark, and then lowering himself carefully to gather her up.  “Where are you hurt?” he began, and then he was sniffing.  “I smell bl…blood…”

He went suddenly silent, his hands digging at her slowly, becoming painful and then surpassing it. Like a scent they cannot smell, Murgull had said.  He didn’t even know what was happening to him.

“I’m hurt,” she said.  “I need help.  Please, Kodjunn!”

The sound of his name seemed to bring him out of it, but not very far.  He pulled her into his arms and stood, but didn’t start walking, and his muscles only seemed to be locking up tighter and tighter. It was as though she had been plucked up and dumped into the arms of a stone statue, one that had come to just enough terrible life to breathe.

“Please,” she whispered.  “Take me to Murgull.”

“I left a candle burning,” he said, a statement so nonsensical that for a moment, she thought Murgull had made the wrong potion after all and he was hallucinating.  “I have to…I have to…”

“Go back for it,” she told him.  “I can wait—”

“No.”  His arms tightened with bruising force, then very slowly eased.
“You’re hurt.  I have to…”

Breathing.  Just breathing.

“Hurry,” said Olivia.  This was bad, but maybe it wouldn’t get any worse.  If he could get her out of here fast enough, get her to Murgull—

He started walking, lurching like Frankenstein’s monster back down the passage, hissing through his teeth with every step as though his were the feet cut to the bone.  It couldn’t have taken as long as it seemed, but darkness, pain and fear run in their own time.  It seemed that hours passed, hours, before she saw the glimmers of golden candlelight and smelled tallow burning and smoking in the air.  He had left not one candle, but many, set all around this abandoned cavern, here in the ruins where the wasted ones had laired.

It wasn’t a very romantic setting, if this was where he was meeting his secret lover.  A sleeping pit had been scratched out in the center of the room, but it was empty.  A brass brazier, tarnished by years and neglect, lay on its side in one corner, the ironwork of its legs rusted through.  Kodjunn’s pink Powerpuff backpack sat up against one wall, unzipped around a water jug and a few unlit candles.  The only furnishing at all was a single bench, and it was there that he set her down and knelt to examine her feet.

“Bleeding,” he hissed, and pulled in one hard, shuddering breath.  “Need…to bind it.”  He cast his eyes around desperately, but apart from a half-dozen guttering candles, the room held nothing.

“Here.”  Olivia struggled briefly with the catches, then pulled her homemade shirt off.  She held it out with one arm, covered her chest with the other, and shivered in the cold.  “Use this.”

Kodjunn took a deep breath, snatched the shirt and tore it into strips.  He crawled back to the very edge of reach and began to wind it tight around her left foot.  It hurt, but it was a whole different kind of pain, not the raw and savage agony of an open wound, but a dull throb that was infinitely more bearable. When he had them both bandaged, Kodjunn dropped her and hunched further over, his head now nearly touching the stone floor.  He took breath after shaky breath, and finally looked up at her, his eyes showing the whites all around.  He reached out with one hand, slammed his claws into the bench at her side and pressed his other palm over his bulging loincloth with a ragged moan.

Olivia watched him suffer helplessly.

During spring break in college, she had once arranged to go camping with a group of girl friends.  One of them, through a poor knowledge of field botany, watered the wrong bush and managed to acquire poison ivy inside her vagina.  They had been driving her to the nearest hospital, three of them holding her while Olivia drove.  On the way, the girl had managed to free a hand and scratch.  Olivia had chosen that moment to look in the rearview mirror.

The expression on that hapless girl’s face and the expression Kodjunn wore now was exactly the same: unspeakable pain disguised as carnal pleasure.

Cheyenne had really thought things through.

“Kodjunn,” Olivia said softly, gritting her teeth against the brief flare of pain in both her feet as she shifted on the bench to straddle it.  “Come here.”

He jerked his head towards her, then away, breathing hard.  “No,” he panted, but his hand was scratching at the stays of his loincloth.

Steeling herself against the agony crawling up her legs like poison, Olivia pulled her skirt up.  “You need me,” she told him, and it was true.  Damn Cheyenne and damn that stupid potion, but it was true and there was really nothing else she could do.

“No!” he panted, pulling his loincloth loose—not off, but just loose, just enough to let the straining rod of his cock free where he could seize it—and worse than that poison-ivy agony eating up his face was the humiliation burning through the whole of his body as he began helplessly to masturbate in front of her.  He buried his head in the crook of his arm, his muscles so tight that she could see the ripple of veins even through his pelt, and jerked himself through his fist, groaning, “You’re hurt!”

“So are you.”  She reached down, and he let her take him, let her take away his punishing hand and replace it with her own, even though he wouldn’t look at her.  He was hot in her hand, hot and harder than she ever thought it possible for a man to be.  She’d heard the word ‘steel’ used far too liberally without realizing that it could be like this, like steel beneath the thinnest cover of his sensitive skin, and that true steel hurt more than any woman could really understand.  Her heart broke for him a little then.  This wouldn’t bring him any kind of pleasure; this was going to be hell.  “Come here, Kodjunn.  Please.”

It might have been his name.  It might have been the please.  He rolled an eye toward her, squeezed them shut again, but when she spread her thighs around the bench, he rose up and crawled, trembling, over her. He shivered once, turned his face away and penetrated her.

He made an awful sound.  Olivia suddenly remembered the horror of that moment, the first night, when she could feel her body building to climax utterly independent of her pain and panic and fear.  If it were possible to give a memory a voice, then she heard it now, ripping itself in rusty shreds from Kodjunn’s throat as he drove to the hilt inside her.

Murgull’s potion did its work very well.  Kodjunn threw his whole body into the act of sex, heaving and sweating and scarcely touching her.  Even the flat board of his muscled stomach flinched back when it slapped against her and his flanks shivered uncontrollably in the grip of her thighs.  He came and came, climbing steadily towards a climax of thunderous proportions, and when it overtook him at last he bayed with wretchedness and pulled back and out of her and huddled on the ground.

They both lay there, breathing, and then he began to cry.

“I didn’t mean it,” he moaned.  “I didn’t want for this to happen.  Ah, damn me, your feet!  Your feet and I—”  He clapped both hands over his eyes and bent himself in half.

Olivia shut her eyes and kept them shut until she was certain she wouldn’t join him in tears.  “It’s not your fault,” she said.  “Look at me.”

He did, a quick, disconsolate glance over one slumped shoulder.

“This was not your fault,” she said, trying to smile.  It didn’t fit quite right, but she kept trying.

“You always flinch when I touch you.  Everyone whispers about me.  Ever since she came.”  He spoke in a voice barely above a whisper.  “When I went to the storeroom for food, Doru and Mudmar stopped talking to look at me.  What did I do that was so horrible?  I only did what our leader told us to do, I did what all the others did, why are they all staring at me?”

Olivia felt a slow sinking in her stomach.  She could only look at him, and listen as a wealth of misery and loneliness came out of him.

“She attacks me, she hits me, she tries to escape.  I try to touch her and she tries to kill me.  I have never coupled with her.  I go to Chugg.”  He stopped, breathing hard, and then exploded, “I have to go to Chugg, because the others won’t speak to me!  Golgun spit at me!”  He covered his face again, shuddering.  “I deserve it.  I deserve it all.  I rutted with you.  I took a wounded, helpless woman and I rutted with her.”

She tried to pat his arm and he wrenched away from her.  They sat, not touching.  Years passed.

At last, he brought his head up and looked around at her.  His gaze dropped to her feet and he winced with sympathy.  “I have some water,” he said dully, and got up to get it from his backpack.

She drank just to have something to do and he hunkered down at arm’s length and took a long, critical look at her.

“What happened to your neck?”   His voice held a faint tremor, the fear that he might have caused her this injury without knowing.

“I fell down,” she said.  No human would ever believe that.  If he had better light, he probably wouldn’t believe it either.

“Your feet are badly torn,” he said.

“I dropped my climbing claws.  I guess, in the dark, I must have stepped on them.”  She remembered the ripping, scraping, savage feel of those spikes cutting into her.  “And slid,” she said.  “And a rat bit me.”

“Rats,” he muttered under his breath.  “We don’t see many of them this deep, but they still get in.  They eat whatever they can and foul everything else, and they’re always crawling with fleas.  We kill them whenever we find them.”  He must have realized he was babbling because he broke off and edged further from her. She could see his nostrils flaring, feel the slow drag of his lungs as he caught her scent, the scent of Murgull’s potion.  He dropped his arm to cover himself, twisting away to try and hide the shame in his eyes, or the desire.

You poor bastard, Olivia thought tiredly.  She spoke his name, reached out to brush her fingers along the rough base of his horns.  He flinched, then leaned cautiously into the touch.  His hand hesitated towards her, settled lightly atop her thigh.  “You can look at me if you want to,” she told him.

He half-rose, dropped back, took a deep breath, and rose again.  He was erect again, a hot brand against her thigh that carried the rhythm of his pounding heart straight to her as it drove deep and slow inside her.  He groaned softly, lifted her hips, and began to move, but not as frantically or furiously as before.  That was encouraging.  It was a powerful potion, but Kodjunn’s body still had limits, and once they were exhausted, they could move on.  To that end, she touched him, reaching up to stroke his cheek before twining her hands around his shoulders and pulling him down to her.

He resisted, but obeyed, lowering himself in stages until he lay belly to belly atop her.  She held him, letting him feel her combing at his back, his sides, his hips, and felt his shudder at that intimate contact with far more clarity than the vigor of his thrusting.  His hands tunneled unexpectedly beneath her, wrapping her wholly in his arms as he pressed his mouth to her throat, thrumming softly against her skin.

It was nothing, really.  Nothing but heat and friction and the feel of a warm body above and inside her, but that was a combination that occasionally synced and it did tonight.  She felt it start for her—pinpoint spasms that flitted over and through her, spreading out like ripples in still water until all her being aligned to his rhythm and began to build toward climax.  Her breath came faster; she pressed her lips together on the moans that wanted out so that he could hear her humming, and his own movements quickened.

They came together, she crying out against the muffle of his shoulder, he straining and silent above her.  Then she tried to hold him, which was in retrospect a stupid thing to do, as Murgull’s potion was still saturant in her hair and on her skin, but he wouldn’t allow it.  He backed away, keeping his eyes averted as he adjusted his clothing to cover himself.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.  Her feet pulsed and groaned with hurt.

One of the candles began to gutter madly, throwing huge shadows to dance upon the wall and giving them both something else to look at besides each other.  For a moment, that was all she saw: the light, the shadows, the ragged surface of the cavern wall.  She saw the tool marks next, well made, smoothing out the natural face of the rock into something that was almost even.  And then she saw flecks of earthen red and charcoal black, and as if a great mental switch had been thrown, she saw the picture: countless gullan on their knees, dark bodies thrown back and mouths hanging open to emit either pale fog or streams of water, something anyway that flowed together into a single ominous shape, but this was too badly degraded by time to make out.

“I suppose you must be wondering what I am doing here.”

Olivia looked at him.  He didn’t meet her eyes.  “I know that few come here,” she said.  “But if you don’t want to tell me—”

“Few come here,” he agreed, his gaze moving restlessly over the walls where other images caught little splashes of poor tallow light.  “Some people think there are angry spirits here. You know about the wasted ones?  One of those forced into the depths after the White Fever took them was the tribe’s sigruum.  He had dreams no other sigruum ever painted, and he continued to paint them here, even here, in the depths.  I come to study them.”

“Why?”

He looked surprised.  “I thought you knew me.  I’m the new sigruum.”

“You?”  She tried to reconcile his face with what Sudjummar had told her about mountains that didn’t exist and a world that needed to be changed, and couldn’t quite manage.  “But you’re so young!”

He ducked his head, then shook it.  Clearly, he’d heard that before.  “I began to dream when I was still a child,” he said.  “I always knew I would be sigruum…I always thought I would be a good one.  Now this…this human business…”  He sighed, and said heavily, “I can’t be sigruum now.”

“Why not?”

“A sigruum must have the respect of his tribe.  He must have…self-control.”  He passed a hand over his eyes, then stood up and faced her.  “Olivia, I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Kodjunn.”

He made no effort even to look like he believed her.  Guilt and grief were pouring into him like cement, weighing on his very bones.  “Blame aside, Vorgullum is my leader.  I…I have betrayed him.”

“It’ll be all right, Kodjunn.”  She didn’t try to say that again, and not just because such assurances were meaningless.  He was sinking into his own unpleasant little world; she didn’t think he’d even heard her.

“I don’t know why I did that,” he said.  “I only know…I wanted you.  I needed you.”  Each admission was its own killing cut.  He covered his eyes again, then turned stiffly away and began to put out candles.  “I rutted with you.”

“Do you need me to carry one of those?” she asked lamely.

“No.  I have made this trip in darkness many times before.  I only use the candles to see the stories.  I would have left them burning, but smoke damages the paint.”  He paused over the last tallow, his shoulders slumping as he stared down into its little light.  “That is a sickening excuse.  I don’t understand…why I did that to you.”

“Please stop saying that,” she said.  “Please.  I can bear anything but that.”

His head bent.

“This was not your fault,” she said again.  “You don’t need to suffer for it.  I’m glad you were here—”

He looked at her, stricken.

“—because I still need your help.  Please, Kodjunn.  Take me to Murgull now.”

He put out the last candle, plunging them into the black.  The next thing she felt was his hand flitting at her arm before he gathered her up.  Then his breath blowing warm against her neck.

Please let that be the end of this, Olivia thought.  Vorgullum could go for hours when she was in season.  Please let this not be the same.

He started walking.

She had no idea how long he carried her through the dark caverns.  It had seemed like hours before, but now, it only seemed a few moments before the lanterns hung below the Deep Drop came into view, and there he stopped and looked down at her.

Olivia tensed, unhappily resigned to being laid out on the damp stone floor and fucked a third time.  He saw it in her eyes, and shame filled his own.

“We need to bathe,” he said.

“Wh-what?”

“The others, my kind, will know someone’s been with you if we don’t.  Can you…”  He faltered, glancing at her bandaged feet.  Blood had soaked right through her torn-up shirt, but at least they weren’t dripping.  “Can you wait?” he finished, and his voice broke on the last word.

“They need to be washed anyway.”

He nodded, and continued walking, following the lights that marked the way to the baths.  He set her down in the opening, out of sight, and went inside alone to make sure they would be undisturbed.

He returned a few moments later to collect her and bring her inside.  He helped her undress, unbound her feet, and lowered her into the most convenient pool.  He knelt beside her to rinse her skirt, his face twisted with misery, before taking it away into the subchamber where Vorgullum had collected new clothes for her before.  He returned naked, with fresh things for both of them, as well as a lump of soap and a plastic bottle of milky white fluid.

He did not bathe with her, but chose another pool close by and kept his back to her while he scrubbed at his fur.  When he was done, he slid it across the wet stone to her waiting hands and immediately turned his back on her again.  He ducked underwater, bobbed out and shook out his wings, then dunked again, staying under for a long time.  When he came back up for air, he heaved himself up and out, fished blindly for the plastic bottle and uncapped it.  “For your hair,” he explained, pouring a great glut of its contents over his chest.

“It cleans it?” she asked, holding out her hands for him to fill.

“Well, actually, it kills lice and fleas, but the principle is sound.”  He spent several minutes rubbing the stuff into his pelt, paying particular attention to the area around his thighs and groin, before jumping back in the water.

Olivia sniffed it dubiously.  It had a faint, bleachy odor.  “What is it?”

“Urine, mostly.”  He caught her expression and frowned, tilting his head to one side.  “What?  It’s been cured.”

Olivia scrubbed her hair, dunked herself several times, and came up gasping.  Both feet throbbed, but in spite of the bright slices of hell in her soles, she thought they felt a little better for having been soaked.  And maybe it was all psychological, but she felt better just for bathing.  It wasn’t the sex she was trying to wash off, as Kodjunn so clearly was, but Cheyenne.  As worried as Kodjunn was about his betrayal of his leader, Olivia’s fears ran far deeper.

And she had to tell him.  That was all there was to it.  She would go back to Vorgullum and she would tell him about Cheyenne and even about Olivia’s own part in her escape, and she would just hope that he and his hunters could find her before any lasting damage was done.  If she had destroyed all trust between them, then so be it.  At least the others would be safe.

Kodjunn helped her out of the pool.  They dressed in silence—he in his loincloth, she in the heavy robe he’d brought her—and then he picked her up again.  He carried her up the Deep Drop, and soon they stood before the iron door that sealed off the women’s tunnels from the remainder of the mountain.

“Horumn!” Kodjunn called.  “Answer!  I must see Murgull!”

The sound of Horumn dragging her heavy, malformed foot came quickly, but before she could unlock the door, she was shoved to one side so that Murgull could get there first.  She saw Kodjunn and the load he carried and her clawed hands flew out to seize the bars.

“What has happened here?” she snarled.

The danger sailed straight over Kodjunn’s head.  “She fell and tore her feet,” he said.  “I made her soak them, but a rat bit her.”

“Bring her in.”  Murgull stood aside so that Horumn could unlock the door, and Kodjunn squeezed by, bearing Olivia in his arms.  “Set her down,” she commanded.  “And leave.”

Kodjunn, setting Olivia gently down on a bench, looked around, stung.  But having lived with old Murgull all his life, he must have realized that there was no point in arguing.

Murgull followed him to the doorway and said something in a low voice to Horumn.  Horumn started to object, but Murgull snapped something back at her, and Horumn limped away after locking the door, clapping her hands and bellowing to clear the women’s commons of the curious onlookers who were beginning to peer in from the other tunnels.

Murgull left the door and came back to Olivia.  She picked up first one foot, and then the other, and then set them both down and straightened up again. “Now he dies,” she said and gave Olivia’s shoulder a distracted and comforting pat.  “I have everything I need, little sister.  He will be dead by dawn.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Olivia began, and suddenly, she was crying.  Strange.  She could handle everything Cheyenne had done and she could lie there under Kodjunn, but she couldn’t take even one minute of Murgull’s sympathy.  “I was wrong.  She lied to me.  He hasn’t hurt anyone.  I can’t believe it was even him I saw with Bolga anymore!”

“Then…”  Murgull studied her, puzzled, then sat beside her on the bench and pulled her against her flat and withered breast.  “Tell Murgull, little baby.  Tell her all the troubles.”

Olivia did.  Beginning with her first meeting with Cheyenne, the lies and the deceptions, how she agreed to help her escape, the confrontation, the use of the potion, and the rat.  Kodjunn’s part in the story came spilling out at the very end of it, and only because it was pointless to tell of the potion and not expect the old witch who’d brewed it to know what it had done.

“That corpse-eating beast!” Murgull exploded.  “She poured that entire bottle on you and left you for him with crippled feet?”

“I have to tell Vorgullum,” Olivia said, drying her eyes.

Murgull recoiled, her slapping arm flying up, but perhaps she decided Olivia had suffered enough because she let it go unthrown.  “You will tell him nothing, fool!  Hear me!  Nothing!”

“I have to, Murgull!  We have to get her back before she gets help!  She’ll never keep her promise to me!  She’ll come back and kill us all!”

“Ha!” Murgull barked.  “She was carried to this place even we knew that you were missing.”

“What?” Olivia cried, dismayed.

“Broke her leg trying to climb the entry shaft.  Good, clean break.  Better than that maggot deserves.”  Murgull, still fuming, bent to have another look at Olivia’s feet.  “You must keep off your feet while they heal, and you may limp for some time, but it should…”

Murgull stopped, then straightened and stared at Olivia.

“But I have to tell Vorgullum,” Olivia murmured, unaware of Murgull’s piercing attention.  “I have to.  What if Kodjunn made me pregnant?”

“He has not,” Murgull said quietly.  “You are already sparked.”

“But I…What did you say?”

“There is a life in you.”  Murgull reached out a shaking hand to grip Olivia’s arm.  Her mouth worked briefly and then she simply fell silent.

“Are you sure?” Olivia asked, hardly recognizing the tiny voice that came out of her.

Murgull nodded speechlessly.

They stared at each other.

“Vorgullum,” said Olivia, and yes, that sounded right, that had to be next.  Vorgullum needed to be told and then he would know what to do.

Murgull applied an ointment to Olivia’s wounds which numbed them over pleasantly, then wrapped them in bandages that had been soaked in some medicinal-smelling liquid.  She offered a shoulder to lean on, and with her help, Olivia made her way slowly through the mountain to the commons.

The hunters were back, and most of the tribe was here.  Olivia did not see Kodjunn, and assumed he must be back in his own chambers, discovering what Cheyenne had been up to in his absence.

Vorgullum was standing on the center rock, surrounded by hunters armed with lanterns and flashlights instead of spears, shouting out orders that included her name when he saw her hobble in.  He froze, his mouth open, then leapt off the rock and charged across the cave.  Gullan and humans alike saw her and made room for him.

Murgull released her with a little pat, and Olivia limped towards him, arms open.  He swept her up, ready to be furious, ready for revenge, and she cried, “Oh, Vorgullum!  I’m pregnant!”

And in the absolute stillness that dropped over the commons, Tina’s very mild, “No way,” carried with pin-drop clarity.

20

The next morning began with a visitor, Lorchumn, bearing a gift—a comb made of wood and bone, not as nice as the one he’d made for Judith, but much nicer than the dried teasel-head she and Vorgullum used.  She accepted it politely even as she wrapped herself in a sleeping bag to conceal her naked body.

Vorgullum saw her discomfort, read it perfectly, and reached out to grip Lorchumn’s hand.  He accepted the inevitable praise and well-wishing with good humor, then gently said, “My mate would be more comfortable in clothes.”

Lorchumn ducked his head.  “Of course.  Naturally.  I apologize, Olivia.”

“It’s good to see you, Lorchumn.  Thank you very much for your gift.”

Vorgullum steered him out of the room, and Olivia slipped into her robe and went in to the washroom.

When she emerged, refreshed and feeling more awake, she was startled to see Amy and Kurlun waiting for her in the sleeping room.

“Is this going to go on all day?” Olivia asked, amused, as she was presented with a stone carving depicting Bahgree rising from the water.

“It’ll probably go on all nine months,” Amy replied seriously.  “You would not believe the party that went on last night.  My aching head!”

“And mine,” Kurlun concurred.  “I had so much thumperjuice, I don’t even know whose pit I woke up in.”

“Truth,” Amy said solemnly.  “He wandered home with Sarah B. and Burgelbun, and they didn’t have the heart to send him back.  Actually, as drunk as Burgelbun was, I doubt if they knew where to send him, or even that he didn’t belong there at all.”

“And you were so sober,” Kurlun teased, poking her in the arm.

“I was drunk like a goldfish at a frat house,” Amy acknowledged, nodding, “but at least I had the good sense to admit it and go home.  To my home, no less.”

“I made that, oh, long and long ago, before my eyes went bad,” Kurlun remarked, smiling at the statue in Olivia’s hands.  He saw her startled expression and shrugged.  “They’re not that bad, really.  I can still see a stag against the forest below, and I can always see the welcome face of my loved mate, but my days of detailed carving are as far behind me as my days of nightly hunts.”

“If it means so much to you,” Olivia began, but he cut her off.

“I would rather be able to present you with your own image, but as I can’t, please accept this.”

Olivia took it humbly then and put it in her alcove.  As soon as Kurlun left, however, she went back and turned it to face the wall.  It was beautiful, and she did appreciate the sentiment, but Kurlun had been a very good sculptor before his eyes went bad and the leering menace on the stone Bahgree’s face was far too well-done to sleep next to.  Later, she would find a place for it in one of the other drab, empty rooms.  She supposed that if everyone brought her gifts, she’d eventually end up with more things than even Vorgullum’s lair could hold.

Her entire morning passed in this fashion.  There was always at least one other person visiting with her, and often there were two or three.  Each of them brought her something—an extra blanket, a handmade shirt or robe, a bundle of food, real Ivory soap (which made Olivia exclaim with delight, and caused the bearer of the gift, Thugg, to display his wings in such a show of masculine pleasure that Vorgullum growled), and a vast array of knick-knacks of no particular purpose, but which did go a long way towards making Vorgullum’s spartan lair look a lot like a real home.

Eventually, Murgull came, chasing her visitors away with indiscriminate slaps and snarls, and then turning on Vorgullum with the same attitude.  “You think you can hole up here like a rabbit in winter, eh?  Tribe starving, ha!  Your own mate will be starving soon enough and here you stand!  Your mate lies here with her feet torn; what is your excuse?  Ha!  Out, stag-head!  Out and to your work!  This is swollen still,” she said, squatting down to peer at Olivia’s foot as Vorgullum made an inglorious retreat.  “Rat bites are vile poisons.  Here, take this and paint your wounds.”

Olivia accepted the small pot she was given and scooped out some of the white goop inside.  It looked and felt a lot like cream cheese.  “Do I want to know what this is?” she inquired.

“It is mountain’s milk, eh?  It grows in the depths, out of the rock itself, a gift of the Great Mother.  Good cure for all bad cuts and open wounds.”  She bundled up the soiled bandages and tossed them on the fire.  “Let that touch the air now.  Air is a good healer, like Murgull.”

“Olivia?”  It was Kodjunn, calling from the entry chute.

Olivia bit her lip, glanced towards the doorway, then looked back to see Murgull’s suddenly serious expression.  “I need to talk to him,” she said, and the old gulla nodded.  “Can you keep us alone?”

Murgull nodded again and hobbled out.

A moment later, Kodjunn was there, looking down at her from the doorway.  He seemed uncomfortable, but smiled when he saw her there.  “I heard,” he said simply, and came to her side.  “I am…happy for you.”

“And I heard,” she answered.  “I don’t know what to say.”

He shrugged.  “Her leg is broken.  Hateful as it may sound, it’s the best thing that could have happened.  If  she’d gone any further, she’d have killed herself.  And at least this way, I’ll know where she is for a little while.”

“Did she say anything?”

“No, only turned her face to the wall and cursed me.  Murgull gave her something for the pain when she set the bone, but I don’t think she means to come back.  Cheyenne is being grim about it, but there’s a lot of pain inside her, and how am I supposed to feel about that?” he asked, opening his empty arms.  “Shall I pretend to be sorry?  She’s spent all this time hating me and now I feel nothing for her.  Nothing at all.”

Olivia, who still felt as though she could cheerfully wrap her hands around her climbing spikes and do Cheyenne in like the world’s biggest rat, forced herself to appear sympathetic.  “That is unfortunate,” she managed.  “For both of you.”

“I would return her,” he burst out.  “I would fly her as far as I could fly in a single night and drop her, but that will never be enough.  Humans have machines that take them places even faster than a gulla can fly.  She could be home before sundown the next day, and we would be invaded before dawn.”

“Assuming she survives the drop.”

He glanced at her, a smile edging around his mouth.  “No, Olivia. That’s not in me.  Even when we go on big hunts, the others do the killing, and I gather the herd.”

“Oh.”  Now it was she who could not meet his eyes.  All the things she had believed about him…  “What will you do?”

“I put a guard back on her,” he said, shrugging with his wings.  “Day and night, this time.  That will hold her until the chain can be made.”

Olivia felt her jaw drop.  “You mean to chain her?”

“It wasn’t my decision, but I didn’t argue with it,” he admitted.  “She has done too much to damage me.  Doru told me she’s been telling people that I am a pervert.  That I beat her.  That I do…deviant things.”  He took several deep breaths and calmed himself down.  “I would never,” he began hotly, and then looked up at her, stricken.  “What happened yesterday…I don’t know why I did that,” he finished in a small voice.

“It wasn’t your f—”

“It was my fault!” he insisted, and passed a hand over his face.  “I saw a woman in terrible pain and I rutted with her!  How can you stand to look at me when I dragged you off into the depths and…and fucked you like that?”

The word tore at him, ripped his voice into raw hurts.  Olivia tried to touch him and he yanked his arm out of her grip.

“I have to tell him,” he said bleakly.  “I have rutted with the leader’s mate.  I don’t deserve to be tribe.”

Oh lord, he was really going to do it.

A thought bloomed slowly in the far corners of Olivia’s mind.  She reached out again and this time, refused to be shaken off.  “I had a dream last night,” she said.

He quieted at once, still troubled, but listening.

“A lean and wondrous woman, shining like a star, with wings of wind stood before me.”  She gauged his reaction and saw only unhesitant acceptance.  “She told me that the Great Spirit had seen your suffering and entered your body when you saw me.  It was his will that we should couple and that was why you could not resist.”

Kodjunn took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled shakily.  “That was no mere dream,” he told her, staring.  “Urga herself appeared to you.  The Great Spirit… possessed me to couple with you.”

“Then Urga told me that our union must still remain a secret, but commanded me to lighten your heart with my vision, as she sensed your guilt was great.  You did not betray your leader,” she added.

“He possessed me,” he said, and shook his head slowly.  “The Great Spirit’s essence entered your body while the child still formed.  His spark will be in this child!  This…This is a miracle!”  Kodjunn stood stiffly and looked down at her, still shock-eyed.  “I…am honored, Olivia.”

She was beginning to feel a little guilty, although she failed to see how she could have convinced him otherwise, so she gently steered the conversation away from her and back to him.  “Listen…about Cheyenne…you must try to explain things to her.  She thinks…oh hell, she thinks she’s being held captive by a beast, a monster.  If you chain her up, you’re only telling her that she’s right.”

He nodded, but grimly.  “There are worse things I could do.  Vorgullum—”  He broke off abruptly, then said, “I understand what she feels.  I’m sure I would feel the same way if I were taken by humans, but I can’t allow her to endanger my tribe or to tell lies about me.”

“What about Vorgullum?” Olivia asked warily.

Kodjunn looked deep into her eyes, his own dark and flat with grim truth.  “There are things you do not need to know about him.”

“He’s my mate.”

“Yes.  Precisely.”

Olivia struggled into a more upright sitting position, feeling a strong flutter of fear like a sparrow set loose in her stomach.  “What did Vorgullum advise?” she asked.  “Tell me now, if you are my friend.”

Kodjunn was silent so long that she didn’t think he meant to answer, would only sit and stare until she changed the subject, as Vorgullum had done himself in those days before he trusted her with his name.  But then, uncomfortably, he said, “Since he knows I have not been with her, he suggests she be thrown from the aerie.”

Olivia froze down to her bones.  “That’s cold-blooded murder!”

“What do you think she would have brought back on us if she had managed to make her way out of the mountain?  Or on you, now that you carry our child?”   But he broke his gaze from hers and slumped in bitter defeat.  “For now, he allows this to be a choice and I choose not to.  I will chain her, I will gag her.  I will not kill her.”  He stared at his hands, breathing hard.  “Not yet.”

“Kodjunn…”

He stood to go, wincing a little at what he saw on her face.  “Olivia, my friend, you have a world of…of lights and hives and metal cars.  This is my world, and blood is the reality of my world.”  He dropped his arms to his sides and looked at her unhappily.  “And I’m doing the best I can.”

“I know.”  The hell of it was, she did.  She sank back into the bedding and curled up around her pain and confusion.

He hesitated as if he wanted to say more, but when she didn’t move he simply left her, and presently Murgull returned.

“There is a shadow on that one,” the old gulla observed, looking back over her shoulder grimly.  “Did you tell him?”

“Hell, no.  If he knew Cheyenne used that potion on me, he’d tell Vorgullum no matter how many amazing visions I had.  I don’t know what Vorgullum would do to him, but I sure know what he’d do to Cheyenne.”

“Nothing but what she deserves.”  Murgull knelt to bandage Olivia’s feet again.  “What would you have me do, little sister?” she asked bluntly.  “Shall I go to Cheyenne-bitch and hobble her leg?”

For a moment, Olivia couldn’t quite comprehend what Murgull was saying.  Cheyenne was already hobbled, at least for a while.  Then she had an intense vision of Murgull seizing Cheyenne’s ankle and driving a spike through it, and realized that was much closer to Murgull’s offer than a chain.

“No,” she said at last.  “I’m evil enough to be tempted, but what good would that do?”

“No good,” grunted Murgull.  “But it would be strangely satisfying, I think.”

“Look,” Olivia said quietly, and pulled the high collar of her robe down far enough to show the purple bruises in the shape of Cheyenne’s hand.  “Who has more reason to hate her, you or me?”

“So?”  Murgull compressed her lips tightly and waited.

“Give her something for the pain in her leg,” Olivia ordered.  “And when you are close, so that Kodjunn does not hear, tell her that I told you everything.  Tell her it’s a small walk from you to Vorgullum.  Tell her that she promised this would be the end of it, no matter what.  She promised.  And if she doesn’t keep that promise, Vorgullum will know everything.  She may be able to get me, she may even be able to get you—”

Murgull raised an eyebrow and snorted, but did not interrupt.

“—but she can never get us both,” Olivia finished.

“Then you mean to forgive her.”

Olivia turned her hands up, indicating the gullan pit in which she lay, the welcome-mate paints on the walls, the whole of the mountain around her.  “I’ve forgiven worse, I think.”

Murgull made a disgusted sound, then a more pensive one.  She rubbed at the loose, scarred skin of her neck.  “So be it,” she said, and gathered her things.  “Yours is a strange vengeance, little sister.  I only hope it is enough.”

She hobbled from the room.

Olivia lay in the pit, greeted two more well-wishers and had a leisurely breakfast before Murgull returned.

“A strange vengeance,” she said again, grinning.  “But a potent one.  You should have seen the beast’s face.  All white like ashes, then purple like a bruise, and then grey like Murgull’s eye.  Little voice, like a mouse, she says, ‘She wouldn’t say anything.’  Her eyes say differently, and Murgull just leans back and laughs at her, Murgull’s mean and cryptic laugh.”  Murgull gave an example of her witchy cackle and leered at Olivia.

“Well, I hope it keeps her quiet, anyway,” Olivia said heavily.

“She is being very quiet when Murgull leaves her,” Murgull agreed.  “And now, little sister, let us chat of birth and sparking women.  I intend to be here long enough to see my Somurg draw a breath, but after that, I think, I will be ready for a new pit to sleep inside.  You must be ready to help your naked frog-sisters when their time comes to spawn.”

“I will be, Murgull.”

The old crone sat and folded her good wing close.  “Nine moons come and go in mother’s time,” she began.  “Three moons for the life to take root.  Three moons for the soul to be spun.  Three moons for the child to form and know its mother.  This life you bear is very fragile yet, for your little white body cares nothing for it.  It sees only an unfamiliar thing invading it.  It will try and kill the thing.  So we are careful now.  We do not let Olivia Urgarna get sick.  She stays here and mends her feet, and lets the life root.”

Olivia Urgarna.

Olivia the Good Mother.

God help her get through this without throttling someone.

“No more thumperjuice,” Murgull announced.  “No more climbing the Deep Drop and no hot baths!  And when your feet are well, no more lying about in bed like wood grub.  Murgull will teach you ways to work your body, to make it easier to expand.  There are muscles that need strengthening, and muscles that need relaxing.  And most important of all these things:  Lie with no one but your mate!  Kodjunn,” she muttered, rubbing at her scars.  “Kodjunn could not be helped, but with luck, his spark will be weak.”

“His spark?”

“Mm.  Until the soul is spun and the child begins to form, all you carry is the seeming of life, eh?  The look and feel of it.”  Murgull have her a stern stare.  “A man’s spark can enter that life through his spitting prick and overwhelm any other.  You want this child to be Vorgullum’s, eh?  Then you couple with him many times, many times, to snuff out the spark of sigruum, and lie with no other.”

Olivia blinked.  “Oookay.”

“And last of all, no more stress for Olivia!”

“Now that,” Olivia said smiling, “is good advice.”

Murgull nodded once, grunting, and then reached into one of her many pouches and drew out a plastic pop bottle filled with a brackish, brown liquid.  “For your pain,” she said.  “And to help your healing.  One swallow only, eh?”

Olivia uncapped it for a sniff, then took a tentative sip of the pungent brew.  It scoured her throat almost as much as it had stung her sinuses, but she thought parts of it were familiar.  “Yellow stoneroot?” she guessed.  “And sunberry bark.”

Murgull’s head cocked expectantly.

“And…white sickle?”

Murgull’s good eye narrowed a moment before her hand came swooping out to slap against her ear, but it wasn’t as hard a slap as she was apt to give.  “White sickle for a sparking women?” she spat.  “Urga’s tears!”

“Right, Urga’s tears.  That would have been my next guess.”

“Also bloodbalm and mooneye, eh?  You will have to study harder when you are healed.  It will make you sleep soon,” she added, taking back the bottle and setting it beside the pit, within Olivia’s easy reach.  “But sleep is good.  I will see to it that you have no more visitors.”

“Thank you.”

Murgull grunted again and stumped out.  Olivia heard her talking to someone in the private passage, and then the voices receded and she was alone.

She rolled onto her side, rested her hand on her flat stomach and soon felt the medicine take gentle effect, first on her aching feet and then on her mind.  She must have fallen asleep, although she dreamed she was still awake; she must have been asleep because it seemed to her that the fire snapping in the hearth was changing, that there was a man, or something like a man, rising out of it.  She must have been asleep because the only way a man could fit in that fireplace would be if he were two feet tall, but the man stood up anyway, stood up and came walking towards her until he stood at the foot of the pit.  His arms folded across his burning chest.  He looked at her, she looked at him, and her eyelids grew heavy, and the next thing she knew, the fire was ash, a lantern was lit, and Vorgullum was easing into the pit beside her.  He nipped her shoulder when he saw her stirring and wrapped his arms around her waist.

“I hoped you would be awake,” he said.  “I have a present for you.”

“Everyone has a present for me,” she mumbled sleepily.  “I’m more popular than the Beatles.”

He didn’t bother to puzzle out her meaning, only reached back for his belt pouch and handed it to her.

“Oh, how lovely,” she cooed.  “A new belt pouch.  I’ll treasure it always.”

“Look inside, you little demon,” he said, tugging at a lock of her hair.

She reached inside and her fingers brushed something cool and metal.  She pulled it out, curious in spite of herself, and beheld a wristwatch.  Not just any wristwatch, either.  She’d actually seen this one before.

It had been the in the window display of Friedlund’s Jewelry, and Olivia had seen it every time she’d walked from her office to the coffee shop at the end of the block.  The band was a delicate loop of sixteen-carat gold.  The face was also gold with diamonds set up at the cardinal points, chic and trendy and stunning and several thousand dollars.

“Thank you,” she whispered.  “Thank you so much.”

“I looked all over for one to replace yours, since you say it is broken,” he explained.  “This was the only one I could find.  I think it’s very pretty.”

“It is,” she agreed, removing her old watch and gingerly slipping the new one on.  She admired it on her wrist, and then looked at him in amazement.  “Is that all you took?”

“That was all you wanted, wasn’t it?”  He eyed her curiously, evidently finding that a puzzling question.

“I hope you got out of there quickly.”

“I did,” he assured her.  “We gullan know all about alarms.  I hid beside the glass, and then broke it, grabbed your present, and flew away.  I was far, far over the town when I heard the machines wailing and saw the lights.”

“My brave mate,” she murmured, cuddling up to him.

“I wanted to make you happy,” he said, nuzzling her throat.

She thought of him telling Kodjunn to throw Cheyenne from the aerie, and couldn’t quite reconcile that thought with the warm reality of the gentle hands now stroking through her hair.  “I am happy,” she said.  She even believed it, although the thought of motherhood did not come without its own little thrill of apprehension, but she supposed though would have happened whether or not she’d been impregnated by a giant, horned bat-creature.

“I could make you happier still,” he murmured, nuzzling at her neck.

“Do you think so?”

“I’m certain of it.”  He kissed her, his strange mouth pressing on hers with his own unique blend of ignorance and desire.  It was the sort of kiss that might seem chaste—just lips on lips—but for the demanding power behind it.  He thrummed once, tickling her open with its vibrations, withdrew to give her chin a playful bite, and crushed his mouth on hers again.  As his tongue worked its way into her mouth, his hand slipped beneath her covers, beneath the hem of her heavy gullan robe.  He rubbed his palm over her thigh in the same slow circling movement as his tongue inside her mouth, and then pushed his hand up, coarse fabric bunching around his wrist, to cup the soft mound of her sex.

Olivia smiled into the kiss, twining her hands around his neck to pull him to her.  He’d been content to do nothing but hold her when he’d carried her home the previous night, but he was not embracing her now with fatherly affection.  Oh, she supposed it wouldn’t take more than a few words to stop him, but it was difficult to find those words when he kissed her.  And anyway, according to Murgull, she needed all of his sparks she could get.

So she lay back, responding to his caresses and savoring them as much as she could in spite of the pain throbbing in her feet.  She must have found a good measure of success because when his fingers parted her, pierced her, she could hear the wet sounds of her body’s desire even over his mating hums.  She felt him smile as he tested her slickness, and then his tongue stabbed with conquering force into her mouth even as his finger thrust up inside her.

Her feet still hurt, but this hurt even better.  Olivia groaned, her hips bucking up at him whenever he struck that sweet place inside her.  He drew back at once to watch her, grinning his savage gullan grin as he pumped his hand at her, relishing every writhing gasp and shameless moan.  The heady smack of his leathery palm against her pussy, slapping exquisitely at her clit, seemed to take even the beating of her heart and turn it to his rhythm.  When she groped at him, he restrained her; when she begged for him, he overpowered her pleading voice with thrumms.  She came on his hand, her fingers knotted in the soft pelt of his triumphant arm, shouting dizzily into his fierce smile.

“My Olivia,” he growled, and threw the covers back, replacing its small weight with his own.  “My Olivia!”  He pierced her, sinking his shaft deeply inside her even before the last shudders of her climax had fully receded, driving her at once back to the crests of pleasure.  He reared over her, forcing her to lie flat where all her raptures must be displayed for his enjoyment, and claimed her body with his slow, determined strokes.  “My Olivia!”

She could only groan wordless affirmation, holding him as best she could while he held her at arm’s length and closing her eyes to better feel every searing sensation: the dull prick of his claws at her shoulders, the soft scour of his pelt at her belly, the bellows-hard wind of his breath blowing down at her, and over all, the relentless, burning conquest of his cock.  She climaxed again, wrapping her legs around his hips and cinching them tight, trying to trap him deep inside her as she rode out her frenzied waves of pleasure.

Now he groaned, arching hugely as her body seized on him, and came at once, pouring heat into her throbbing womb.  One last gasp, a shudder, and then he sank down to press his brow to hers.  “My Olivia,” he breathed.  “My mate.”

She smiled wearily, reaching down his back to rub between his wings.  Her feet hurt.

He bumped her brow again, rolled back to turn off the lantern, then moved beside her in the pit, wrapping her solicitously in the sleeping bag he had thrown aside before spooning up against her.  His arm came around her waist.  His wing half-opened and draped her.  He closed his eyes and soon was sleeping.

Olivia listened to his soft, half-snoring breaths and rubbed restlessly at the unfamiliar weight of her brand new wristwatch.  At last, she found Murgull’s medicine in the dark and took another small swallow.  She looked at the fireplace.  It stayed dark.  She curled on her side under Vorgullum’s arm and outstretched wing and eventually slept.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHADOWS

1

The first thing Olivia did when she was healed enough to walk was go in search of Victoria.  By this time, Horumn had put her foot down refused to admit any of the humans in the women’s tunnels, proclaiming that it was difficult enough to keep the tribe fed and cared for, and she could not be expected to do it while breast-feeding the humans.  Instead, it had become habit for those humans who still wanted to be useful to gather in the commons and learn what they could from one of the female gullan slippery enough to escape Horumn’s clutches.  This was usually Crugunn.  Participation in these training sessions was not exactly mandatory, and Olivia had already noticed that there were certain women who joined in—Amy, Tina, Tobi, and Sarah J. were always there—and certain women who did not—Mojo Woman, who rarely even showed up, Sarah B., who never did unless her mate bodily pulled her into the commons and left her, and Victoria, who seemed to join the training groups solely to make a point out of storming out of them.  The other women might or might not show up, and Olivia supposed she really couldn’t blame them for avoiding the primitive chores if that was their choice; they all had mates to take care of them, and in the case of those like Beth or Liz, it wasn’t so much that they were lazy as much as embarrassed over not being able to do anything.

Olivia got lucky on her first day out and walking.  There were three loose circles of humans and gullan in the commons, and nearly everyone was there. In the largest group, Rumm and Thurga patiently instructed humans in the art of tanning hides for leather.  In another, Crugunn, along with Ellen, Amy, and Anita, sewed human clothes and loincloths with catgut and bone needles.  In the last, Carla and Karen had joined three other unfamiliar gullan females for a snack and some gossip.  Close to the hearth, Victoria sat rigidly reading a magazine.  And in the furthest corner, Doru appeared to be teaching ‘his’ Tobi how to tell the right end of the spear from the wrong end.

Curious, Olivia limped unobtrusively closer to him, and heard his rolling, deep voice say, “—a head taller than the length of your body, wingless…but of course, you already come wingless, so that should be easy to remember.  I doubt you will ever be pressed to fashion your own spear, but if you do, make sure the length of the tang is equal to half the length of the head.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tobi interrupted, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet.  “When do I throw it?”

“I haven’t dropped that particular stone on Vorgullum’s foot yet.  First, learn to hold it.  Maybe by the time you master that, I’ll have grown some guts.”

“No problem.”  Tobi giggled.  “I can be pretty good with this spear.”

Olivia saw Tobi’s hand dart out, and had a pretty good idea of what she did with it because Doru hissed and jumped back as if burned.  He started to say something, caught sight of Olivia, and shifted around Tobi, stretching out his wings to cover his human from view.  She heard him mutter, “Now try it, and see what you get.”

Smiling, Olivia left them alone and went to deal with Victoria.

The other woman made a bitter production out of having her reading time interrupted when Olivia asked for a moment of her time, making a point of slapping her Hunter’s Digest down and drawing as much attention as possible.  There was no shortage of little bench-lined alcoves in the commons, although finding one out of easy eavesdropping range was a tricky thing with so many people here, and it was with an audible sigh of relief that Olivia was finally able to find a seat and rub gingerly at her bandaged feet.

“I’ve been asked to speak to you,” she said.

“Naturally.”  Victoria folded her arms in that upper-class, waspish way—fingertips tapping lightly at her slender arms and back as straight as a ruler.  “You wouldn’t go through all this bother just to socialize.”

“You know the gullan have a highly developed sense of smell, right?  Well…”  Olivia felt a blush crawling up the sides of her face like flames.  “Well, so they can…smell you when you…you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Victoria snapped.  “What are you talking about?”

Well, she’d known this wasn’t going to be an easy conversation.  Olivia took a deep, stabilizing breath and started over.  “The thing is, your mate has noticed—”

“My mate!” Victoria echoed, shrilly enough to halt conversation all around them.  In the far corner, Doru looked around.  “I don’t have a mate, you degenerate little whore!  I am being held captive by a hideous, perverted monster and I have no intention of standing here and discussing him with you!”

Olivia took a deep, cleansing breath, aware that Doru was striding silently, menacingly towards them, spear in hand.  “—have noticed,” she continued, “that you haven’t had a menstrual period yet.”

“That is absolutely none of your goddamned business!” Victoria spat.  Blotchy color had begun to bleed in high along her cheekbones.  “I refuse to stand here and discuss my private medical life with a…with a secretary!”

Doru had stopped, unseen, just behind Victoria.  He cast an expectant eye at Olivia, and she shook her head very slightly.  He stared inscrutably at Victoria’s back and did nothing.

“Well, the fear is that you might be…you know, a bit too old for—”

“How dare you!”

Olivia waited for a few seconds in the hopes that the other woman would calm down, and when it became obvious that waiting wasn’t going to help, she sighed and said, “Look, I understand this is pretty personal and I’m sorry.  It’s just obvious that you’ve had a little work done and—”

“You little bitch-whore!”  Victoria whipped her arm back for a slap and Doru caught her wrist.  The human actually staggered with the aborted momentum, then turned, blinking in shock at the huge gulla that had, from her view, materialized as if by magic.

“I have never,” Doru said now, slow and thoughtful, “ever in my life struck a female, but I think I am going to strike you now.”

“Please don’t,” Olivia said softly.

Doru eyed her almost without emotion, then returned his gaze to Victoria, who did not even try to struggle free of his massive hand.  “I believe Olivia asked you a question,” he said.  “Answer it.”

Rage had taken a cadaverous effect on Victoria’s features.  Paled by fury, her eyes appeared sunken and too dark, her lips pressed into blue slits, and the shadows of her unkempt hair cut across her face like claw marks.  She did not merely look old, but haggard, trollish.  She said nothing.

Olivia waited while everyone in the commons watched them.  “Fine,” she said at last, and sighed again.  “Okay, that’s all.  I’m sorry I disturbed you, or… whatever.  You can let her go now, Doru.”

“Kick her ass, Doru,” Tobi called helpfully.

Victoria turned her scathing glare on Tobi and opened her mouth.

That was as far as she got before Doru heaved her by her wrist alone into the air over his head, grabbed the neck of her crude clothes, and shook her hard, once and twice.  “Say it,” he growled, his voice scarcely audible.  “Say anything and give me a reason.”

“Enough,” Olivia said.  “Put her down.  Now.”

Doru dropped her; Victoria’s feet struck the ground, buckled, and sent her flat on her butt on the stone floor.  She gaped up at him while he glowered down at her, horns low and teeth exposed.

“Doru, enough.” Olivia put one hand gingerly on the vast expanse of his chest and he permitted himself to be pushed back.  She reached out to help Victoria stand.  “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she said.

Victoria sneered at her empty hand and smacked it away.  She stood slowly, ran her hands down the sides of her rumpled leather jerkin, then marched with great dignity from the cavern towards her chambers.  At the doorway to the main passage, she stopped and turned around.  “You are all whores,” she announced.  “You are all whores who fuck animals.  And you!”  She pointed at Olivia.  “You are the foulest slut of them all, because you like it!”

The gullan in the room cast curious glances at the humans, clearly hoping for a translation as Victoria concluded her speech and took herself away.

Olivia rubbed at her eyes with the heels of both hands and sighed.

“Fine,” Tobi called irritably.  “I’ll kick her ass.”

“You’re not helping, Tobi.”

“It’ll help when her ass is kicked!”

“Hush now,” Doru said simply, still gazing at the empty doorway Victoria had vanished through, and Tobi turned her back on him with a grumble and twirled her training spear.

“You’re not having a good day, are you?” Amy called, smiling faintly.

“Oh, it’s about to get better,” Olivia said with a sigh.  “Now I’m off to see Cheyenne.”

Doru had been moving away.  Now he turned back, his face set resolutely.  “Not alone, you’re not.”

“Why not?”

He met her challenging eyes with an expression of thunder and fire.  “The leader’s young belong to the entire tribe.  It falls to me as much as any other male to protect them.”

“Oh, have it your way.”  Olivia stalked from the cave, and he followed her like a shadow.  “Honestly, you act like you think she was going to jump up and attack me or something,” she added when they were well away.

He stopped suddenly and dropped one massive hand over her shoulder, yanking her back and spinning her to face him.  His eyes were blazing, but his voice was very calm and even as he said, “What are you playing at, Olivia?”

“What do you mean?”

He tossed his horns hard, cutting the air in a curt whistle.  Before she could think to move, he had hooked one claw around the loose neck of her robe and pulled it into a taut V, exposing her throat (and, thanks to the gullan design of this backless robe, exposing much of her chest as well).  “That’s the mark of a human hand, or I’ll eat my own wings.”

“I fell down.”

His eyes narrowed, but burned just as brightly.  “I see.  Tell me how you managed to drop your iron claws, step on them, slide on them, and throttle yourself half-killed in the process.”

“I didn’t have a plan!”

“No.”  He leaned back, his tone softening even if his stare did not.  “Oddly enough, that much I believe.  But someone surely put a hurt on you, and for the life of me, I cannot imagine why you’re protecting her.”

Olivia looked at him, expressionless.  “What are you suggesting?  That I strangled myself so Cheyenne could escape?”

“That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”  He released her robe and watched her straighten it.  “But then, there’s a lot about that night that never made sense to me.  What were you doing in the depths anyway?”

“I wanted a bath.”

“You were nowhere near the baths when Kodjunn found you.”

“I got lost.”

“Well, that’s easy enough to do, I suppose, especially since you climbed down the Deep Drop by yourself after dark without any kind of a light.”

“I had a light!”

“What happened to it?”

She had no idea.  She’d had it until Cheyenne had hit her, and after that…  “I dropped it.”

Doru folded his powerful arms and leaned back, fanning and half-unfolding his wings so that he appeared as large and menacing as possible.  “And by no means would it be the second light the beast had with her when she fell?”

She was blushing.  She knew she was blushing.  Damn him.  “No.”

“Well, those human lights are such useful things to have,” he mused.  His eyes on her stayed hot.  “Let’s go look for the one you lost together.  I can follow your scent well enough if it’s fresh.  I can follow hers too, but of course, I’m not going to find hers down there, am I?”

To that, she had no answer at all.

He searched her face, grimly satisfied with what he saw, and quietly said, “You can hardly see them yourself, but I can’t fathom how Vorgullum is missing the blood pooled in the corners of your eyes.  No one gets that falling down.  Someone choked you.  Someone nearly killed you.  And there are scratches on the little beast’s face and arms.  Did you make them, Olivia?”

“No,” she said automatically.

“So be it.”  He straightened and tightened up his wings with a few angry snaps.  “You obviously think you’re saving her, and she would surely need saving if her part in your wounding were known.  But what are you saving her for?  So she can try again, and perhaps succeed?  Olivia, what would have happened if that beast had made good her escape?  Think.  Even assuming she had survived the climb and found helpful humans somewhere in the wild.  What would happen to us?”

“No one would believe her if she told them about you,” she said, but her reasoning had no strength, and why should it?  She’d argued against it too effectively when just that claim had been made by other women.

“They might.  Long enough, at any rate, to fly up here in their metal cars and look for us.”

And Olivia was confronted once more with the vision of gullan shot down by faceless army-guys of the sort that always showed up in the last frame of any movie to deal with the bad guys.  And for the human captives?  Rescue for some, she supposed, but what about her?  Her, with a bellyful of baby gulla.

She moved around him very deliberately and continued down the tunnel to Cheyenne’s cave.  “I appreciate your concern,” she said.  “But I fell down.”

“Onto your own hand?”  He snorted.  “Was this before or after you stepped on your own spikes?”

“If I hadn’t been so stupid as to try and go down to the baths by myself in the first place, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.  Which,” she added, “is beginning to sound an awful lot like an accusation.”

“Are you trying to scare me, Olivia?”  He barked out a hard laugh.  “A man can’t be scared after he’s coupled with Chugg!”

She tried to keep a straight face and failed.

His voice lowered, even if it didn’t quite soften.  “I tell you all this for your own sake, and for the sake of the other humans.  You understand that if you died, most of what binds we gullan to our little mates would blow apart like smoke in a storm.”

Olivia rolled her eyes and tried to turn away.  He turned her right back.

“You think this is more of that worshipful Olivia-is-always-wise nonsense that Vorgullum is so fond of flinging about, but stop and think.  There are damn few humans willing even to play at friendship with their mates, and most are little more than…I don’t know the word.  Those animals you humans sometimes bring on hunts—you feed them and work them, and keep them chained to trees when you’re not using them.”

“Pets,” Olivia said numbly.

He repeated the word, testing it and finding it good.  “Most are pets.  Willing pets, if you can imagine that.  Only after Olivia came out of her cave did they start to wake up, to learn our words and show any interest in our ways.  Great Spirit, do you think Gormuck would have made any effort to bring his Liz out of that madness she had after Judith died if you hadn’t been trying as well?  And between us, I think it was your words more than his that did the trick.”

Probably.  Her threat to tell Vorgullum about Liz’s pills.  Olivia turned away and kept walking.  This time, he settled for following her.

“Do you think we would allow Thugg’s bitter little bitch-mate to walk around freely, much less open her poison mouth, if not for your continued efforts to reason with her?  And Mojo Woman.  Do you think she lives because we fear her?  Well, some do, perhaps, but I am not one of them, not by a spear’s throw.  With damn few exceptions, none of the females make any effort to be happy.  Karen hates Bodual, Sarabee sits and cries all day, Carla—”

“And Tobi?” she interrupted, sending him a swift and (against her will) troubled glance.  “Are you having problems with her?”

“With Tobi?  My Tobi?”  He sounded honestly surprised.  Then, without warning, he broke out laughing.  Real laughter, neither angry or strained, but the rolling, good-natured sort of laughter that so perfectly fit his massive frame.  “My Tobi?” he said again, and shrugged.  “A little, in the beginning, but surely no worse than could be expected.  No, we have no hot claws between us, but if things were different, I never would have tried to take her for my mate.”

They had nearly reached Kodjunn’s chambers, and Olivia was slowing down, not only out of deference to her throbbing feet, but to give the conversation a chance to play out.  “Why?  Is something wrong with her?”

“Nothing’s wrong with her.  She is my healthy, strong, clever, cheerful, fine, young Tobi.  She…”  He snapped his teeth absently, his brow furrowed as he sought words.  “I don’t know if you can understand this,” he said hesitantly.  “Tobi does not enjoy the act of coupling.”

Olivia briefly considered falling down and goggling at him in shock, decided that he wouldn’t get it, and refrained.

“This isn’t the sort of thing a man tells a woman…but what the hell, I told you about Chugg.”  He stopped walking and looked at her, his eyes gleaming in the near-blackness.  “So I’ll tell you how it is with my Tobi.  First, you ought to know that I didn’t find her.  The female I brought out of the hive was that one you call Ellen.  And let me tell you, even as serious as the whole business was, if I had been the one to find Tobi, I would have left her sleeping in her den.  I ended up with Tobi because she knocked Mudmar in the head and ran off while we were getting ready to fly, and I went after her.  When I got back, Mudmar had flown off with Ellen like the sneaky little snake that he is—it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch—and I was left with Tobi.  Believe me, I was truly unhappy about it.  Tobi is such a scrawny thing…I didn’t want her to be afraid of me.  More than that, I didn’t want to break her.

“That first night, thoughts of mating were foremost in my mind and about the last thing my body wanted.  She lay in my pit like a sack of mud with her head still thick with Murgull’s tharo.  I sat there all day and watched her, keeping up my courage with thumperjuice, to the effect that by the time she woke up, I was busy being sick.  She tried to run, made it as far as the mainway, and fell down.  I carried her back to the pit, not exactly at my best, and passed out.  She thought I was dead and actually—”  He laughed again, softer this time, smiling.  “—ran for help.  I like to think that wasn’t just the tharo.  Once she got someone in to see to me, of course, she just ran.  Vorgullum had to post a guard outside my cave to keep her in while I recovered.  The third day, when both our heads were clear, I decided it was soon enough.  I went to undress her.  She fought me.”  His smile broadened with something like pride.  “Fought like a she-bear.  You would never think it to look at that skinny snake’s body.”  His smile faded, and then he shook the memory away.

“And once I had her pinned down, I couldn’t think of what to do with her.  If I eased back on her legs, she kicked.  If I released her arms, she punched.  If I bent too close, she bit.  My fierce Tobi.  So I had to sit on top of her for all the hours of daylight until she finally came too close to sleep to throw me off or beat at me and I settled for lying there beside her.

“The next day, I was determined.  I taught her the words for stop and for yes.  Then I went to undress her again.  Five days she told me stop.  On the eighth day, she came naked to my pit.  I came naked to the pit.  I touched my Tobi.  Then she told me stop.  Fine.  Fair.  And five more days of this.  And finally, finally!”  He tossed his horns and spread out both arms in a pose of triumph.  “I thought it was good.  For both of us, I mean.  And each time after when I called to her to lie down with me, she came willingly.  And lay there.”  Doru’s step slowed.  He looked straight ahead.  “Just lay there.”

Olivia could not reply.

“But she was good company, and clever, and I taught her our words as fast as she could learn them, because I knew her season was coming and I needed her to be ready.  On the day I explained to her of a female’s season and of coupling, she narrowed her eyes at me and says, ‘Seasons make baby?’  I admitted that was the way of things.  My Tobi…”

Doru trailed off and Olivia looked up at him, piercing the darkness as best as she was able.  He was still smiling, but his eyes were full of pain.  “My Tobi said, ‘Season comes, Tobi fuck you.  Never again.’  And that was it.  All I tried to teach her of patience or pleasure or…or love…”  He walked along, his head bent, staring at his feet as they paced through the tunnel.

“Tobi has had three seasons since we brought you to Hollow Mountain.  This last, when I scented it starting, I said, ‘You are in season.’  She hadn’t enjoyed hers before, but we had made a little friendship between us and I had heard there were…well, things you can do to give a human pleasure.  I thought…never mind.  She put down her book, she lay back, she pulled up her covering, and she said, ‘Fuck away.’”  Doru’s mouth twisted as he clumsily repeated the English words.  “And she did this—”  Doru reached out and drummed his claws rapidly on the wall.  Then he just stood, his head down, breathing hard.  “So I left.  I sent Gullnar’s Tina to stay with her until her season was done.  I would rather have a friend, a true friend, than a mate who does this—”  He drummed his claws again.  “—when I come to her to couple.”

He started walking.  So did Olivia, after a moment.

“Kurlun is happy,” Doru said.  “Wurlgunn is happy.  Lorchumn was happy, spirits pity the poor bastard.  Vorgullum is happy.  And that is all we have of happiness here.  That, and the spark in your belly.  You’ll forgive me if I choose not to risk it for the sake of that beast you’re protecting.”

He stopped outside the narrow chute leading up to Kodjunn’s lair and eyed her feet.  “I’m going to carry you,” he said, and put out his hands.

Olivia stepped into them gratefully, hissing with pleasure as he took her into the air and her weight left the ground.  An instant later, the dull ache that had settled like stones inside her wounds turned to fire-hot flares of agony and she almost wished she was walking again.  Then her back was scraped along the rough chimney wall as Doru attempted to squeeze them both up together and that more or less took her mind off her feet.

“Bear piss,” Doru grunted as he heaved them both out and spilled into the entry chamber.  “That about took half my hide clean off.”

“Who comes?”  Kodjunn appeared in the entry room, his wings fanned out impressively and the glint of a steel knife in his hand.  When he saw them, he relaxed slightly but continued to fill the doorway to his inner lair.  “What does Vorgullum ask of me?” he asked with an edge of suspicion.

“Nothing, that I know of,” Olivia said with surprise.

“He sends his mate and his chief hunter for nothing?”

“I was not sent, sigruum,” Doru countered mildly, testing the stretch of his left wing and wincing.  “I was walking a woman with crippled feet.”

Kodjunn’s eyes darted to Olivia’s bandages and she saw a shadow of pain flash across his face.  He sheathed his knife in his belt.  “Forgive me.  More than one gulla has come here this evening to offer me…advice.”

“Ha, I’m sure.”  After a moment, Doru realized both Kodjunn and Olivia were looking at him expectantly.  He managed not to show too much of his obvious annoyance as he turned around.  “I’ll wait just below,” he said.  “But you are warned, woman, I intend to carry you right back to your lair when you are finished with this pointless endeavor.”

“Thank you,” said Olivia, and Kodjunn showed him his open hand in respectful, if distracted, salute.

After Doru was gone, Olivia came forward and touched Kodjunn’s arm.  “How is she?”

“Hurt.  Murgull brought her something for her pain this morning, but she just spits it out at me when I try to give it to her.”  He started to say more, then gave her an embarrassed sort of glance and shook his head.  “She’ll recover.  How are you?”

“My feet hurt, but Murgull says there’s no infection.  The wounds were deep and feet always heal slowly, but they should heal well.”

“I meant the baby.”

“I’m a moon along at most,” she told him, rolling her eyes.  “I’m perfectly fine.”  His somber expression had not changed.  She let her smile fade away, glanced past him at the sleeping room and said, “Is something wrong?”

“I told her you were pregnant.  I told her that babies are the reason she and the others were brought here, and now that we know it is possible, I expect her to be my mate.  I told her she would be free to live in the women’s tunnels once she catches my spark, but until then, I will couple with her when she is in season.  I’ve been patient, but I won’t allow her to refuse me anymore.”

Olivia could feel her features darkening with foreboding.

“I know,” he said, as if she had spoken aloud.  “But I…don’t have a choice.  Vorgullum knows I haven’t been coupling with her.  He was willing to overlook it as long as it was not known whether our kinds could breed, but now it is, and if I’m not willing to give him a child, he’ll find someone who will.  Someone who won’t limit himself to her seasons.  I don’t want her…but I don’t want her hurt.”  Kodjunn covered his eyes briefly, then looked at her again.  “I suppose you want to see her.”

“I think I ought to.”

“If it were anyone but you…”  But Kodjunn gave that up with a sigh and beckoned her to follow him.

Cheyenne lay in the sleeping pit.  Her left leg had been wrapped with bandages and splinted with straight wooden stakes, but that was not the first thing Olivia saw.

Cheyenne had indeed been chained to the wall.  Both hands and her good foot had been caught up in iron shackles, padded by sheepskin (had Sudjummar made those as well?  Climbing claws for some, shackles for others), with enough slack to allow her to move almost anywhere in the sleeping room, but not as far as the hearth, and not as far as the door.  All her needs had been provided for: a bucket of ashes waited beneath the nearest bench; she had two jugs of water and a basket of bread and apples within easy reach on one side; on the other, a short stack of magazines, untouched.

Cheyenne looked at Olivia furiously and turned her face to the wall.

Olivia turned to Kodjunn.  “Give us a moment alone, please.”

He gazed into her eyes a long time in silence, then finally nodded and withdrew.

“Have you ever noticed,” Cheyenne began in a tight, calm voice, “that all the worst words in the English language are male?  For instance, I can’t call you a son of a bitch; I can only call you a bitch.  A fucking bitch, a stupid bitch, a goddamn bitch, but a bitch all the same and that’s not good enough.”

“I see.”  Olivia sat down on the bench with a restrained sigh of relief.  “This is my fault, for not distracting him enough, I suppose.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“Cheyenne, you have got to see that you can’t live like this.”

“Fuck you!” Cheyenne shouted suddenly.  “I came to you for help and you gave me a fuck-potion, so what was I supposed to do?  Then you send your fucking witch to tattle on me, is that it?  Play nice or you’ll have me fucking killed?  What the fuck is wrong with you?”  She unleashed a wordless shriek of rage and frustration, seizing her chains and throwing herself in a fit of unrestrained fury, heaving and yanking and smacking herself a ringing blow on her own head in the process, ultimately falling back in a panting heap in the pit.  “I wish I’d killed you,” she hissed.  “You hear me?  I wish I’d killed you!”

“Did she catch you, Olivia?” Kodjunn called.

“No.”  Olivia stood up and limped closer, but only a little.  “I’m sorry things worked out like this, but this is how they worked out.”

“Fuck you!”

Olivia sighed.  “I’ll have someone bring you more of Murgull’s medicine.”  She left Cheyenne in a huddle of chains, hurling profanities after her.

2

Bolga lost the baby.

It was not unexpected.  The cramps which had plagued her for the past month, ever since Olivia’s injury, had become more and more frequent, and then the fever came and it was just a matter of time.  When Murgull came and got Olivia from the commons, she knew what it meant without needing to be told.  They went together to the women’s tunnels, where Bolga rolled and thrashed in the pit she shared with Horumn.

Murgull took a rag, wetted it thoroughly with liquid from a pop bottle, and gave it to Olivia.  “Press it over her face and make her breathe it,” she commanded.

Olivia knelt by Bolga’s head, waited until the gulla was almost holding still, then pounced on her, holding the cloth over Bolga’s nose and shrieking mouth.  Within a few moments, the suffering gulla’s struggles began to wane, and soon she was lying there, drooling quietly, staring up at Olivia’s face in wonder.  ‘That would be tharo,’ thought Olivia, and gently stroked the sides of Bolga’s ugly face.

“Look there,” Horumn murmured, pointing between Bolga’s thighs.

Olivia raised herself up to see and saw a thin trickle of blood seeping through the thick loincloth.

“So.  It’s over.” Horumn shot Olivia a mistrustful, despairing glance.  “Help me pull her up.”

They each got an arm under Bolga’s unresisting shoulders, and hauled her into a sitting position.  Olivia could see the gulla’s stomach jumping in the grip of powerful cramps.

“I have her,” Horumn said gruffly.  “Unbind her and let it happen.”

Olivia unfastened the binding and unwound the strip of leather as best she could while Bolga sat there dumbly.  As she worked, the dribbling flow of blood heaved into a thick, clotted mass of fluid.

Bolga whimpered, but that was all she did as the beginnings of her doomed child washed out between her thighs.

“Well,” Murgull said in a low voice.  “That answers that.”

The flood slowed again to a trickle.

“Give her raspberry tea and bloodbalm for a few days,” Murgull advised, bending to help Olivia gather the soiled bedding and pull it out from under Bolga.  “Milk and meat, and let her sleep.”

Horumn nodded, stroking Bolga’s head, and didn’t look up as they left.

“Pity them both,” Murgull muttered when they had left the women’s tunnels.  “Horumn was too old when she bore Bolga.  She knows it, and she knows many of Bolga’s troubles are her own fault.”

“Bolga is Horumn’s daughter?” Olivia echoed, surprised.

“Horumn’s last child, the first in twenty years, I think.  Too old for birthing.”  She grunted.  “Too old for mating, I think, but that is Murgull’s opinion.  And Bolga lived long enough to draw breath, which surprised us all.  Horumn nearly died in the birthing, there were such troubles.”

Olivia tried to suppress a shudder, but Murgull noticed.

“Do not fear for your own time,” she said, patting her.  “Olivia is healthy.  Vorgullum is strong.  All will be well.”

It was comforting to hear, but Olivia had her doubts.  Still, she welcomed the chance to throw her mind into her work and leave her fear behind.  She followed Murgull back to her secret room behind the false wall and watched as the withered gulla threw the bloodied loincloth and bedding into the fire.

“Will Bolga be all right?” Olivia asked.

“Her body will heal,” Murgull replied.  “In another moon’s time, she will not remember this night, as she has already forgotten the evil man who used her.  She will play with her stones and her toys, and perhaps Horumn will take more pains to keep her in the tunnels when her next season comes upon her.”

“I only wish I knew who had been with her.”

Murgull shook her head in frustration.  “You are not alone.  A male that will lie with her once will do it again if he can.  It is a serious threat to us and to all that we are trying to do.  You believed once you knew who had done it…”

Olivia could only shake her head, aware of Murgull’s piercing stare, but unable to answer it.  She had seen him, yes.  She had seen the stiff mane of silvery hair running down his back, just exactly like the one on Kodjunn.  But then she’d met Kodjunn, really met him, and the evidence of her eyes paled beside what she had learned of him.

“A man can show many faces,” Murgull said, prodding at the bedding so that it would burn evenly.  “Is it so unimaginable that he should play for your sympathy after he had lain with you, and you the leader’s mate?”

“But he wanted to confess everything,” Olivia said.  “You can’t believe how guilty he felt, the things I had to say to keep him quiet…Kodjunn never could have let Bolga stand alone before the whole tribe.”

“So you say and I must trust you.”  Murgull moved to her worktable, rattling bottles, boxes and unknowable tools as she cleared a space to work.  “But who else could it be?  It was no spirit that put his prick in Bolga, no harmless pleasure-dream.  It was a male in this mountain, a male we feed and clothe and provide for!  What is the word Thurga uses…?  Dickhead.”

The word, uttered in Murgull’s thickly accented English, caught Olivia unawares and she started snickering before she could help herself.

Murgull glared at her over her withered wing.  “Ah, you laugh at Murgull!  Go, have fun with her!  Useless, ugly old gulla, no good for anything but worm fodder.  Poor Murgull,” she keened.  “Suffering Murgull!  Little bald frogs laughing at old Murgull!”

“I apologize,” Olivia smiled.  “It just surprised me to hear you swearing in my tongue.  And you’re right.  Whoever it is, is a dickhead.”

“Ha,” Murgull muttered darkly.  “Murgull laughs at Olivia.  Ha ha!”

“Please, I’m sorry, Murgull.”

Somewhat mollified, Murgull stood aside and gestured at the row of glass bottles she had arranged on her work table.  “Bolga’s pain could have been avoided,” she said.  “These are all potions that can be made to expel a life from the belly—the root of blue or black bitterwort, bark of stagbush, oil made of bluespear, wormwood and rue, yes—but they can only be used on a child without a soul!  After the third moon has passed, the only result will be terrible pain and damage to the child.  Here, most precious of all medicines, flowers of whelpsbreath.  If the child is sick or dead inside her, whelpsbreath will force it out.  If the child is healthy and the mother weak, whelpsbreath will strengthen her.  There are many more herbs that might strengthen a weak womb—raspberry, yes, and waterweed and rosehips, and yellowhair best of all.  You will study each of them tonight, so you will have the knowledge if ever you need to have it.”

“Let us hope,” Olivia said softly, “there is never a need.”

“Hope is good to have,” Murgull said after a moment.  “But hope does not lift a tree about to crush your mate, or bring meat to a starving belly.  It warms a cold heart and it soothes a worried brain, but what use is that?”  She ran her hands over the tops of the bottles.  “Murgull had so many hopes in her youth.  Hoped to find a friendly tribe.  Hoped to bear a child.  Hoped her wing would heal and her scars would melt away.  Hoped to stay young forever.  Now you and that life you carry are the only coals left in my pit of hope.”

“Oh Murgull…”

The gulla looked up, her single eye bright with naked pain.  “I am too old for this, Olivia.  I should have passed on this wisdom years ago, and now here I am!  Cold and hurting and lonely, heaping my burdens onto your naked back.  It is not fair!” she cried suddenly.  “Not fair to you, and not fair to me!  I wanted more!  I promised so much, I meant to do such great things, and now look at me!”  She looked down at herself with helpless anger.

Olivia could not think of anything to say.

At last, Murgull looked up again, her features twisted in despair.  “Olivia, you must make me a promise, and it will kill your heart to hear it.”

“What is it, Murgull?”

“In the chest behind my pit there is a black bottle.  It is poison, the most potent and painless I know.  If the child you bear is malformed and dead like the others, promise me—”  She saw the revulsion in Olivia’s eyes and seized her by the shoulders, shaking her.  “Promise me to give that poison to the other humans here!  Promise me to take it yourself!  Force my people to abandon this place and find a new tribe!  No hell can be worse than this, to watch the mountain dwindle and blood thin, until sisters mate with brothers and all our young are made crooked and foolish!”

“I will,” Olivia whispered.

“Promise!” Murgull hissed.  “Say the words!”

“I promise that I will poison the other humans if no healthy babies can be made between us.  My solemn oath.”  Olivia stood stiffly in Murgull’s grip, then shook off the gnarled hands and said, “Damn you for doing that.”

“Murgull is damned already.”  Years of age and hard living seeped slowly into Murgull’s face, bending her shoulders and buckling her knees.  “More than that, has Murgull done.  A river of blood on her hands.  For vengeance, for pride, for the vanity of a ruined body that was no treasure to begin with.”  She turned away.  “Lives are like lamp flames.  So easy to put out.”

Olivia stared at Murgull’s back.

“Over the mountains, Murgull climbed.  With no spark and no eye and no wing.  She saw with an eye of hatred.  She flew on the winds of rage.  Her child was a burning thing that giggled and scratched and sang for blood.  And Murgull fed it.  Murgull grew strong and cunning and cruel.  And then Murgull returned to the place of her crippling.  She lay beneath the moon and saw a hunting party overhead.  She followed them back to their lair in the mountain.  She waited until night, when all the tribe were locked in sleep.”

Murgull’s voice broke and she began to weep an old woman’s tears.  “She had thick, brown candles.  Candles the humans use to open mines.  She fixed them to the entry wall and blew it all to hell.  No tunnels out for gulla tribe.  Males that kicked her and chained her and fucked her on her broken wing died inside, slow deaths of hunger and horror.  Males that did nothing died!  Mates died!  Children!  Oh, damn me!”  Murgull’s words were lost to broken sobs.

Olivia did not move, did not speak.  She felt as though Murgull were shrinking away into the distance.  The enormity of what had been done, of what Murgull had done, staggered her down to the roots of her soul.

How long she stood and watched the gulla sobbing, Olivia did not know.  It was as though time was frozen in place.  Olivia imagined she could see Murgull’s sins crawling through her thinning fur.

Finally, Murgull’s weeping tapered off to sighs and shudders, and she stood there, a broken, bitter old woman.  “It will be the same here if there are no healthy young,” she whispered.  “Slow death.  Decay.  Our bloodlines curdling into filth.  But they dare not take their human mates on a journey to seek a new tribe to join, and your mate will never order them killed now.”

“I gave my word,” Olivia said.

Murgull glanced around, and her eyes were cold and damp and dead.  “I have been haunted by the dead ones all these years.  I could not lose them in all my great works, or hide from them in the arms of all those lust-sick men.  I have begun to see them, sister, and I know now that I am close to them at last.  Soon I must face them again, the six whose lives I was right to take, and the unknown many whose lives I wrongly stole.  Olivia, please, I have earned so much hate in my time, do not add yours as well.”

“I don’t hate you, Murgull,” she said, reaching out to lay a hand on Murgull’s arm.  But it changed things, and that Olivia did not even need to say.  The knowledge was already there in Murgull’s steady, sorrowful gaze.

3

That night, when the hunters returned and the tribe gathered in the commons to divide the catch, Murgull and Olivia were there to help.  It was obvious that this night’s hunt had been carried out in a grocery store; the meat came neatly wrapped on plastic panels, which prompted quite a lot of good-natured teasing from humans, and some not so good-natured, like Karen, who peppered Bodual with catty observations about the difficulty of spearing a boneless chuck roast or the ethics of taking out an entire herd of chicken thighs until Anita cheerfully told her there was plenty of bread in the women’s tunnels if she didn’t like what was on the menu.  As the hunters’ feast was prepared, Liz made the tentative suggestion that she could go along on the next raid, and help them find food that would hold over the winter.

“You know, like rice or noodles, or there’s all kinds of canned stuff.  Or, you know, vitamins and aspirin and toothpaste and stuff like that.”

“Damned good idea!”  Tina sprang up, startling the male next to her with the vehemence of her agreement.  “I want to go, too!”

The gulla beside her gaped for half a beat, then threw down his spit and seized her arm, snarling, “No woman of mine hunts!  I hunt!”

Tobi started forward; Doru caught and held her.

“Gullnar is your mate,” Vorgullum said, chopping off Tina’s furious protests at the first word.  “Obey him.”

Tina yanked her arm out of Gullnar’s grip, and for a second there, Olivia fully expected her to add a solid sock to Gullnar’s snout.  Instead, and not without a scathing stare in Vorgullum’s direction, she stalked out of the commons and away.

Tobi shook off Doru’s restraining hand, but didn’t run after her.  Instead, she stomped back over to where the gullan women were quietly preparing spits, snarling, “Dick!” over her shoulder as she went.

Gullnar bristled, glanced at Doru, and sat back down.  “You should mind your mate’s mouth,” he grumbled.

“Why?” Doru asked, just a little too darkly to be his usual mild tone.  “I think you’re a dick, too.”

There was a little nervous snickering, but not much.  Liz had waited, watching anxiously as this all played out, and now she hesitantly raised her hand.  “But what about me?” she asked.

Vorgullum studied her for a long time with that hard glint in his eyes that Olivia knew so well and dreaded so much, but at the end of it, to her surprise, he nodded.

“If,” he said, pointing at her mate, “you never once leave Gormuck’s sight, and if you make no sound except to indicate this food or that food.  At the first cry of alarm, you are in the air and back to the mountain!”

“You think I’ll scream?” Liz said, looking cross.  “For God’s sake, what would I say?  I’ll be shoplifting!”

Doru cleared his throat and said loudly, “I am teaching my Tobi to hunt, Vorgullum.  Perhaps, if there are other humans who wish to learn…?”

Vorgullum turned very slowly and looked hard at the larger male.  It was not a hostile expression, but his silence was deep and long as he considered the open-ended request.  At last, he turned and looked out at his tribe, where the humans were clustered together and said, “Which is your Tobi?”

“I am.”  Tobi sprang up again and ran over.

Vorgullum immediately fought an obvious battle with laughter.  “You are teaching this to hunt?”

Before anyone could speak or move, Tobi dropped, spun, and knocked Vorgullum’s legs out from under him.  He fell with a bark of alarm and she sprang with an enthusiastic war-cry.

Doru snapped her out of the air and tucked her under his arm.

“I wasn’t going to hurt him for real,” Tobi protested, kicking.  “Let me go, you big jerk.”

Vorgullum rolled onto his knees and looked back over his shoulder with blatant astonishment.

Olivia could see Doru’s shoulders tense as his leader rose slowly and fanned out his wings.  There was no sound at all in the entire mountain.

Vorgullum said, “Can she do that to a goat?”

“I can do it to a bear!” Tobi insisted.

Vorgullum burst out laughing.  “Sudjummar!” he bellowed.  “Size the human for a spear!”  He looked at Tobi hanging from Doru’s arm and shook his head, grinning.  “To think that I have lived to lead a tribe of females who hunt,” he marveled.  To Doru, he added, “If there are any others among them with any skill, and if their mates allow it, I trust you to train them.”

Doru tossed his horns, plainly relieved, and thumped his Tobi on her feet.  Tobi immediately gave him a hopping hug, crowing, “Did you see that?  Bam!  Fucking BAM!  Right on the ground!”  She pumped her arm at the air and howled like a wolf, then ran out, presumably to share the good news with Tina.

So now they were hunting.  Olivia could not help but think of Cheyenne, who was still bed-bound with her broken leg.  She wondered what she would do when she learned that Vorgullum was now allowing weapons and shopping trips.  The tribe appeared to have accepted the idea of arming humans and allowing them to hunt without objection, or even much surprise.  Again, Olivia was reminded of the unique position of authority that Vorgullum held.  His word was Law; there was no argument because no one argued with Law.

And now, as the meat was cooked and distributed to the tribe, Vorgullum crossed to the center stone and leapt atop it, fanning out his wings to their full, impressive span.  It was an ominous posture, and Olivia was certain it was meant to be. She waited, fully expecting him to order Cheyenne to death.

“Thugg, come before the tribe.”

Olivia turned with the rest of them to see Thugg clamp a hand down on Victoria’s arm.  Victoria looked at once outraged and confused, but the confusion faded fast as she was towed toward the rock.  Her rolling eyes lit briefly on Olivia, and her expression was one of naked pleading.

Vorgullum folded his arms and gazed down on gulla and human in grave silence as Thugg turned to address the tribe.

“This human is Victoria, bound to me as mate, not out of passion, but of need.  No blood has come to her and I would have our bond severed.”  He spoke this last with real depth of emotion and released Victoria’s arm.

“She was an important woman once,” Olivia murmured.

The nearest gulla, Doru, looked around in surprise.  “How?”

She shook her head, too tired even to try and explain about human politics, or economics, or whatever the hell it was that made Victoria think she had been so much better than the others.

“So be it.  Thugg, stand down,” Vorgullum said, and Thugg shook off his upper body as if throwing off cold water.  He strode into the crowd without a second look back.

Vorgullum continued to consider the human before him, his face expressionless, his voice like steel.  “Murgull, come and take this female to the care of the Eldest.”

Grumbling, Murgull heaved herself off a bench.

That was as much as Victoria could take.  “What are you doing?” she shrilled, swatting wildly at the aged gulla’s shoulders.  “Get your hands off me!”

“This human is barren,” Vorgullum said, his voice booming out over hers and silencing her as effectively as if he had clamped his huge hand over her mouth.  “She will reside at the boundary of the women’s tunnels, under Horumn’s care.  She is safe,” he said impassively, “to couple with.”

Olivia felt the collective consideration of the unmated males pin on Victoria in the span of a heartbeat.  “Oh my dear God,” she said in a tiny voice.

Victoria began to shake, then to stagger.  Her mouth was working, but no sound came out.  In the end, Murgull had to call irritably for a younger female to carry the human to her new cave.

Vorgullum watched her go, then caught Murgull’s eye and jumped down from the center stone.

Murgull muttered something black under her breath and limped heavily over to climb the rock he had just vacated.  She glared out at the sea of upturned faces and squinted her good eye at them.  “Bolga is no longer carrying,” she said without preamble.

There were low murmurs of sympathy, but none of remorse.

“Olivia Urgarna is healthy.  Her feet are healing.  Her mate’s spark is rooted strong.  Do not crowd her now.  Olivia Urgarna needs peace and rest.”  She grunted and started climbing painstakingly down.

“Olivia Urgarna wants pickles!” Amy called, and some of the humans laughed, Olivia among them, mostly to get the horror of watching Victoria taken away out of her mind.

“Was that a joke?” Doru asked, puzzled.

“When humans are pregnant, sometimes they crave strange foods,” Olivia explained.

Kurlun nudged him and muttered something about gullan females and something called durmunk.  Doru’s expression smoothed out and he nodded, making a thoughtful growl in the back of his throat.  After a brief pause, he pricked his ears and turned to Olivia and asked if she was having cravings.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I’d like a bag of oranges.”

Kurlun and Doru exchanged bewildered glances and gullan shrugs.  “I can pass that along to Liz,” Doru said at last.  “Surely she can find some.”

“Furthermore,” Amy continued, in a voice meant to be heard only by Murgull and Olivia, “I’m betting you can throw in some peanut butter for me, because I’m two weeks late.”

Murgull looked at her in surprise, then hauled her off into a sub-chamber by one arm.  Kurlun watched her go, an expression of astonishment creeping over his craggy features

Several minutes later, old Murgull limped back to the center rock with Amy in tow, struggled back atop it, and pronounced her pregnant.

Another wave of cheers went up, although even Olivia noticed that they were not as desperately relieved as when her own pregnancy had been revealed.  The hunters’ feast took on new life; a case of Diet Dr. Pepper was produced from some personal hoard, with a full can each for Amy and Kurlun.

Olivia was in the process of giving Amy an enthusiastic hug when she noticed Kodjunn moving across the commons.  He walked deliberately to the center rock and leapt atop it.  His wings fanned out as he surveyed the room, but his eyes did not linger on hers when they met.  Alone among the gathered gullan, he was not smiling.

“I have dreamed,” he said.

It took a little time for the humans to catch on to the significance of this, but he had every gulla’s attention at once.

“The sun rose within the mountain and spoke to me in the voice of the Great Spirit.  It told me that Olivia will bear a son, and his name will be Somurg.”

Olivia flinched back as she and Murgull exchanged swift glances.  She had told no one but Murgull of her intention to name her baby after the ancient gulla.  In fact, she hadn’t said anything about Somurg at all since learning she was pregnant.

“A spark of the Great Spirit has entered Olivia,” Kodjunn continued, his eyes burning into hers.  “And his essence shapes her child.  He will be the fire of his people.”

Low voices rumbled through the cavern.  Olivia looked up into Vorgullum’s wide, awe-struck eyes.

“Olivia,” Kodjunn said softly, and she turned back to him uncertainly.  “I have made a place for you in our histories.  Your name is known to us, and will never be forgotten.”

“That…That honors me, Kodjunn,” she stammered.  “But I haven’t actually done anything.”

“The Great Spirit commanded me to prepare a place for you,” Kodjunn repeated with eerie calm.  “He has told me that your role extends well beyond the bearing of your son.  Humans,” he announced to the silent assembly, “who cannot fly, have roads to walk upon.  The Great Spirit showed me the path that Olivia has yet to walk in this world.  It extended over all the earth and through the sky, and over the wide waters of the ancient lands.  It was revealed to me that her road leads us all out of darkness into light.”

Kodjunn held the assembly in a moment of silence, then jumped off the rock and came towards her.  He seized her hands, and Olivia resisted only with the most extreme effort the urge to twist away and maybe slap him.  Looking up into his grim face, she was suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation that Kodjunn’s features were being overlapped by someone strange and supernatural.

“The Great Spirit gave me words to speak to you,” Kodjunn said softly, insistently.  “He said, ‘Somurg of Three Fathers comes through you.  My son comes through you.  Olivia Blake, you will see my face again and I will meet you and gather you in hands that are not borrowed.  Until then, my blessing lies upon you.’  This he said, and this is truth.”

Olivia stared at him, wanting very much to believe that Kodjunn had been delusional, or made it up out of whole cloth, or even gone temporarily out of his mind, anything to keep from believing that anything he said was even approaching truth.  Well, it obviously wasn’t the truth, because Olivia had made up that whole business about her dream of Urga and the Great Spirit’s spark, and anyway, there was no such thing…

How did he know my last name? she thought, horrified.

Kodjunn, silent, released her and walked away.

4

Winter settled into the mountain, and the tribe settled with it.  The caves were deep enough to remain largely unaffected by the weather outside, but there were places, particularly in the women’s tunnels and the commons, where icy drafts blew in with the reflected sunshine.  Olivia’s days began to run together in a not-entirely-pleasant blur of routine.  She would wake to find Vorgullum gone, go down to the women’s tunnels to lend her hands in the never-ending labor there, get thrown out by Horumn, then go to Murgull’s workroom and learn the arts of brewing and binding and healing, and return exhausted to her lair at day’s end to find Vorgullum waiting for her with a meal to share.  Sometimes they spoke of the tribe, more often they spoke of inconsequential nonsense or had entirely wordless sex until it was safe to go to sleep.  The Great Spirit’s blessing should have brought them closer, but there was a wound between them now, open and raw: the reality of his position and his power to command the human lives…or deaths.

Once, and only once, she tried to say something about Victoria, but as she sat trying to put into words the cruelty of standing her before the tribe and declaring her communal property, he shook his head and actually interrupted her mid-sentence.

“Olivia, every individual in this tribe must work to support the others.  That is being a tribe.”

“How is—” she began, and he did it again.

“You are my mate, you are wise, and you are leader of your humans.  You are learning Murgull’s skills, and you are passing much of that knowledge on to others of your kind.  You are healer, leader, teacher.  You do the work of many.  From you, we withhold nothing.  Gullnar’s Tina is a healer, and she learns from you and from Horumn.  Tobi hunts, Liz hunts, Sarahjay hunts.  The others work.  They skin, they smoke, they sew, they boil soap, clean beddings and coverings, prepare fuel, and fill our storerooms.  Because they do these things, the males of this tribe are free to hunt.  And you must have seen by now that there are many who cannot hunt.  You understand that there are scarcely a handful of us trying to feed all our many mouths.”

She nodded, keeping a tight rein on her frustration, knowing he’d make his point eventually.

“Cheyenne does nothing,” Vorgullum said with venom.  “But that is Kodjunn’s problem.  He provides for her; we do not.  Mojo Woman—”  Vorgullum whipped his head aside and spat.  “—does worse than nothing.  Mojo Woman breeds fear and uncertainty among the weak-minded and there are more of those among us than I would like, but again, she is Grunn’s mate and he speaks for her for some goddamn reason I cannot fathom.”  The human curse rolled off his tongue without him seeming to realize it.  “Victoria did nothing, and Thugg, having more sense than Grunn and less patience than Kodjunn, refused to tolerate it.  It has been now five moons since the arrival of humans in Hollow Mountain; do you deny she had every opportunity to put aside her anger and make herself tribe?”

“You say that like it’s easy!” she accused.  “You say that like all she had to do was wake up one night and say, ‘You know, I think I’m okay with this now!  Time to be tribe!’”

His face darkened with real anger and she shut her mouth with an effort.  “Karen,” he growled, “despises Bodual.  Still, she works.  Not well and not often, but she works.  Sarabee has never spoken one word of our language, but she works.  Carla has locked herself in the women’s tunnels rather than attend a hunters’ feast with Sutung, but she works.  I don’t care if Victoria ever rises from her pit and showers down stars and feathers of joy, but she eats our food and she wears our coverings and she will give something back!”

“That’s cruel!”

“That is life!  There are eighty males in this mountain; fifteen of them now have mates and of that number, only six have mates with whom they have some friendship.  There are damned few barren females, and all but four are older than Kurlun!  Yawa has made a point of working in other ways, and that leaves three females, three, to be mate to the entire tribe!  It was not so bad before you came, because all males bore the same burden.  But now, it’s different, and all the old frustrations are coming back to the surface and I will not have death bred in this mountain!” he finished at a shout.

When she flinched back he lowered his voice, but his chest was heaving and his eyes showed the whites with rage.  “Now there are four females, and yes, one of them is human, and that will help.  Do you think they came to her in fours and fives and use her like…”  He groped for an analogy and found none.  “They don’t.  They bring her food and that is all.  If she doesn’t want to take their food, she has only to get her own, or earn her own with honest labor.  She chooses to couple with males for the things they give her.”

“Of course she chooses that!” Olivia exploded.  “She can’t hunt!  She can’t climb out to pick her own berries!  What else can she do?  Would you have her die of hunger just to have something safe to fuck?”

“Yes!” he roared back.

They stared at each other, both breathing hard.

“All right,” she said at last, shaking with anger.  “All right.  Okay.”

He straightened, opening his wings and lowering his horns in a deepening posture of aggression.  “Go,” he ordered.  “Now.  Go and have some chat with her.  When you return…”  He narrowed his eyes to slits and showed the very tips of his sharp teeth.  “When you return, I will hear your words again.”

Olivia turned on her heel and stalked from the room.

She found her way down to the women’s tunnels in total blackness, her hands clenched tight around her climbing spikes, although she had no need of them.  They made her feel bitterly better.  She met no one, and soon stood before the iron door that locked the tunnels away from the mountain.

She called for Horumn and when the gulla’s misshapen and snarling face appeared, Olivia said, “I want to see Victoria.”

Horumn let her in and led her to a small chamber, little more than an alcove at the end of a long and twisted tunnel.  There was a single candle burning here, a single bench.  It smelled of smoky tallow and sex.  It had no other furnishings, no other purpose.

“Oh.”

Olivia turned at the sound of the unfamiliar voice, and at first, even when she saw Victoria, she didn’t recognize her.  The older woman’s rich black hair had gone gray in broad streaks and hung listlessly to her shoulders; clean and well-brushed, but dull and lifeless all the same.  Victoria’s face looked haggard; her eyes were huge and dark but only vaguely unhappy.

“Horumn didn’t say it was you,” Victoria said after a moment.  “She just said…someone…”  She lifted and dropped her hand, then stood there and waited.

“Vorgullum wanted me to see you.”

“Oh.”  A long silence followed, not awkward or bitter, only empty.  “How long have I been here?  Do you know?”

“About a month.”

“Are you…still…”  Victoria trailed off, looked around questioningly, then looked up again.  “Still pregnant?”

“Yes.  Are you…getting enough to eat?”

“They feed me.  The ones that come here.  It was just…easier.”

“How…How often—”  She could think of no way to end the question.

“I don’t know.  It was every day at first, but not…not so much anymore.  But they feed me a little, just in case.  And they give me things.  I have some furs now and…some…things.”

Olivia’s stomach knotted.  “Are they drugging you?” she asked.

Victoria blinked slowly, owlishly.  “It helps.”

“Do you want me to get you out of here?”  She could not believe she was asking this, but was stunned when Victoria shook her head.

“No.  This is…best.  I don’t have to do anything.  I don’t have to…talk to them or…sit with them.  I don’t have to look at them if I don’t want to.  I just…It’s not so bad.  Horumn gives me something for the pain, you know, the…the pain.  I just lie there and they feed me.”

Victoria lowered herself onto a bench and studied her hands for a long time.  “I was…at High Hill apartments,” she said suddenly, with difficulty.  She reached up to wipe at her staring eyes, but they were dry.  “Do you remember?  I had a house in the Palisades, but I was…at High Hill that night.”

“I’m sorry,” Olivia whispered, but Victoria shook her head.

“It was my…revenge.  My husband has an apartment in Bridgeport where he goes when he wants to…take a secretary home.  I rented the apartment at High Hill to go…slumming in.  I wanted him to find out.  And when he did, he didn’t care.  I got mad and I spent the whole day there, trying to find someone…to come and sleep with me.  No one came.  No one came.  But they came.  That’s who came.”

“I could get you out of here,” Olivia said again, feeling her eyes well up with tears.  “I’d feed you.  I’d find a way.”

Victoria shook her head, very slowly, very deliberately.  “I’m okay.  I’m fine.  I don’t want to have to look at them.  I can just stay in my room all day if I want to.  Vorung brings me magazines, but I don’t have to look at him.  Murgull gives me the drink and I just…think of other things.  I don’t have to really be here.  I don’t have to be anywhere.  I’m okay, Olivia.  I’m okay.”

Horumn’s ugly face poked around the corner.  “Rummanal is here,” she grunted.  “Do you want to see him?”

“I can always say no, you know,” Victoria explained, still in that disconnected, toneless voice.  “They told me that.  I can always say no.  It’s all right.  This is so much better.  I’m fine.”  Without taking her eyes off Olivia, she added, “I can see Rummanal.  Olivia is leaving.”

Olivia’s feet carried her forward past Victoria, who continued to stand in the mouth of the tunnel, facing the empty room.  Past Horumn, who watched her go with strangely soft and knowing eyes.  Past the gulla who stood in the waiting place beyond the door with a bundle of something meaty in one hand.

Back to Vorgullum, who stood before the fire and did not look up when she came into the room and dropped onto a bench.

“As you would have me do, Olivia,” he said.  He sounded depressed.

“She says she doesn’t want to go.”  Olivia let her climbing spikes fall to the floor in a clatter of iron.  “You broke her!” she cried out.

“I know.”  He watched the fire lap lazily over the logs.  “Do you despise me for it?”

She opened her mouth without any idea of what she was going to say, and heard, “No.”

He exhaled a knot of tension; still he did not look at her.  “Are we still friends?” he asked, and his voice cracked slightly on the last word.

Olivia hunted inside herself in anguish, realized with both dismay and relief that they were, and said so in a strengthless whisper.

She sat and he stood, and neither one looked at the other or spoke another word until dawn.

5

Olivia rolled over in the pit and rubbed up against a hard rock.  “Muh?” she said muzzily, fumbling around in the bedding.  She couldn’t find anything, rolled back, and promptly landed on the rock again.  “The hell?”

Vorgullum growled.

“What have you got in the pit?” she mumbled, probing down through the layers of bedding.

“A squeaking mouse,” he growled.  “Who should know better than to wake a sleeping gulla.”

“There’s a rock in the bed.”

“Where?”  He lifted his head and tracked her hand, glaring with sleep.  “Olivia,” he said, watching her rake through the jumble of sleeping bags.  “Olivia, my wise Olivia, you are hunting your own belly.”

“What?”  She peered at him, then rolled onto her back and peered down at her stomach, still flat, to her own eyes at least.  “No I’m not!”

“Is the rock still there when you lie on your back?”

Olivia wriggled experimentally.  “No.”

He grunted, dropped his head back onto his arm.

Olivia rolled over cautiously, felt the hard lump immediately press back into her belly.  “Vorgullum,” she said, a note of alarm sounding in her voice.

He growled again.

“Vorgullum, I’m having a baby.”

“Imagine that.”

She lay there, eyes wide, one hand pressed to the lump, which in turn pressed into her stomach.  Then she flung back the covers and started to get up.

Vorgullum ground out a heart-felt groan.  “What are you doing now?”

“Nothing.  I have to walk around or something.  I just realized I’m pregnant.”

He absorbed that while she dressed, then sat up and really looked at her.  “You’re frightened,” he said, frowning.  “Olivia, come here.”

She started to pace away, came back, and let her draw him down against his broad, hot chest.  She combed her fingers lightly through his pelt.  Soft as otter, she thought.  My baby will have fur like that.  What if he doesn’t?

“Doesn’t what?” Vorgullum murmured against her hair.

She jerked hard in his arms, which tightened firmly around her.  She hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud, was reluctant to repeat her fears.

“What if he does not what?” Vorgullum said again, patiently.

“What if he doesn’t have fur?” she whispered.  “What if…he doesn’t have horns or…wings…or whatever.”

He stroked her hair and hummed.  “You have no fur and no wings and you are tribe.  You are my Olivia and you are beautiful in my eyes.  My son will be fine, whether he has my horns or your white frog-skin.”  He laughed.  “Truth, Olivia, I no longer care what the child looks like as long as his body is fit and his mind is strong.  If he has no wings, what matter?  He can hunt on the ground.”

“It matters,” she insisted.  “And what if…what if he’s even worse than…”  She shuddered against him.

“What if he’s perfect?  Think how foolish you’ll feel.”  He rubbed her back and released her, smiling crookedly into her eyes.  “Kurlun says his Amy is having these same fears.  She insists she will not give birth at all if it intends to come with horns.  She will carry it until it is grown.”  He shook his head at the absurdity of humans.  “Someone should warn Burgelbun.”

Because Sarah B. was now pregnant as well, according to Murgull.  The third to conceive, and not even two whole months after Amy.  It was as if Olivia had opened some sort of metaphysical door.  Who knew?  Maybe by the time little Somurg was born, all the humans would be pregnant.

And if the birth went horribly wrong, they would all know what was coming when their own time came due.

God, why was she thinking like that?

Olivia chewed her lip as he settled back in the pit, then stood up and started to dress.

He muffled an exasperated bellow against a fold of her sleeping bag.  “Great Spirit, woman!  It’s the middle of the night!  Come back to my pit!”

“I have to do something,” she insisted.  “I’m not just going to lie there and worry about this.”

“No,” he grumbled, already sprawling out over her side of the bed.  “You’re going to pace yourself into exhaustion worrying about it, and then sleep all day.  Again.”  He started muttering, but degenerated gradually into snores.

Olivia climbed down the chute and started down the mainway towards the women’s tunnels.  If Murgull was awake, as she often was even at these early hours, she would occupy her mind with a few lessons in gullan medicine.  If not, well, the walk there and back would still do her good.

But as she passed the commons, she was puzzled to see faint glimmers of light, and hear muted human voices.  When curiosity drew her in, she saw a loose knot of perhaps ten humans, apparently led by Amy and Tina, engaged in very heated, very serious debate.

“What’s going on?” she whispered, joining them.

The three women nearest her jumped up with startled little screeches and Tobi actually leaped back and drew a knife before she saw who it was.

“Fucking Christ!” Tobi gasped.  “Don’t you ever sneak up on—what are you doing here?” she demanded.  “This is a secret meeting, and you weren’t invited!”

Stung, Olivia backed up a pace, only to have Tina reach out and smack Tobi on the side of the head.

“What’s the matter with you?  Come on in, Olivia.”

Olivia did, still hurt, unable to keep from noticing the distinct aura of distrust with which the others were viewing her.  “What’s going on?” she asked again, hesitantly.

“No hard feelings,” Tobi said, looking flustered.  “I like you and all.  It’s just…Vorgullum…and…well, look, we don’t need a fucking narc or anything.”

“I’m not a narc,” Olivia protested.

Glances passed from woman to woman, and when they had all run their course, Amy finally nodded.

“Bad idea,” said Tobi, sheathing her knife.  “She’ll rat us out.”

“Oh, she will not,” Tina said crossly.  “Sit down.”

“Is something wrong?” Olivia asked, finding a place to sit among the women, some of whom were still obviously mistrustful of her presence.

“Very,” said Amy.  She held up her wrist and tapped the surface of her sports watch with a grim expression.  “Outside, it’s the middle of December.  Dead winter.  No campers, not a whole lot of game, Christmas season in the city, so it’s not safe to be stealing into town anymore.  We’re running out of food.”

“I’ve noticed short rations,” Olivia said tentatively, still wondering why she hadn’t been invited to Tobi’s big secret meeting.  “But I’m sure there’ve been hard winters before.  We just have to trust that they know how to get through them.”

“Oh they do,” Amy agreed, nodding politely.  “They do it by laying aside barrels of their godawful bread mix all year long, except that this year, they ate it all because their hunters were too busy taming humans to hunt.  The storerooms are almost empty, and they may have to last us until April.  At this point, they aren’t going to last us until February.”

“And believe it or not, we humans are eating best of all,” Anita put in.  “Especially the pregnant ones.”

“No, especially fucking Mojo Woman!” Tobi hissed.  “Stuffing her fat face!”

Mojo Woman.  At the mention of the name, all heads turned as one to Olivia.

Olivia sighed, running her hands over her belly.  “I get it.  I complain about Mojo Woman and Vorgullum will probably have her put…somewhere.”

“She’s not pregnant and she’s got Grunn scared silly,” Tina said.  “He’ll probably chuck her off a cliff.  Vorgullum is entirely out of patience with all her stupid nonsense already, and if he had any idea just how bad this is, he’d put a spear through her first.”

“Like that’s such a bad idea,” Tobi grumbled.  “But okay, fine.  No one wants to kill anyone,” she said in an overly placating tone which she addressed to a scowling Tina.  “We just want her to start sharing.”

“Sharing?”

“Hunters don’t have to share the kills they make on their own,” Tina explained.  “And since we went to short rations, Grunn hasn’t.  Everything he gets goes to Mojo Woman.  Mojo Woman in turn parcels out what she feels like sharing to that little cult she’s got going.”

“Cult?”

“Oh you better believe it,” Tina said, nodding.  “Welcome to the Church of Mojo, membership growing daily.”

“Are you serious?”  Olivia looked from one solemn face to another, stunned.  “How many gullan are we talking about?”

“Three hunters, about ten other males, and maybe six females.  But that’s three hunters too damn many,” Amy added darkly.  “That leaves twenty-eight gullan and three humans to hunt for the whole tribe.”

“She took over two other lairs already and she’s got them filled!  And guarded!”  Tobi pointed furiously down the hall as if Mojo Woman would materialize at her command.  “I say she’s building an army!”

“For what?” Olivia asked, baffled.  “Even if she managed to overthrow Vorgullum, who does she think is going to be the new leader?  Grunn?”

Amy snorted.  “Oh, I’m sure she’s got someone building her a little crown or something.  I can see it now: Mojo Woman, Queen of the Bat-People.”

“The point is,” Tina cut in severely, “that if Mojo Woman actually makes a move in that direction, all hell is going to break out in this mountain.  There’s no way—”

“No fucking way!” Tobi amplified.

“—that Vorgullum is going to go down easy.  The man is a mountain.  But even if Mojo got her loyal hunters to tackle him in a dark corridor and kill him, the rest of the warriors of this tribe would rip their stupid heads off before the body got cold!”

“Doru will kick her ass!” Tobi added, nodding.

“Doru will kill her ass,” Tina corrected.  “Doru will also kill anyone else who was involved, and unfortunately, one of those three hunters Mojo’s got serving her is Burgelbun.  And Burgelbun has a human mate, and Sarah B. is pregnant.  Now I’m not a hundred percent sure he’d kill her—”

“But I’m not entirely convinced he won’t, either,” Sarah B. countered.  There was no obvious concern on her face or in her voice when she said it.

“And that’s just what would happen if Vorgullum actually was killed,” Amy finished.  “God help them all if they try and fail.  This is not a fun, forgiving culture we got sucked into.  That man of yours will not hesitate to slaughter every male, female, or human even remotely associated with a revolt.”

Olivia was uncomfortably aware that this was probably true.  “What are you thinking you’re going to do?” she asked at last.

“Kick her ass!” Tobi cried.

“We have no idea,” Tina translated.  “But the longer we let it go, the worse it’s going to get when the shit finally hits the fan.  The thing is, if we confront Mojo, she’s not going to go down quietly.  We’re afraid to provoke her as much as anything.  I mean, three gullan saw Mojo spit through her stupid fist at Judith and tell her she was going to die, and guess what?”

“Oh Jesus,” Olivia said, startled.  “Do people actually think she killed her?  With magic?”

“You bet they do,” Amy said.  “‘Okie-dokie artichokie, now you die.’  And then she did.  That’s tough to argue with.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Miss Good Mother, but they are real big on magic around here.”

“And we can’t…tell the truth,” Liz said in a small voice, and Tina patted her on the knee distractedly.

“And for God’s sake, we can’t let Vorgullum know about this,” Amy insisted.  “We don’t dare tell any of our fellas, but least of all him.  Look, I’ll be honest here, I really don’t give a rat’s ass if he gives Mojo a flying leap off a high ledge—I’m sorry, Tina, but I don’t—but I also don’t think he’d stop at just Mojo.  He doesn’t believe Mojo’s got magic, so telling him that her loyal followers were scared of losing their souls if they didn’t obey her is going to cut zero ice with him, you know?”

Olivia took a deep breath, released it with a sigh, and nodded.  “I know.  I won’t tell him.”

“Good.”  Amy frowned.  “Because the salt of the matter is, her loyal followers are that scared.  Seeing Mojo Woman on the end of a spear wouldn’t cross my eyes any, but I think of Burgelbun getting blamed and I get sick.”

Olivia looked at Sarah B, but the other woman merely picked at a loose thread on her robe and gave nothing away.  Olivia turned back to Amy and Tina.  “So what are we doing about it?”

Now it was their turn to take deep breaths and drop their eyes.

“I don’t know,” Tina said at last, in a soft, utterly defeated voice.  “I’d like to try talking to her—”

“Good luck on that,” Sarah B. remarked.  And when Olivia looked at her, she sighed and said, “No one talks to Mojo anymore except her most loyal subjects.  And they sure don’t talk about what she says.  It’s bad with her.  You really have no idea.”

No, she didn’t.  She didn’t have any idea at all.  Looking around at all of them was suddenly like looking at a group of strangers.  Why had they kept all this secret for so long?

And why hadn’t Olivia made it her business to check on Maria all this time?  She knew that Mojo Woman stuff was dangerous.  Guilt sank down into her stomach; Sudjummar had called her a true leader, but she’d pretty much picked the few people she’d felt like leading and let all the others go, hadn’t she?

Amy looked around into the ring of pale faces and put her hands on her hips.  “Okay, then, break it up.  We’re done for today.  If anyone gets any ideas, any ideas at all…” She shook her head in frustration and flapped her hands at them dismissively.

Olivia lingered until she was alone with Amy, Tina and Tobi and asked, “Do you really think Mojo Woman could drum up a revolt?  Honestly?”

Amy scowled.  “I do, actually, and what’s worse, I think her little fan club knows it.  They’re scared, but they’ll do it, make no mistake.  The price of one of her pieces of meat is a name in a jar full of honey.  They don’t want to serve her.  Hell, I don’t even think they want to feed her, but she’s got them convinced she’s got their souls, and when Mojo ain’t happy, it’s okie-dokie artichokie time.”

“I thought it was funny back when she told us about blowing out Grunn’s candle,” Tina said in a low voice.  “This is so far from funny right now I could be sick.  And have you seen her lately?  Has anyone actually seen her?  Because I haven’t, not for at least two months now.  Sarah B. has a pretty good line on things from Burgelbun, who’s actually losing his fur he’s so scared of her.  And if Burgelbun can be believed, Mojo Woman looks like a bag of mud, and her hair is always cold and wet.  Burgelbun says Mojo vomits water when she talks.  What the hell does that mean?  What is she doing up there?”

“He really thinks she’s got his soul?”

“Have you ever heard of bone-pointers?” Amy answered, shoving back her bangs with a quick, angry movement.  “Aborigine shamans who punish criminals by pointing a bone at them and commanding them to die.  They always do, not because there’s anything wrong, but because they believe in the shaman’s power so fiercely that they believe themselves to death.”

“This tribe believes things very strongly,” Tina agreed.  “They have spirits, they have magic, and they believe Mojo can do the things she says she can.  And who’s to say different?  There’s no other shaman here to rival her power.”

“Well, Kodjunn,” Amy said dismissively.  “But he’s not pushing it and he’s wise not to.  If he can’t control Cheyenne, who would believe he could take on Mojo Woman?  I tell you what, if Mojo ever decides to start a war around here, all she really has to do is take out Kodjunn.  Once she becomes the sole supplier of spirits around here…”  She bared her teeth, gulla-style, and shook her head.  “And Tina’s right.  This is as far from funny as you can get.”

6

Amy’s words about bone-pointers had been floating around in the back of Olivia’s head all night when the hunters returned and inadvertently brought things to a head.  They brought with them no food, no stolen goods, no camping gear.  Doru had a backpack half-filled with nuts and pinecones, which he threw with a snarl at the nearest female’s feet.  And then Burgelbun appeared, carrying the carcass of a deer that looked like it had been hit by a car.

For a long time, he stood in the doorway of the common cave, staring across the room at his mate.  Sarah B. sat as if carved by stone, watching him with a look that showed she did not expect and would not ask him to feed her.  Burgelbun turned slowly and took a shuddering step towards the private tunnels, towards Mojo Woman.

The vague idea of Aborigines and shamans suddenly crystallized into a plan, and Olivia called his name.

Burgelbun halted and turned back with a look of heart-rending hope.

Vorgullum put his hand on her shoulder.

Olivia ignored him.  “Your mate can tend to that,” she said firmly.

His eyes rolled towards the tunnels.  “I promised this to Mojo Woman.”

“She has more than she needs right now.  Your mate and your child need meat.”

“Olivia, my mate,” Vorgullum said.  “This is not for you to say.”

“He is a hunter for this tribe,” she said loudly.

“He is a hunter who has promised his kills to another,” Vorgullum corrected, although he could not quite keep the disgust from his voice.  He took a moment to conquer it, then added, “As Lorchumn once promised his to you.”

She ignored the censure of his tone and kept her eyes on Burgelbun.  “You are a hunter for this tribe,” she told him.  “We depend on you.  Your mate depends on you.”

Burgelbun looked past her again to Sarah B., who waited without expression for his decision.  He shivered, dropped his voice to a mere hiss of breath.  “She has my soul!”

Vorgullum looked up.

“Well then.”  Olivia stood up, shrugging off Vorgullum’s restraining hand.  “I’ll just have to go and get it back for you.”

Burgelbun threw down the carcass and sank to the floor beside it, rubbing over and over at the base of his horns with shaking hands.

Slowly, Vorgullum rose and took two steps towards his hunter, then swung around and frowned at Olivia.  “What goes on here?” he demanded.

“Nothing that you need concern yourself with.  It’s simply time to have some chat with Mojo Woman.”  She set off down the tunnel without looking to see if she were followed.

It had occurred to her while Burgelbun had been agonizing in the doorway that Tina was right when she said all Mojo needed was another shaman in the tribe to take her down a notch.  After all, it wasn’t as if Maria really had anyone’s soul in a jar of honey, and it wasn’t as if Olivia was going to drop dead just because she spit through her fist and said Die.  Olivia didn’t have to do anything, really, except rob Maria of the appearance of power, and Olivia already knew that most of the tribe believed Kodjunn when he’d claimed the Great Spirit had entered her.

She didn’t like to think about that, because it always brought up the timid question of just how Kodjunn had known her surname, but Olivia didn’t have to think about that part today.  Today, she was just the woman with the Great Spirit’s blessing.  And Mojo Woman was in for a fight.

Outside the chute leading upward to Mojo Woman’s chambers, Olivia squared her shoulders and called out a challenge.  “Grunn!  Come down, Grunn!  Come out of the embrace of that tainted being!”

A murmur rippled out from behind her, and she knew with some satisfaction that she had attracted a considerable crowd.  From somewhere among them, she heard Amy murmur, “Smart,” and Tina grunt agreement.

“Grunn!” she called.  “The Great Spirit has given me his protection and I extend it to you!  Come down to me!”

From within, a deep voice began to speak only to have the shrill scream of a human cut through it in pure rage.  “Get away from my room, cochina!  Grunn, you stay right where you are!”

“Silence, demon!” Olivia shouted, really getting into the part.  “Release your hold on that human!”

A low current of angry agreement ran through the crowd at her back.  Vorgullum, trying very hard to sound reasonable, just beneath it:  “Would someone tell me what is going on?”

Mojo Woman unleashed a maelstrom of shrieking and Olivia almost jumped back in alarm.  For a moment, just a moment, it sounded as if the cry came from more than one throat—a chorus of hatred like a wind, not the play-acting of a slightly power-crazed human.

Conscious of her audience, beginning to feel uneasy, Olivia squared her shoulders and stepped forward.  “You will not trick me, demon!  I am Olivia and you have no power over me!”

And then there was a mighty crack like thunder inside her mind and Olivia felt blistering heat and pain pound through her body, roaring out through her throat in a voice that was not entirely her own: “Mine is the blood of darkness and mine are the bones of the mountain and mine is the fire of all creation and I call you out, demon!”

Gone, with the same suddenness of its arrival.  She woofed forward, nearly falling with the force of its leave-taking.  Olivia could hear a profound silence behind her, as though every breath were being held.

There was the sound of a struggle and then Grunn dropped out of the chute.  He clambered wildly past Olivia and fell against the wall, shaking and silent.  Slate-thin, his fur mottled and torn along his back and sides, he stared at nothing with eyes that showed more white than black.  No one reached out to him, and in the next moment, Vorgullum was bowling his way through the crowd with eyes of fire.

“What is this?” he was shouting.  “What has been happening in my mountain?  You, answer!”

“It’s all right, Grunn,” Olivia said gently.  Grunn’s eyes darted to her, focused, darted away.  “It’s almost over.  Your mate is possessed of an evil spirit, and I intend to chase it out.”

“What shit are you smoking?” someone called from Grunn’s lair, but it was not Mojo Woman; it couldn’t be.  There was more than one voice, and they no longer spoke in perfect tandem.  “I am not possessed, you puta!” Maria screamed, as the other voice, terrible and inhuman, blew in and out of the words, trying to keep pace.

Olivia felt herself start forward.  It was the very last thing in the world she wanted to do, but she couldn’t stop herself, and at her first step, the thing in Grunn’s lair erupted into a screaming, retching, laughing fury that cut across her ears like knives. “Come and have me, then!” it finished, no longer even pretending to be human.  “I’ll drink the blood from your beating heart!”

Vorgullum grabbed her arm. “I forbid it.  Spear!” he bellowed.

“She means it,” Grunn shuddered.  “She will kill you.”

“I am not for that one to kill,” Olivia heard that other voice inside her say, and if thunder could be gentle, that was how it was.  She unhooked Vorgullum’s hand from her arm and pushed him back into the wall as if he weighed nothing at all.  She drew her spikes from her belt and started up.

Olivia had no idea, really, what happened next.  She remembered coming out of the chute, and then her arm went straight into the air at the same time Mojo Woman swung the heavy iron fire poker, and somehow she deflected the blow that should have caved her skull in.  Her claws twisted, hooking the poker from Mojo Woman’s grip and throwing it aside with a clatter.  Olivia sprang from the chute and faced the thing that Maria had become.

The woman who had once laughed about trapping Grunn’s soul in a candle was still there, struggling within a swollen mass of flesh that leaked water in thousands of tiny rivulets.  Her wiry black hair clung wetly to her bloated head; the ends writhed like headless snakes.  The eyes that should have been brown were frosted over now with white, but they could still see her and they narrowed with hate.

Mojo Woman opened a mouth that unlocked like the hinge of a door and dropped halfway across her chest.  A torrent of clear, cold water gushed from the gaping hole in Mojo Woman’s face and poured out over the floor.

Olivia stepped back from the spreading pool, feeling herself seized with a supernatural calm.  “No,” said the other voice inside her.

Mojo Woman thrashed and vomited again—gallons of water, masses of it, enough to fill a bathtub, enough to fill two or three.

Olivia’s hand went up, pressed down on the slick, freezing curve of flesh that was Mojo Woman’s brow.  “No,” she said again.  “This was not the agreement.  Release her.”

Steam hissed out from beneath her palm and nightmarish shrieking filled the room.  Mojo Woman’s body began first to pucker, then to convulse.  She twisted, spewing violent jets of freezing water in every direction.

A hand, bluish-white and ghostly, thrust itself sluggishly from Mojo Woman’s mouth.

Olivia heard herself scream, but that other voice spoke on with fearless resolve.  “Out, creature.  You have no claim on this one.  Release her.”

The hand grew an arm, then the slick curve of a woman’s head crowned, filling the gulf of Mojo Woman’s gaping maw, reluctantly birthed in a freezing gush of water.  The head twisted, opening eyes like mirrors, baleful and beaten.  She clutched turgidly at Olivia’s arm, but the ghastly hand burst apart when it struck her skin and then the whole emerging body collapsed and splashed out over the floor.

Mojo Woman slowly folded over, her jaw sliding back into place, the great flood of water slowing to a stream, then to a trickle, and then gone.

Olivia blinked and realized she was standing in a massive puddle of water that appeared to be dissolving into the solid rock.  Maria lay at her feet, her wasted body sprawled and skeletal, water leaking out its last drops from her open mouth.

“Olivia?”  That was Vorgullum, sounding subdued and fearful.

“I’m here,” she answered faintly.  “I’m fine.  Just a moment.”   She looked around, as if to orient herself, then walked towards the source of light and into the pit room.  There were perhaps a dozen jars lined up along the wall beside the sleeping pit, each one filled with honey and holding a single strip of bark upon which had been written a different name.  Olivia picked one up and opened it, sniffed cautiously at the interior.  Just honey.  Just bark.  Just the cruel theatrics of a delusional mind.

Olivia pulled the strips of bark out one by one, and put the sticky things in her belt pouch to be burnt later.  She returned to the entry and knelt down beside the prone human.

Cold.  Still.

Dead, and dead for weeks.

Olivia shuddered and stepped away.  She stood shaking over the corpse and did not think.

7

“No, seriously,” Amy said for the fifth time.  “What happened?”

Olivia sighed and covered her face with both hands.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know and believe it or not, I don’t care anymore.  All I know is I went up there thinking I would screw around with Maria’s head and maybe get the tribe to see what a total fraud she was and the next thing I know, something…horrible happened and she was dead.”

They were sitting in the commons of the women’s tunnels, where Olivia had been ever since leaving Grunn’s lair.  It was the only way she could have any peace.  By this time, the story of Mojo Woman had been told and retold so often that if everyone who claimed to have been there at the time really had been, there wouldn’t have been any room for Olivia herself.

Amy watched as Olivia rubbed her face free of worry and went back to work scraping the coarse hair from an elk’s hide.  Slowly, reluctantly, she said, “Listen, not to sound like a total psychopath here, but is there any chance that little Somurg really might be the son of the Great Spirit?”

Olivia slammed her own scraper down on the ground hard enough to knock chips off it.  “Am I mistaken,” she said tightly, “or did you just call me the Virgin Mary?”

“Hey, if it walks, talks, and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a damn duck!” Amy shot back.

“Well, it’s bullshit!  Kodjunn got the idea from me and I made it up!”  Olivia grabbed her scraping tool and attacked the hide again.

“Got what idea?  What are you talking about?”

Olivia shot a series of swift, angry glances around the cavern to make sure they could not be overheard and lowered her voice.  “When I got…hurt a while ago.  Do you remember?”

Amy nodded impatiently.

“Cheyenne did it.  Cut up my feet and covered me with some of Murgull’s love-musk and left me in the tunnels for Kodjunn to find so he wouldn’t come back and find her gone.”

“Okay, we all knew she was a bitch and you were covering for her, keep talking.”

“Well, it’s a good potion; it did what it was made for.  Kodjunn was ready to throw himself on his sword and tell Vorgullum, and I knew how that would end, so I told him I had a dream and Urga told me the Great Spirit possessed him so it really wasn’t his fault…and anyway it was total bullshit!”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you have a dream?”

The scraper jigged in her hand and sliced into the delicate webbing between her thumb and finger.  Olivia cursed and sucked at the blood, glaring at Amy.  “No, of course not,” she said around her hand.  “It told you, it was spur-of-the-moment crap.  I just didn’t want to get him castrated or Cheyenne killed!”

“Hey, I’m an enlightened American atheist,” Amy said defensively.  “I majored in mathematics, for crying out loud!  But the rules have changed, honey-bunny, and it seems to me that it’s at least plausible that some great cosmic force is working through you, because something sure as shit was working in Mojo Woman!  So let’s play along for a second.  Maybe nobody had to possess Kodjunn, and maybe you did spin that whopper out of whole cloth, but what if, by telling him what you told him, you actually caught the Big Guy’s ear?  So maybe he didn’t know you from Big Bird before, but now you’ve piqued his interest.  Since he’s already been called the Divine Daddy by Kodjunn in front of the whole tribe, now he’s for damn sure got to be certain little Somurg is born.  And for that, he’s going to need to keep an eye on Mommy.”

“That,” Olivia said darkly, “is a whole lot of maybes.”

Amy tapped her finger thoughtfully against her bicep.  “Here’s one more for you.  Maybe you should be asking the Great Spirit for game.”

“Hey, let’s not play with this, okay?” Olivia said, more sharply than she’d intended.

“I’m not playing,” Amy countered.  “That’s a legitimate request.  Or hadn’t you noticed that we’re all slowly starving to death?”

“We’ve got Mojo’s storerooms now,” Olivia countered.

“It won’t last, Olivia.  Being a mathematics major means you never stop seeing the numbers, and I’m telling you, we’re going to run out.”

“I—”

“You don’t want to play with it, I get that.  But if what you just told me was the truth, the only way you stopped Mojo, or whatever she turned into, was with this extremely real Great Spirit’s help.  And if what you told me was true, no one else could have stopped her.  So if you had it to do all over again, would you do it the same way?”

Olivia opened and closed her mouth a few times, torn.

Amy threw up her hands in surrender.  “Do what you’re going to do, Olivia.  I’m not Cheyenne; I’m not going to cut you up if I don’t like your answers.  All I’m saying is, if I had some power over the Great Spirit, I’d be using it to get us fed.  Even the Virgin Mary had God pick her a cherry once.”

8

Much later, alone in her lair, Olivia sat in her alcove with her photo album on her lap and stared into the fire.  It was late, but Vorgullum wasn’t back yet.  She didn’t really expect him to be.  He would be out all night, no doubt, trying to figure out exactly what had happened, who was involved, and how long people had known about it.  She didn’t anticipate a happy gulla coming home to her at the end of it.

So when she first heard the soft sounds of claw-studded footsteps, she braced herself for unpleasantness, only to see Sudjummar, the tribe’s metal-maker, limp into the room.  He raised a hand to her, then took a seat on the bench, facing her with the sleeping pit between them.  “So,” he said.

“Is Vorgullum coming?” she asked uneasily.

“Eventually.  He’s with Grunn now, and Grunn may need a lot of comforting before he’s safe to be left alone.  He blames himself.”  He tipped his head politely to one side.  “Are you all right?”

She managed a laugh she did not in the least feel.  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Spirits can be powerful allies,” Sudjummar agreed with a solemn nod.  “They can also be easily distracted.  You have been touched once, Olivia.  I suggest you do not live believing you are forever in the Great Spirit’s eye.”

“How comforting.  Amy wanted me to ask for game.”

Sudjummar shrugged, gullan-style.  “You wouldn’t be the only one.”

“Yes, but I might be the only one suddenly borne out of the caverns on fiery clouds, hurling lightning bolts into the backs of giant, glowing elk.”  She looked at him plaintively.  “What I saw today was awful, but what happened afterwards was worse.  The way they all looked at me…I don’t want to be worshipped, Sudjummar!  It was wrong when Mojo Woman did it, and it would be just as wrong if it was me!”

He regarded her sympathetically.  “I think I begin to understand the situation,” he said. “But if I may ask, why did you go up to confront Mojo Woman rather than send another of your humans?”

“They are not my humans!”

“Don’t change the subject, answer the question.”

Olivia sighed and threw up her hands.  “How should I answer?  Because it was my idea!  Because if it was going to work, I couldn’t take the time to confer with someone else first!  Because—and I want to make this absolutely clear—because I never thought Mojo Woman was really possessed!”

“All right.”  He waited for her to meet his eyes again.  “Now why did you really do it?”

She stared at him, and after a long and uncomfortable silence, whispered, “Because I knew people would believe me.  No one would question whether or not I had the power because I am Olivia, the Great and Terrible.”

“Well, half the fun of infamy is living up to your own reputation.”

“But goddammit, the mother of the Great Spirit’s son is a little more notorious than I wanted to be!”

“First of all, the Great Spirit didn’t put that child in your belly, Vorgullum did.  If the Great Spirit wants to take credit for it, that’s his problem, not yours.  Second, no one asks for notoriety, it just comes and bites us in the ass, and that is why we call it notoriety and not popularity.  Finally, as my wise old father used to say, in three thousand years, who’s going to give a damn?”

Olivia’s laughter caught her by surprise.  She touched her smiling lips and sighed.  “You have a way of putting things in perspective.”

“All the truly deformed gullan do,” he said.  “If the tribe couldn’t come to us for wisdom, they might start wondering if a whole gulla would be a better metal-maker, or a healer, or a…or whatever it is that Murgull does.”

“Murgull does everything.”

“So I’ve heard,” he said with a smile.  “My wise old father told me that as well.”  He gave her shoulder a firm squeeze, then stood up.  “I need to go.  Vorgullum asked me to look in on you, but you seem to be doing all right.”

“Did he think I wouldn’t be?”

“Vorgullum has been plagued enough by unwanted notoriety to know that you would be here with your guts in knots.  I hope I have untied at least some of them, but please be assured, he will help you with the rest.”  He paused, then came a step closer to her.  “Or did you think he would be angry with you?”

“Not with me, maybe, but with someone.  Mojo Woman never could have gained so much power if we…if certain people hadn’t kept secrets from him.”

Sudjummar nodded and shrugged, this time human-style.  “People will always keep secrets from the tovorak.  He knows this.  But Olivia, it was no human woman’s deception that made power in this place, it was a demon, and he knows that now as well.  If you think he’s gone to cut Grunn’s wings and throw him off the mountain for harboring a demon, I think you do him an unfairness.”

She sighed, leaning back on the bench.  “I’m glad to hear that.  I would much prefer to be unfair than right about him.”

He regarded her for a long time with a curiously unreadable expression.  “Do you love him?” he asked finally.

It caught her by surprise, and for a moment, her mouth only worked in silence.  “I’m happy with him,” she said at last, flushed.

“But do you love him?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

He looked away, nodding as if she had answered.  In a way, she supposed she had.

“I accept him,” Olivia said.  “I even like him.  God help me, I like him a lot.  No, I don’t love him.”

“My brother is a hard man to love.”

“Who is it you share?” she asked.  “Your mother or your father?”

“Both.”  He smiled at her.  “It was the old leader’s effort to breed strong blood.  He gave my mother to my father and ordered them to mate.  They were loyal to him, even if they never found much affection for each other.  And it turned out well enough.  Vorgullum is certainly fit, and I manage to contribute, but there were no more children.  My coming ended that.”  He fanned his folded wings slightly, drawing attention to his deformity with his attempt to conceal it.

They were quiet together for a time.

“I know he likes me,” Olivia found herself saying.  “And he listens to me and lets me argue with him, but…I don’t think he loves me, either.”

“You are tallest among your kind,” Sudjummar replied.  “Your joining is far too important to allow something as trivial as love to influence it.  It is enough that you respect one another.”

“Trivial,” she said, leaning slightly back.

His small smile faltered and he looked away.  “A poor attempt at humor.  Forgive me.  I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for you to decide to be happy with my brother when you must have had…”  His claws flexed in the air.  He turned slight back to her, although he kept his eyes averted.  “Did you have a human mate, Olivia?”

“No,” she admitted.  And sighed.  “You don’t have to tear your wings over this, Sudjummar.  I know what you were trying to say.  We have this terrific human concept called politics…I’ve known for a long time that what Vorgullum and I have is mainly political.  Thank you.”

Now he looked at her, his gaze disturbingly direct.  “For?”

“Being with me when I was lonely.”

“Ah.”  His face softened, turned at once wry and wistful.  “My motives are not virtuous ones.  Of course, I am loyal to my brother, but I like you, Olivia.  More than I should.  In fact, if you ever decide to ask the Great Spirit for game, you might mention that I am available for possession, should he ever want another son by you.”

She looked at him, startled, and he flipped her another of his dry smiles and quietly withdrew.

Olivia sat alone on her bench and watched the logs dry before the fire.  She was surprised to be left alone for so long.  No one had interrupted them for all the time they’d been talking, and no one was waiting for Sudjummar to leave before intruding on Olivia the Demon-Slayer.

She sent a sheepish glance heavenward.  “Great Spirit?” she began, feeling foolish.

No flames, no sense of a divine ear stretching towards her.

“If you’re not too busy, would you mind terribly throwing a few elk our way?  Thank you.”

The fire popped loudly.

Olivia arranged the wet logs a little closer, started to get up, and then fell heavily back onto the bench.  Something…there!

Somurg was kicking.

Olivia put her hand gingerly over the small swell of her belly and the motion ceased.  Still, it was real.  She had really felt it, and it wasn’t her imagination.  “My son,” she murmured, amazed.

“Our son,” a voice corrected gently, and she turned to greet Vorgullum.

The room was empty.

Despite her close proximity to the fire, Olivia felt a chill sweep through her and she was glad she hadn’t, even in jest, mentioned Sudjummar.

9

A small fraction of the large hunting party returned early the next night, carrying slabs of butchered elk between them and calling for all those with working wings to come and help carry the rest.  The humans and those gullan unable to fly stayed behind to haul the carcasses down to the women’s tunnels, to be prepared for storage.  There were hides for clothes and bedding, antlers and bone for tools, fat to render for soap and candles, and best of all, there was meat, enough to feed on for weeks, maybe months.

From seven in the evening to two in the morning, the entire tribe worked to prepare the seemingly endless supply of meat being carried in by hunters, until finally, Wurlgunn gave the iron door a rattle and happily announced that the remainder of the kill was being roasted in the commons for the hunters and their mates.

All in all, he told them happily, some thirty-eight bucks had been slain.

“You butchered a whole herd?” Beth asked, her blue eyes shining.

He shook his head, tucking an arm around her as they walked.  “You should have seen the size of the herd.  I thought the snows had melted into mud before I realized the ground was moving.  Elk as far as the clearing reached.  A hundred elk.  Two hundred.  They ran right into our spears.  Even I killed one!”

Olivia followed them, listening with a mix of pleasure and dread.  It wasn’t just me, she kept reminding herself.  The whole tribe was praying for game.  And the elk had to be somewhere.  But all the reasoning in the world couldn’t stand against those two little words:  Our son.

She shivered.

The commons were alive already with the smell of roasting game and the sounds of celebration. She could hear gullan shouts and laughter, hands clapping… she could hear…music?

Olivia broke into a jog, swung around the doorway and stared.  The gullan had formed a large ring around the center of the cavern, where a smaller circle of humans were stomping and clapping and otherwise keeping time and there, in the center, was Tobi, doing a very successful pole-dance with a spear to the rhythmic strains of Ricky Martin singing ‘She Bangs’ in Spanish.

Olivia felt someone nudge her arm, turned and saw Doru.  He was staring fixedly at Tobi, grinning in a puzzled way.

“What is she doing?” he asked.

“We call it dancing.  Where did she get the radio?”

“The—?  Oh, the black box?  Liz took that from a human camp some time ago.  She said it was broken.  I guess she fixed it.”  He watched the performance through the end of ‘She Bangs’ and the beginning of some other song she didn’t know.  “Is that all it does?  Make noise?”

“That’s all.”

“Humans are very strange.”

Olivia tended to agree, but looking around, she could see that while none of the gullan seemed to quite grasp the concept of dancing, quite a few of them were clapping along with the music.  Her own shoulders were swaying, independent of her will.  It was the first song she’d heard in ages.  She was about to head on over and see if she could remember some of the moves when Kodjunn materialized at her side and motioned urgently for her to follow him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He hissed at her for silence and took her at a near-run down the mainway to his lair.  Without looking to see if she followed, he flattened his wings and scrambled up the chimney.

Worried now, Olivia pulled out her claws and followed.

He caught her by the wrist before she was halfway up and pulled her bodily into the room. At once, she heard an angry noise from the sleeping room, and moved instinctively towards it, but Kodjunn put out a wing to block her and made her face him.  “Tell me everything that happened between you and Mojo Woman,” he said tensely.

She was utterly derailed by this.  “Haven’t you heard by now?”

“Cheyenne has been in season,” he explained.  “I left my lair for the first time this evening.  I saw Grunn.  Then I heard that Mojo Woman was killed by demons?  That you had something to do with pulling them out?”  He searched her face while she struggled to find some way to tell him the truth and then he startled her by letting out an incredulous and strangely hurt laugh.  “The most amazing thing to happen in this tribe for thousands of years and when it happens, where am I but fighting in the pit with my miserable mate?  Unbelievable.”

“You wouldn’t have wanted to be there,” she heard herself say.  “It was awful.  It was like a nightmare.”  And then the whole story poured out of her, from the point of Tobi’s midnight meeting until Maria lay dead at her feet in a puddle of melting water.

Kodjunn’s face was stone throughout, inscrutable.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Of course I believe you,” he said.  “But I almost wish I didn’t.”

A particularly violent cry of muted rage distracted them both for a moment, and when they looked at each other again, sorrow had taken much of the intensity from his eyes.  “Come see her, then,” he said with a sigh.  “We have a little time before tonight’s feast is ready.”

She followed him silently into the sleeping room and looked at the screaming, struggling woman he kept chained to the wall.  He’d taken out a lot of the slack.  Cheyenne saw her and immediately went limp, as if keeping up the appearance of defiance were too much effort for Olivia’s expense, and turned to face the wall, her chest heaving as she fought to breathe around the gag.

Kodjunn crossed the room and deftly unfastened the hard leather strap that covered his mate’s mouth, and then silently offered her a dipperful of water from a pail beside the pit.

Cheyenne took it, her eyes glittering.  She swallowed twice, but spit the third violently into his face.

Kodjunn sighed as a stream of abuse ripped rustily from Cheyenne’s throat, and wiped his face dry on the back of his hand.  He hunkered there beside the pit, looking into his mate’s face with an expression of weary determination until she fell silent, panting, and then offered her another drink.  When she bared her teeth at him, he shrugged and backed away.

“Sit down,” he said to Olivia, rummaging among a collection of containers in the corner.

Cheyenne whipped her head around to glare at Olivia.  “What are you doing here?” she rasped.

“How is your leg?”

Cheyenne writhed into a sitting position by hauling on her chains.  “What the fuck does it matter when I’m never allowed to fucking walk on it?”

Kodjunn replied to this by reaching out nonchalantly and unhooking the chains that bound her from the wall.  Cheyenne pulled her feet beneath her immediately, glaring at him.

Kodjunn glanced at Olivia, his dark eyes sad and not hopeful.  He crouched beside his mate and unfastened the shackles that held her wrists.  Then he backed up and sat on a bench opposite Olivia and looked at her.

Cheyenne rubbed her hands roughly over red welts in the shape of shackles and pushed herself up the wall until she stood.  “What do you want, a fucking medal?” she muttered.

Kodjunn sent Olivia a look that said Wait just as clearly as if he had spoken aloud.

Before he had even brought his eyes back to his mate, Cheyenne leapt for the door.

Olivia jumped up, but Kodjunn had bounded past her in a black blur and already had Cheyenne firmly by the arms.

The redhead began to scream, tossing her hair like stinging whips, kicking and flailing as Kodjunn pulled her resolutely and silently back to the pit and clamped the chains back on her body.  It took less than a minute, and then she was gagged again, yowling her hate while ropes of drool soaked into the chapped edges of the leather thong.

Kodjunn sank back onto the bench and raked his claws through the thick fur between his horns.  “Well,” he said after a deep sigh.  “We all have troubles.  I could be tempted to trade for yours.”

She giggled, a little appalled by herself.

He tossed her a smile.  “But not that tempted.  I know the stories of Bahgree.  I fear them, and I fear for you, my friend.”

“I thought Bahgree was a…like a lust-demon or something.  What would she be doing with Mojo Woman?”

“Water flows through any crack,” he answered with a shrug.  “This Mojo Woman…I doubt she ever had any real power, but I think she might have stupidly invited power to share her body.  If Bahgree heard, and Bahgree willed it, Bahgree could have had her.”

Olivia was shaking her head.  “Look, even if I could make myself believe that all those old stories are true, Urga knocked the stuffing out of Bahgree.  She’s supposed to be powerless now.”

“Powerless means different things to spirits than to mortals like you and I.”  Kodjunn glanced at Cheyenne as he said this, and his eyes grew older.  “Any creature formed from the substance of the Great Spirit can never be made entirely powerless.  Bahgree is one of these, perhaps the most dangerous one.  Especially to you.”  His eyes came back, black and cold as space. “She knows you now.”

She turned to him, but he looked back at Cheyenne, who rattled her chains at him in a futile display of defiance.

“No one else speaks the name of Bahgree,” he said, frowning.  “Only Mojo Woman.  Mojo Woman had a demon, they say.  Grunn says she spat out rivers, but so far, no one has thought to name it Bahgree.  I think we should keep it that way.”

“Why?”  Not that Vorgullum could do anything against the River Woman, she was sure, but by the same token, she couldn’t see how it would hurt for him to know exactly what they were up against.

“Two reasons.  First, because you are pregnant and whipping the entire tribe into a state of frothing panic isn’t going to do you or the other mothers any good.  And time is different for spirits than for mortals.  Perhaps nothing will happen in the time we have on this world.”  He fell into another thoughtful silence, staring at Cheyenne as she glared back.

“A good reason, I suppose.  And the other?”

“I could be wrong,” he said simply.  “I’m no spirit, to know the future of all things.  I’m only a man, and men can be wrong.”

Olivia thought of Mojo Woman’s gaping maw gushing freezing water like the mouth of a living faucet, of the ghostly arm that birthed itself from the torrent and the white eye like ice turning to fix its hateful stare on Olivia, of the voice like a hellish chorus that couldn’t quite keep in sync.

“Olivia.”

She looked around to see him gazing at her with his sad, dark eyes.

“Go down to the feast.  Let them see you.  Let them touch you.  Celebrate with them and remind them that a new life is coming.  And if you get the chance,” he added with a sigh.  “Bring me fresh meat to feed my mate.”

“I will.”  Olivia retreated as far as the doorway, but then had to stop.  “Kodjunn, how could something like this happen?  Why here?  Why now?”

For a long time he was silent.  She thought he didn’t understand and felt like crying because she didn’t know how to make the question any clearer.  Then, in a voice dark and slow with dread, he said, “The last time Bahgree came among us, it was at the hour of the beginning of our kind.  Now, I fear she comes at the hour of our end.”

10

After so many lean days, to eat their fill of good, hot meat was an intoxicating experience, so much so that even Olivia managed to let go of her worries and just enjoy herself.  She ate, she drank, she even allowed Tobi to haul her into the middle ring and execute a clumsy bump-and-grind to the Ricky Martin songs spinning out endlessly in Liz’s stolen disc player.  When Olivia clapped her hands over her head and spun around, the gathered males set up such a thunder of thrumms and tooth-snapping that Vorgullum was compelled to pounce on the most vocal of them.  All in play, she told herself, but she stopped dancing, because for play, it went on just a little too long, and even though the vanquished ones laughed as they backed down, some of them were bleeding.

After he had proven himself the victor, Vorgullum emphasized his position by pouncing on Olivia as well, swinging her up over his head as if she were a very small child and not his pregnant mate.

A gnarled hand promptly shot out from nowhere and landed a ringing blow on the side of his head.  “Sap-brained idiot!” Murgull snarled.  “So many young you have that you can toss this little frog into walls?”

Vorgullum immediately set Olivia back on the ground and looked sheepish.

“Goat-head,” Murgull grumbled, limping back to her bench.  “Just what this tribe needs.  Ha.  Little goat-frogs.”

Vorgullum fanned his wings roguishly behind the old gulla’s back.  “Many goat-frogs.  Murgull tells me that there are three more sparking humans,” he said.   “Anita, Liz and Ellen.”  He dipped a wing in a shrug.  “Liz is irritated.  Doru refuses to let her hunt.  She missed the taking of the herd tonight.”

“Doru refused?” Olivia echoed, amused.  “Gormuck had nothing to say about it?”

“Perhaps.  But to rephrase the wisdom of my loved mate, Gormuck wants to sleep with her.  Doru does not.”  He grinned in the direction of his chief hunter, who was standing with Tobi and Tina and looking as if he were working very hard to look happy.  “So when Liz came to us with her spear in her hand, Doru looked at her.”  Vorgullum swelled out his chest and spread his wings in a fair imitation of Doru and growled, “You can give that to me or I can take it, but you are staying right here, human.”

Olivia burst out laughing.

Vorgullum ran his eyes across the tribe until they settled on Liz, who was encouraging one of the female gulla to take a few dance steps while Ricky Martin banged on enthusiastically.  “Soon there will be six babies in my mountain, and ours will be the first,” he said, smiling.  His hand slipped around her waist, beneath the hem of her quilted shirt to rub at her rounded belly.  “The others will see life come to us, our strong and healthy Somurg, and there will be no more fear.  We will have a hundred young.”

“Was that the communal we, or just you and I?” she teased.

“You and I.  In fact,” he murmured, drawing her firmly out of the commons and towards the mainway.  “I think I should take you straight to the pit and train with you, so we aren’t out of practice when the time comes to make a new spark.”

“I hardly think we’re in any danger of that,” she said, smiling.

“It depends on how we train,” he said ominously, and carried her up the chimney to his lair.

In the entry room, he set her down, but did not release her.  Instead, he turned her in his arms to kiss her, running his hands over her in rising passion as he peeled away her clothing.  His tongue explored her mouth with unpracticed enthusiasm and growing confidence, but he kept her hands firmly at her side and would not allow her to return his embrace.

“It was a long hunt, my Olivia,” he whispered.  “Five hours I stood in the freezing wind, my feet sunk in snow.  Five hours, alone with Kurlun.”  He slipped his hand between her legs and rubbed slowly back and forth, stroking at the damp folds of her sex with his thick fingers.  “Kurlun…who has had some chat with his Amy about human pleasures.”

His thumb pressed down gently over the little nub crowning her pussy, a touch so unexpected that she bucked at the sensation without warning.  Vorgullum, smiling, lifted her.  His arm behind her held her steady, held her pinned close against him, while all her weight rode the hand between her thighs, where he stroked and ground and teased as he walked.  Olivia sank her own small, insignificant human claws into his shoulder, gasping and groaning until she felt stone at her back and knew herself to be trapped between it and him.

“Have I neglected you, my mate?” he murmured, slipping only the very tip of his finger inside her, a torment of promise he as swiftly withdrew, and all the while his thumb played at her clit.  “And so eagerly you have sought to please me, to learn the ways of my desires.  I am ashamed.”

The first gusts of purely physical response swept over her and through her, and as she shivered in its golden grip, she was exquisitely aware of Vorgullum’s mouth on hers, kissing her as though he were trying to breathe in the pleasure he had given her.  She kissed him back, trying to hum for him—a somewhat mismanaged effort, but heartfelt.

“Here.”  Gently, he lowered his arm and let her find her own balance, but kept his hand at her sex, his fingers dipping torturously into her wet well as she squirmed.  “Are you ready?”

“Ready?”

He turned her firmly around to face the wall, pulling her back against his body, his hand moving only as far as needed to continue caressing and teasing at her clit.  “For me,” he growled, the thrumm of his intent turning his words to dark silk, and then she felt the hot head of him pressing at her from behind.  He mouthed at her shoulder—less a kiss than a hungry bite—and slid his other hand up to cup and knead her breast.  “Tell me you are ready.”

She stammered without words, her hips moving in helpless jerks, frantically trying to impale herself on his evasive fingers.  Tell him?  Why should she even have to tell him?  If she could hear the greedy suck of his fingers as he worked them in shallow passes back and forth, back and forth, then so could he.  And even if he couldn’t, surely he could smell her!

“I insist that you tell me,” he murmured, and now there were claws at her breast, carefully pinching and rolling at her nipple, and this was what he talked about all day with Kurlun, waiting for the sun to set so that the hunt could begin?  How did a subject like that even come up?

“I am!” she gasped, pushing hard against the wall, thrusting back at him, begging with every part of her body and not only her voice.  “I am!  Please!  Now!”

“Because you want me.”

“Because I need you!  I need you!  Vorgullum, now!”

His fingers at her pussy opened, admitting the agony of air on her most secret self…then closed again, stroking her.  “A little louder,” he said mildly.

“Wh-What?”

“After all the times you have lured me just so far and no further, so that any ear in the mainway could hear me in the ruins of my dignity, by the Great Spirit—”  He stroked at her clit again, bringing her almost there, almost, and growled into her ear.  “—I will have a vengeance now.”

Olivia sucked in a tight breath and released it in a keening cry: “Vorgullum, have me!  I need you!  I need my mate inside me now!  Oh please!”

Even she could hear the distant flutter of startled laughter somewhere in the tunnels below.  Vorgullum heard as well, snapped his teeth smugly in the direction of the chimney, and finally pushed deeply inside her.

She came at once, so violently that she could actually see it bursting behind her eyes in colors never found in nature.  Her knees buckled; she sagged into the steadying grip of his arms, bent even further over so that he could go even deeper.  With the shockwaves of climax still humming through her nerves, he thrust at her, rocking her with strong, steady force.  It was too much and not enough and just when she thought she was getting a handle on it all, that she could weave herself in and find some kind of symmetry to the pace he set, he dropped his hand to her clit and brought her to a second titanic convulsion.

Olivia could not even put a name to the sound that came out of her—a high, groaning, wolfish howl that spooled out and just hung there, shaken into panting grunts at the very end that matched the power of his rhythm.  She didn’t, couldn’t, hear anything else, but Vorgullum must have because he snapped his teeth again, chuckling to himself in triumph as he drove at her.

“This was what you wanted,” he mused, his fingers and hips working faster, not in sync but in harmony.  “‘Look at me,’ you said.  ‘Hold me and stay with me.’  And I did not understand.”

She was incapable of any kind of reply, could only comprehend the meaning of these sounds in a peripheral sort of way.  She did not feel the rough rock under her hands or think about who might be listening out in the tunnels; she did not know how wildly she writhed in his enclosing arms or hear the urgent animal cries she made; for the first time in months, she had completely forgotten that she was pregnant.  All she could know, all she could feel, was the ominous crest of some great, impending explosion, its ignition just beyond her senses, and she was straining towards it, and it was the sun, just like the sun, and the sun—

Went out.

Blackness on every side.  Blackness within and without her. Blackness, and all she could hope for in those first startled seconds was that she had knocked herself unconscious in the grip of the world’s greatest orgasm, because if she hadn’t, she’d had a heart attack and died.  And poor Vorgullum, seriously.

“Behold me.”

The lights came on, light in the shape of a man, difficult to look at.  Not too bright, not blinding, but difficult all the same, difficult in a way that made her eyes and her mind and her whole soul want to cringe away.  Behold him, he’d said, so she had to, but beyond that terrible man’s shape, she saw nothing.

“Olivia,” the light said.  It came a step closer, raised its arm as if to touch her, shining its unthinkable brilliance into her.  “Have you eaten?”

-bang-

The rock and the cave and Vorgullum’s roar and climax splitting her down to her atoms and Olivia shrieked, not knowing where she was or what she was doing but only savaged in the jaws of sensations beyond her control.  Her body spasmed, firing off bursts of pleasure entirely independent of her ability to perceive them, and then Vorgullum was crushing her against the wall, panting into her ear with smug little grunts of laughter.

That didn’t just happen, Olivia thought, utterly dumbfounded.

“This battle was mine, I think,” Vorgullum was saying cheerfully.  He straightened up, supporting her as she struggled for balance in her body and her mind.  “But I could put up a second challenge if you disagree.”

“Could you?” Olivia managed.  She was a little amazed by how normal she sounded.  Out of breath, yes, but normal.

“Perhaps not immediately.”  He bent to nuzzle at the side of her neck, and that was all right, that was all the way back to here and now in the real world, and she was even able to relax some and enjoy it.  “You’re still shaking,” he observed, in a tone that suggested he meant to take the credit for it.

She let him.  Even the best sex in the world lost a lot of its appeal when you realized you’d been having it with a crazy woman.

11

The first thing she wanted to do the following morning, once Vorgullum had left her (still thrumming to himself in a satisfied way), was find Murgull.  Whatever she had seen—or thought she saw—was not something she felt comfortable speaking of with any gullan, but it had sat in her heart all night like a fishbone stuck in her throat, and it was either tell someone or choke on it.  A part of her knew that the tribe’s sigruum would be a better choice of confidant, that he might even be able to tell her what it meant or (and this terrified her) help her to summon the vision back.

These were precisely the reasons she did not go to Kodjunn’s lair.  She didn’t need to be believed and she didn’t want anything explained.  She just wanted to pull the memory of that otherspace and its man-shaped radiation out of her so that it could be crushed and forgotten.  If it meant submitting to Murgull’s open hand upside her head for getting girly over nothing, so be it.  She would welcome that (so she could tell herself, knowing full well that nothing of the kind would happen), but when she reached Murgull’s secret room and worked its ingenious door open, all the words she’d been planning how to say went tumbling out of her head.

Murgull was not looking well.

She sat on her throne of bones, her face turned toward the fireplace where nothing burned, and everything about her seemed sagged and labored.  Her eyes were closed and did not open, even though she must have heard the door grinding over its rails.  Her hand squeezed and scratched endlessly at the dead, scarred flesh of her neck, but the movement was somehow devoid of life, like the shambling walk of a zombie.

“What do you want?” Murgull growled, startling her.

Dread worse than anything her vision could inspire punched in through her guts and gave her heart an icy squeeze.  “Are you sick?” she blurted.

The old gulla sneered, then sighed.  “Murgull is old, little sister.  Just old.”

Olivia came inside, the door hanging open with all its secrets revealed, to lay her hand on Murgull’s brow.  She refused to be shaken off, but pursued the thin patch of hairless flesh beside the gulla’s pointed ears and found it hot; pursued the pulsing vein at her scarred throat and found it shallow.  Alarmed, she realized that Murgull’s skin seemed oddly loose; the body beneath, diminished and somewhat slack.  “When did you last eat?” she asked.

“Ah, you pest!  You biting flea!  Horumn sets a bowl aside every night!  Enough, eh?  Let old Murgull be.”  She glanced at her, made a face, then heaved a sigh and struggled onto her feet.  “Down, then.  Let me have a look at you.”

Olivia started to protest, but Murgull gave her a smart slap on the shoulder, so she scooted to the edge of the bench and lay back, spreading her legs and hitching her heavy robe up around her hips.

“Have to bite at Horumn’s ears, eh?” Murgull mumbled.  “Find a birthing bench and make it ready.  Too soon is better than too late.”  She used her right hand, the claws of which were kept round and very dull, to gingerly probe inside Olivia.  Her other hand prodded her belly from the outside, turning the baby this way and that so that Murgull could feel it.

Olivia closed her eyes and tried to tune it out.  As often as Murgull demanded these examinations, she had never gotten used to them.  Murgull had given her instructions in sex that could make a sailor blush, but having a baby embarrassed her.  She shook her head minutely, disgusted with herself.

“All is well,” Murgull pronounced, limping over to the table to splash something acrid and unpleasant-smelling over her hands.  “Strong life is growing stronger.  The soul is fast inside him.  If he had to, he could come out today, and maybe he would survive.”

Olivia struggled to right herself and pull her robe back over her naked thighs.  “When will it happen?” she called

“Old Murgull says, oh…three cycles hence, when the moon is at its fattest.  A very good omen, to birth the same night as Urga above.  Perhaps you truly will bear the Great Spirit’s son, eh?  Now come with me, little sister.  Come to see Amy-maggot.  Olivia will learn how to feel inside a woman.”

Olivia pulled a face.  “Oh, ugh!  Do I have to?”

Murgull nodded, patting her on the shoulder.  “No one else but Olivia.  Come on, then, be brave.  Old Murgull thinks the other maggot will be more horrified even than you.”  She cackled, and led the way from the room.

12

Amy tracked Murgull with her eyes while Olivia counted off her pulse quietly.  “No, I haven’t been bruising any worse than usual, and why is Olivia still here?”  There was new steel under the suspicion in her voice that said she was done answering questions until her own got answered.

Up until now the interview had gone rather well.  Murgull had asked several questions regarding Amy’s general health and the health of her family.  Amy answered them, looking perplexed, remarking once or twice that they’d already discussed this, and why was Olivia here?

Heaving a sigh, Murgull finally gave in and told Amy that Olivia was here to learn how to midwive, and Amy came as close to losing it as Olivia had ever seen.

“You want a woman my own age, with no experience at all, testing her skills on me and my baby?” she said, astonished.  “Absolutely not!”

“I told you so,” Olivia said.

“You hush,” Murgull commanded, pointing at Olivia.  To Amy, she said, “Murgull is old and could die any day.  Do you want to birth alone?”

“No,” Amy admitted.

“Do you want Horumn to help?”

“God, no!”

“Then help me teach Olivia.”  She reached into her pouch and pulled out a clear plastic soda pop bottle.  “Fill this.”

Amy glanced back and forth between them for several seconds, and then with an air of despair, she took the bottle with her into the entry room of Kurlun’s lair and filled it.  She returned, holding it as far from her body as she could.  “Well?” she said challengingly.  “Are you going to run it under a microscope?”

Murgull glared at her fiercely to disguise her complete ignorance of the word, then took the bottle and held it up to the light.  “Pregnant women need to drink water.  If the urine is dark yellow, they are not drinking enough.  If it is cloudy or foul-smelling, make a tea of goldenspray leaves, one good pot each day, eh?  But this is good.”  She passed it back.  “Pour it out.”

From the look on Amy’s face, Olivia knew just where she wanted it to go, but in the end, she took the bottle back into the other room and poured its contents into the bucket of ashes that served as her toilet.  When she returned, Murgull was ready.

“Lie back,” she commanded, and Amy did, looking at her suspiciously.  “Olivia,” Murgull began, gesturing.

Amy’s thighs snapped together.  “Why?” she said warily.

“She is learning to examine you,” Murgull answered, her expression growing thunderously dark.

“Uh-uh, no!  She can examine me from back there!”

“Open your legs and keep your flapping lips silent!” Murgull snapped.  “Pretend you are back at the conception!  Olivia, come here!”

Olivia threw her friend an expression of abject apology, lowering herself ponderously between Amy’s knees.

“This is so humiliating,” Amy grumbled.  “This is a part of me I never ever wanted you to see.  God in heaven, I haven’t shaved in months.”

“Ignore the little frog’s croaking,” Murgull commanded.  “Look for sores and bruising.”

Olivia checked, somewhat squeamishly.  “I don’t see anything.”

“Put your hand here.  Feel.”

Olivia massaged Amy’s belly, until, with Murgull’s help, she could identify what was either the head or the buttocks of the baby.  “It’s very quiet,” she observed after prodding the protruding lump for several seconds.

“When was the last time your baby kicked?” Murgull asked immediately.

“This morning,” Amy grumbled.  “Stomped on my bladder.”

“See if you can provoke it,” Murgull suggested.  “Reach inside and find the baby.”

“Inside?” Olivia and Amy said together.

Murgull slapped them both in the side of the head, one with each hand.  “Murgull does not need a voice for each ear,” she snapped.  “Murgull’s ears work just fine.  Now reach inside and move the baby!”

“Oh God,” Olivia whimpered, hesitantly prodding Amy with two fingers.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Murgull exploded.  “Better results you get by reaching down her throat, you little goat!”

“Good Christ, what a life I’m having,” Amy muttered.

“Rub her belly and try to move the baby towards your hand,” Murgull ordered, glaring at Amy.

Olivia attempted to comply.  The bulge against both of her hands twitched, and then tumbled over.  A little hand poked her incuriously.  “It’s moving,” she announced.

“How big?”

Holding her fingers against the baby from the inside, Olivia used her other hand to move Amy’s uterus from side to side.  “About…two fists.”

“Good,” Murgull said, sounding pleased. “She is six moon-spans along.”

“We already knew that!” Amy said angrily.

“And now she knows what it feels like,” Murgull replied, unruffled.  “Now use your thumbs.  Feel the bones of her hips, there.  Too soon to tell how big the child will be,” she added in a mutter.

“What exactly am I feeling for?” Olivia asked.

“Practice.”

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Amy intoned, closing her eyes.

“When the child is bigger, you will be able to get an idea of how easily it will be delivered, and be ready for difficulty.”

Olivia closed her eyes, trying to picture a baby’s head sliding through Amy’s pelvis.  It seemed an awfully cramped passage.

“Good,” Murgull said shortly.  She ran her hands over Amy’s hair, lifted her lips to examine her teeth, prodded her swollen breasts, and checked her fingernails briefly.  “Need milk,” she mumbled.  “Olivia, tell your mate to trap a she-goat.  New mothers need milk.”

With an eager sound that was more relief that the examination was over than actual agreement, Olivia stood up, eager to leave and find a place to scrub her hands.

“Now you know how,” Murgull declared, looking smug.  “Do it to all the other mothering maggots.”

13

Vorgullum and Olivia slept together that night, buried beneath sleeping bags, animal skins and stolen sleeping bags.  Vorgullum even snored softly, twitching a little in his dreams as he chased dream-elk into the night.  Olivia slept a while herself, but was roused by the touch of a hand on her arm.

“Mm?” she said fuzzily, blinking and looking around.

There was an exceedingly ugly creature standing in front of her.

At first, Olivia’s eyes had trouble taking the sight in, or even focusing on any one aspect of her body.  It was a female, that much was clear.  There were small breasts and a hairless sex, anyway.  The hips, waist, and torso all flowed solidly into one another; the arms and legs were straight and solid and strangely androgynous.  She had vaguely hand-shaped lumps at the end of her wrists, but no fingers; she had blunt hoof-like appendages in place of feet.  The head was even worse, hairless even for eyebrows and lashes, with cavernous eyes and a lipless slit for a mouth.  The nose was downturned and split like a goat’s, and the ears came off the head at an awkward angle and stuck out like open doors.

Her skin was white and made of stars.  There were wings stretching out behind like moonbeams.

Urga reached out and extended her hand.

Certain she must be dreaming, despite the vividness of the image, Olivia placed her hand in Urga’s and felt a curious sense of detachment as she was pulled to her feet.  Looking back over her shoulder, she saw her own sleeping body lying in Vorgullum’s arms.

Without a word, Urga wrapped her arms around Olivia’s waist and flew up and out of the mountain.  Olivia was aware only of darkness for a long time, and then they broke out of the rock, hovered for a moment in the air, then arced lazily about and streaked towards town.

Olivia felt no urge to speak.  She held on to Urga and looked back over her shoulder at the ground as it went whizzing by beneath her.  The wind blew in her air and she felt snow falling against her cheek, but there was no sense of cold, so she knew she must be dreaming.

Still, it was a beautiful dream.  Olivia saw tiny cars and trucks crawling along the highway far below her, twin rivers of light in red and white.  She saw the glow of life pouring out of a thousand windows.  She saw people, small as ants, scurrying across parking lots and down sidewalks in the halo of streetlamps, their heads tucked down into their winter coats and boots skidding in the wet snow.

Urga flew faster than any gulla, and in minutes they were flying extremely low over the buildings in the upper side of town.  After a moment, Olivia realized they were pointed towards the hospital, and sure enough, Urga flew in through the wall, coasting to a stop in the soft, soothing halls of the psychiatric division.

Urga set Olivia gently on the ground, and they walked together across the hall.  Snatches of conversation came at Olivia from all sides.  Nurses and patients, doctors and specialists.  It sounded so real.  No one seemed even to notice them, these two naked beings walking through their hospital.

Urga came to a door and walked through it, so Olivia followed.  She saw Urga standing behind two men, one older with a beard, and one younger and balding.  There was a woman here, too.  A woman Olivia knew.

The madwoman who had been Bundel’s mate was seated in an overstuffed chair, clutching a stuffed bear instead of a saucepan.

The bearded man was talking in a soft, friendly voice, and after a moment, Olivia realized he was hypnotizing her.

“Amanda, do you hear me?”

The madwoman blinked rapidly.

“Amanda, raise your left hand if you hear me.”

The madwoman’s left hand rose slowly into the air and hovered there.

“How old are you, Amanda?”

“Five.”

“I want you to picture the calendar again, Amanda.  The month is December, and it has your favorite picture on it.  Do you see the calendar?”

Amanda nodded and smiled timidly.  “Pony,” she said.

“Good.  Now I want you to reach up and turn the page so that the calendar says November.”

Amanda reached up with her right hand and mimed flipping a page upward.  Her expression brightened.  “Puppy!” she said.

“That’s right, now go back to August for me.  You can use your left hand if you need to.”

Amanda held the invisible pages in place with her left hand and turned time back with her right.  She frowned at the picture, concentrating.  “El’pant,” she said judiciously.

“Do you like the elephants, Amanda?”

“Yes, please.”

“Good, now go back one more to July.”

Amanda struggled with the invisible pages and the balding man took notes, despite the presence of a video camera in the corner.  Finally, she managed to turn the calendar page and see the picture.  She recoiled, lashing out with her hands.

“Amanda, it’s all right.  Nothing can hurt you.  You’re not in the room, you’re only watching.”

Amanda calmed down immediately.

“Now, what do you see on the calendar?”

Amanda shuddered. “Bats.”

The hypnotist made a notation on his own pad of paper, and then addressed Amanda again.  “Turn around, Amanda.  There is a window beside the calendar.  Do you see the window?”

Amanda turned her face and nodded, frowning.

“You can see your home through the window.  You can see High Hill Apartments.”

Amanda nodded again, still frowning.  “Dark.”

“It is dark, isn’t it?  Do you see any people?”

“Lots of people.”  Amanda leaned closer, peering as though trying to look through dirty glass.  “Ladies in the parking lot.  They cry and cry.”  She reached up and made trickling motions with her fingers over her cheeks.  “I see Amanda.”

“But you can watch her.  You don’t have to be the Amanda in the parking lot.  You can watch her and be safe where you are.”

“Watch Amanda.  See Amanda try to run.  Oh, run Amanda!” the hypnotized woman called in a breathy, little-girl voice.  Her face fell.  “No, he catches her.”

“Who catches her?”

“The bat-man.”

“Batman?” the bald man echoed, looking puzzled.  Clearly, he was imagining the Caped Crusader, blue tights and cowl, leaping onto the back of the fleeing Amanda.

“Look at Batman, Amanda,” the doctor commanded.

“Not Batman!” Amanda said loudly, very offended.  “Batman helps people like Amanda!”

“Okay, not Batman, but a bat-man.  Look at the bat-man.  What do you see?”

“Big with hair on his arms,” Amanda whispered.  “And wings.  And big, big eyes and teeth.  He wear a towel.  Got naked feet with sharp hooks, and naked hands with claws.  Pick Amanda up.  Take Amanda back.  Amanda cry and cry.”  Those trickling motions again.

“What happens now?” asked the doctor gently.

“Big bat-man come to Amanda.  ‘What do you want?’ he say.  Amanda wants to go home, but he say, ‘I cannot do that.’  He give Amanda to other bat-man, and he hold her.”  Both times when Amanda spoke as Vorgullum, she deepened and slowed her voice.  “Bat-man say to Amanda, ‘What do you want?’ and now Amanda cry.  So he take her back to home.  All the women go home and get things.  Amanda get a pan.”

“Why a pan, Amanda?”

“Amanda buy the pan yesterday.  She buy the pan, and she wants the pan.  She cry and cry.”  Trickle, trickle, go her tears.

“Now what happens next, Amanda?”

“Bat-man talk to other bat-men.  Amanda can’t understand them.  Then bat-man take them all to the road and climb up the road.  Take Amanda and say, ‘Turn around, please.’  Amanda turn and he hold her.  He jump and fly away.  Bye-bye.”  She waved like a child, her open palm flapping straight up and down.

The balding doctor shook his head, but the hypnotist continued.  “The window is like television now, and you can see where Amanda goes.  Where does Amanda go?”

“In the mountain.”

“Where on the mountain?”

“In the mountain,” Amanda insisted.  “It all black and can’t see.  Bat-man carry Amanda up a little tunnel and he put her in a hole.  He say, ‘This is a place to sleep in.’  Amanda wants to go to sleep.”

“Does the bat-man let her go to sleep?”

“He say, ‘Take off this.’  She take off her nightie and be naked.  He take off his towel.”  Amanda’s lip was trembling.

“You aren’t there, Amanda.  You can watch and still be safe.”

“Amanda lost.  Amanda can’t leave.  Bat-man fold up wings little-bitty and lie down on Amanda.”  Her staring eyes welled with tears.  “Bye-bye, Amanda.  Bye-bye.”

“What happens to Amanda?”

“Bye-bye, Amanda.  Bye-bye.”

The balding doctor began to speak in a low voice, looking at the camera.  Olivia tried to hear what was said, but Urga took her arm and led her from the room.  She spread her wings in the hospital hall and flew away.

At first, Olivia though they were flying back to the mountain, but then Urga veered away and they landed in the police station.

Two men, one with graying hair and the other barely old enough to grow a beard, were being questioned by a police officer in a private room.  Another officer watched from the door.

“Where did you take the women?”

“I didn’t take them anywhere, I just took them out of the apartment,” said the younger calmly.  “They went to Jupiter to be with the Messiah.”

“Yeah, well one of the women fell back to earth.  She says she was on a mountain.  Tell me where the others are.”

“Jupiter.”

“Jupiter,” the older agreed.

“Jupiter, for Christ’s sake,” muttered the man in the doorway.

“Will you arrest us now?”

“Not until you are able to corroborate at least one piece of evidence, no,” the seated officer explained patiently.  “If you want us to arrest you, tell me where the women are.”

The two men exchanged glances.  “Well,” the younger said.  “Like I say, we didn’t transport them.  I guess it’s possible the landing site is somewhere on the mountain.”

“Possible?”

“The Messiah had a map,” the older suspect said.  “With a big X.”

The two cops exchanged startled glances.  “If we show you a map, can you show us where the X is?” asked the one at the table.

“Yes,” said the older suspect, smiling.

The officer in the doorway knocked on the mirror and left.

Urga took Olivia’s arm and flew again, back to the hospital.  The hypnotist and the bald man were alone in the room, talking among themselves.

“—views her captors as bat-men,” the bald man said.

“As a metaphor, of course,” replied the hypnotist.  “She was taken very quickly, so they have wings.  They loom over her like monsters, so she gave them monstrous features.  Sharp teeth and claws.  It’s a very common defense mechanism, much more so than people realize.”

“And the mountain?”

“There must be some sort of structure up there.  Maybe even a cave such as she describes, more than just a hole in the ground.  Perhaps an old mine shaft, where the other women are being kept.”

“There was no evidence of sexual trauma when she was found,” the bald man observed, checking his notes.

“No recent trauma, you mean.”  The hypnotist took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.  “In a way, that’s the most disturbing thing of all.  It means someone was taking care of her.  She was well-fed, clean, no signs of damage from exposure, no signs of physical abuse.  That’s a lot of work.”

“Well, Batman or no Batman, someone is up on that mountain.  Some of those women might still be alive.”

Urga touched Olivia’s arm, but Olivia resisted.

“We need to get some infrared equipment up on the mountain and see if we can detect any heat sources that might indicate a generator or electrical facilities.  Fly a search plane over there a few times, see if we can pick out any sign that a large group of people has set up some sort of semi-permanent residence.”

“Is this happening?” Olivia demanded, catching at Urga’s arm.  “Is this a dream or is it real?”

Urga looked calmly down at Olivia’s hands, so brown and rough looking against her starry skin.  She kept looking, motionless, until Olivia released her.  Then she brought her empty eyes back up, took Olivia in her arms, and flew.

Again, they circled the town, and now they landed at High Hill Apartments, dropping down through the roof and into Olivia’s old home.

A young, scruffy-looking man was sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking a cigarette and flipping through the TV guide.  All of Olivia’s possessions were gone.  The pictures she’d hung on the wall were not there, the holes left by the nails had been filled in and painted over.  The carpet had been shampooed, then re-stained by the new occupant.  The furniture was in a different pattern, and none of it was hers.  Her life, if it could ever have been said to be here, had been removed.

“Where did it go?” Olivia asked, only dimly aware of how childishly mournful she sounded.

Urga said nothing, did nothing.

Olivia walked up and down the small apartment.  The grungy young man in the bedroom was a stranger.  The filthy bathroom was filled with shaving supplies and manly tonics.  The kitchen was squalid and matted with old food.  The living room was cramped and deep with someone else’s junk.

“Why are you doing this?” Olivia screamed.  She wanted to grab Urga and shake her, make her answer, but didn’t dare.

Urga held out her hand impassively.

Having no choice, Olivia took it, and let herself be carried away.  Finally, they left the town behind, but did not move back towards the mountains just yet.  Urga flew above a narrow road, past a wooded place to a garden of stone set in a clearing.

“No,” Olivia moaned.

Urga landed gently on a sloping hill in the cemetery.  She took Olivia’s hand like a mother walking a small child across the street and led her through the monuments and flowers to a small outbuilding away from the memoriam hall.  They walked through the wall and down the stairs into a storage bay of coffins and marble slabs.  She nudged Olivia forward and pointed.

“I don’t want to see this.”  Olivia tried to twist away, but Urga took her firmly by the shoulders and turned her bodily around.  Again, she pointed, her tapered finger pointed at a flat, dark headstone.  All it needed was the final date.

OLIVIA ARDETH BLAKE

Olivia screamed, an anguished, horrified cry of rage.  She turned and struck out wildly, battering the luminescent body of the First Woman.  Her blows did not seem to land, glancing harmlessly off a cushion of air that surrounded Urga like armor.  Urga only watched as Olivia tired herself out, and when the dreamer slumped weeping to the ground, she simply reached down and pulled her up again.

Wings of moonlight beat the air and they flew out into the night again.  The snow-covered landscape was beautiful in the moonlight.  It hurt Olivia’s eyes to see it, and it hurt her heart to think of it, but she looked and thought all the same.

Urga flew past Hollow Mountain and kept going.  She flew to the north, along the mountain ridge, over caps of snow and jagged rock, until the forests became a single vast, black sea.  She flew until Olivia couldn’t see any sign of human habitation, and then she landed.  She put Olivia down in a pack of ice and snow and waved her arm at the horizon.

Olivia looked.  She saw high, white mountains, a broad valley, a slightly higher thicket of wooded foothills, and then a sloping roll of evergreens.  She turned the other way and saw a rushing river, stabbed with jagged lines of broken ice and bleeding froth and foam, plummet over the side of the mountain and down into a glassy lake.

Urga waited until she had filled her mind with the sight of this place, then turned her and pointed at the mountain itself.

There was a cavern, and it looked deep.

Olivia started to walk towards it, but Urga took her arm and dropped down through layers of rock instead, until they came to an opening hundreds of feet below.  In the glow of Urga’s ethereal body, Olivia could make out a system of tunnels and caverns filling the body of the mountain like a network of veins.  Still, Urga continued to fall deeper, until she arrived in a small, stone enclosure, and released Olivia to look around.

In this silent and long-empty chamber was a sleeping pit, a fireplace with fragments of charred wood now gone grey with dust, and there, in the corner, stood a low, stone bench with indentations for a prone gulla’s wings.

“Remember,” Urga said in a death-dry whisper.

“I can’t—I don’t understand.”

Urga gathered her up and pulled her back out of the mountain.  She stopped again, turning Olivia so that she could see everything around them.

“Remember,” she commanded.

“I don’t know where we are!” Olivia wailed.

“Remember.”  Urga leapt into the air and pulled Olivia northward over the mountain ridge, back to the hollow mountain where the gulla tribe slept.  She flew down through dark stone into Vorgullum’s chamber, and there was Olivia, sleeping in his arms.

“Remember,” Urga said again, placing Olivia down inside the pit.

Olivia could feel her physical body pulling at her.  Though she struggled, she was being drawn in, inhaled like a breath of air.

“Remember,” Urga said a final time, and spread her wings to fly.

Olivia fell exhausted into her body and opened her eyes.  The world drew into painful focus.  Weight and sense and smell assaulted her, overwhelmed her.  Every facet of her dream stood out in her mind with crystalline clarity, especially the view from the mountains to the north.

Urga’s only word pounded in her ears with the beating of her heart, until Olivia couldn’t stand it anymore.  She did something she had never done before.

She rolled over and shook Vorgullum awake.

He came alert quickly, confused and initially angry.  One look at her pale and frightened face changed his whole demeanor.  “What is it?”

Olivia took a breath, shook her head, and said, “Wake everyone up, now.  We have to go.”

14

“Take only what you can carry,” Vorgullum was saying, amplifying his voice by cupping his mouth.  “We can come back for the rest.  Wear as many clothes as you can.  Do not bring fuel, there will be something to burn at the new site.  Horumn is bringing burning coals to light all the new hearths.  Do not try to take fire of your own.”

“You’re crazy,” Karen cried out shrilly, waving an arm at Olivia.  “It’s the middle of winter, we just barely got a decent hunt in!  We can’t possibly survive a trip like this!”

“Who are you, my conscience?” Olivia shot back.  “Do you think I don’t know these things already?  Don’t you think I’m terrified, too?”

“There are seventy-one gullan capable of flight,” Kurlun reported grimly, coming up to Vorgullum with an equally grim-looking Amy at his side.  “Of that number, maybe forty could manage to carry the weight of another.  We will have to make several trips to move us all.”

“How far is this new mountain?” Vorgullum asked.

Olivia could only shake her head.  “In my dream, we went much faster than any gulla.  It could be days away.”

“Days?” Amy echoed.  “Camping above the snowline in the friggin’ Cascades?”

“The Great Spirit would not give us warning only to kill us with cold,” Kurlun said, but he sounded unsure.

Amy rolled her eyes.  “Yeah, if he means to kill us, he’ll do it with giant, mutant mammoths or something.”

Kurlun hooked those words out of the air and looked uneasily skyward.

“The strongest fliers can carry the humans and the crippled gullan in waves,” Vorgullum said edgily.  “The weaker ones can carry our supplies and make camp.  We can hunt as we go and come back for our stores once we have arrived at the new mountain.  Doru!”  He moved off to catch at his chief hunter’s arm and then two of them drew away to confer.

“This is a hell of a risk to take over a dream,” Tina said, joining them.  She frowned at Olivia, not with anger, but with uncertainty.  “The odds of a search team, even equipped with infrared devices, finding this place—”

“Don’t talk to me about odds,” Amy snapped.  “Just remember that people win the lottery all the time.  Whether or not they find us is almost completely irrelevant.  All they have to do is blunder around the mountain long enough to starve us safe in our damn lairs!”

Gullan and humans looked at each other uneasily.

“Do you really think someone’s going to get that close?” Tina asked, her brows knitting.

Amy snorted.  “Somehow, I doubt that Urga would have bothered taking Olivia for a magic carpet ride if no one was coming.  And before you ask, yes, I am completely convinced it was the real, live, honest-to-Christmas Urga.”

Tina looked at Olivia, then at Amy.  “Why?”

“I don’t know.”  Now Amy frowned, her hands rising to rest on the swell of her hard stomach.  “All I know is, I’ve been an atheist for ten years, and when I saw her face—”  Amy’s eyes met Olivia’s, dark and troubled.  “—I about pissed myself.  I don’t do that over bad dreams.”

Vorgullum returned, looking back over his shoulder.  “It is dark,” he said, “and the snows have eased.  It must be now.  To your mates, both of you.  Olivia, to me.”

She followed close at his side as he led his tribe out of the commons, to the bottom of the entry shaft and into the cold wind that blew down from the world above.  He shouldered the pack of his few possessions, pulled her up into his arms, and began to climb.

When he had brought her down this very wall, so many months before, it had seemed endless.  Now, it was no time at all before a tiny icy sting reintroduced her to snow, and then she was out, looking up into a night of whirling flakes and a few, dim stars behind sullen clouds.  She kept her head tipped back, her hands clasped behind Vorgullum’s head as he brought her easily up and out of the mountain, into a winter as sharp as a hunting knife.

Vorgullum set Olivia on a rough aerie of sorts and stepped out to stand beside her.  It was hard to look at him, hard to see the anguish in his eyes as he strained for the calm that a leader should always project.  “I did so much to stay here,” he said.

“I want you alive to miss it,” she replied, and he enfolded her in his arms again, staring out at the mountains over her head as behind them, other gullan similarly burdened heaved themselves out of the only home they had ever known: Kurlun and Amy, Doru and Tobi, Wurlgunn with Beth riding piggy-back so she wouldn’t have to trust his clumsy hands to hold her, and then Kodjunn, who heaved a massive bundle up on the aerie at their feet and climbed up after it.

“Leave it,” Vorgullum said without looking.

“It’s Cheyenne,” Kodjunn explained.  As if to demonstrate, the bundle made a muffled yowl of rage and writhed on the aerie, prompting Kodjunn to set his foot in the middle of the mass and press it flat.

Vorgullum eyed the bag of human.  “Throw her off,” he said shortly and looked back out at the horizon.

Olivia stepped back from him, stunned.

“No,” said Kodjunn.

Vorgullum sighed, scritched his claws over his furrowed brow, then turned and seized the bound human with grim resolve.

“No!” Olivia cried, but it was Kodjunn’s hand that caught Vorgullum’s wrist.

“She’s pregnant,” said the sigruum wearily.

Vorgullum did not initially move.  He looked at Kodjunn, then down at the writhing canvas bag.  “Are you certain?”

“Murgull is certain.”

Vorgullum’s eyes narrowed.  He looked out at the world, thinking, his claws still sunk into the bag, and presumably, into Cheyenne.  At last, he locked eyes with Kodjunn and waited for the other to reluctantly remove his hand.

Olivia took a half-step forward and Kodjunn caught her by the shoulder.

“No,” he said.

“But—”

“He is tovorak.  No.”

Vorgullum stood the bag on its feet, thrust down brutally with his claws to open the canvas and drew Cheyenne out by her hair.  She started to scream and he locked his hand around her throat and swung her out over the aerie.

“Look at me,” he said.

Cheyenne’s eyes squeezed open.  Both her hands clutched at his; her legs cycled futilely in empty space over the whistling black of the drop-off.

“I am going to carry you,” Vorgullum said.  His voice was calm.  His eyes were pitiless, impassive.  “I will carry you only so long as you lie still in my arms.  Only so long.  No longer.  Do you understand me?”

Cheyenne’s hands clawed at him spastically.

“Do you understand me?”  Cool.  Relentless.

“…essss….”

He brought her back over the aerie and set her down.  Deliberately, he removed his hand from her and turned his back on her.  Cheyenne clutched her throat and swallowed air, eyes shut and leaking tears.  Vorgullum said, “I trust you to bear my mate and child on this journey, sigruum.”

Kodjunn nodded once, wrapping one wing around her.

Vorgullum looked at Olivia with eyes that still held little of mercy or emotion and which silently said he would have given much to keep her from having seen it.  “Which way?” Vorgullum softly asked her.

She could only point.

He looked out in the direction she indicated, frowning.  “North,” he said.  “I’ve never heard of any of our kind who dwelled there.  I had always believed this tribe to be the northernmost.”

“So did I,” Kodjunn agreed, plainly troubled.

“The aerie is full,” a gulla called.  “Someone has to jump off before we can keep coming.”

“To the north, then,” Vorgullum commanded, his voice booming out into the still night.  “North, to the home the Great Spirit provides us!”  He took impersonal hold of Cheyenne and leapt into the air without another word.

An instant later, Kodjunn followed.  Olivia wrapped her limbs helplessly around him, hating the feeling that came with suddenly losing kinship with the ground.  The wind of their passage chilled her to the bone, and soon her teeth were chattering uncontrollably, despite her many layers of heavy clothing.

She considered, not for the first time, that she could easily be sending the entire tribe to their deaths.  Either the cold would kill them, or they’d die of hunger when they couldn’t manage to chase up enough game as they traveled.  But the thing that worried her the most was the thought that they would never find the mountains seen in her dream, because they didn’t exist.

Olivia buried her head in Kodjunn’s chest, hiding her face from the freezing sky.  Once again, there was nothing to do but let herself be carried.

15

There were seven stops in that twelve-hour night, but no complaints, not even from those strong flyers who had to make several treks back and forth from the stopping points while everyone else rested.  Vorgullum refused to leave what he perceived as the safety of the higher altitudes and so they flew along the mountains, in the bitter cold and blowing snow, ever watchful for a good place to camp out the daylit hours, but it wasn’t until just before dawn that Wurlgunn stumbled on the perfect place.

That is, he tried to bank too hard and fell out of the sky at full speed, slamming through a snow pack and into a small collection of sheltered, cozy caves.  Of course, no one saw this immediately, and so everyone was landing and running towards the place they’d seen him vanish, calling out his name.

“We’re all right!” Beth called from within.  “His head broke his fall.  Come and see!”

The snow pack was probably twenty feet thick at its thickest point, and Wurlgunn had only broken through at all because of his momentum, weight, and the dumb luck to hit at a high angle where the ice was light and the snow only four feet deep.  The cave it concealed was a massive one, easily containing the entire tribe, and with the bundles of their supplies blocking the entry hole, their combined body heat was enough to keep them from being too miserable.  Once Horumn got a fire going out of the few coals she’d carried with her in a cow’s horn, it was even fairly comfortable.

For several hours, everyone pretended to sleep.

And then Bolga began to cry.

Horumn tried to hush her, but the harder she tried, the harder Bolga cried, and soon Murgull rose from her place near the back and stumbled over various gullan to reach them.

“Too soon for her to be so active,” Horumn whispered loudly.  “She is in a great deal of pain.”

“Make her drink this,” Murgull said.  “It will soothe the cramping and help her sleep.”

Bolga’s sobbed swung briefly into a child’s temper tantrum.  “No!” she screamed.  “Nasty drink!  Bolga won’t!”

Horumn spoke to her in a stern, low voice, and Bolga’s cries tapered off into sniffles.  There were messy gulps, then more sniffles, and finally quiet.

Olivia waited for it, counting slowly backwards from ten.  She had reached the number three when Horumn finally asked, “Why are we doing this?”

From the low groans and muffled sighs that swept the cavern, Olivia had not been alone in anticipating the question.

“Bolga is hurt inside,” Horumn added, switching tactics.  “She cannot keep this pace again tomorrow.  She could die if she does!  And it takes two of us to carry Murgull!”

“Then leave Murgull!” Murgull snapped.  “Let Olivia be the tribe’s new nuisance.  She knows all now that I knew then, anyway.”

“Olivia?” Horumn repeated, stunned.  “It is Olivia’s nonsense we’ve chased out into this damned cold!  If anyone should be left behind—”

“No one will be left behind,” Vorgullum growled warningly.

“—it should be Olivia!” Horumn finished, glaring at him.

Vorgullum started to get up, but Olivia pulled him back down.  She stood up instead.  “Are you cold, Horumn?”

Horumn glared at her, then dropped her eyes.  “No colder now than tunnels back home.”  She looked back up fiercely.  “But the wind in the air is biting me!”

“Speaking of biting,” Tina said in low English.  “Have you thought about frostbite, Olivia?  Fingers falling off?  Hypothermia, for God’s sake?”

“Look,” Olivia said bluntly, turning back to Horumn, “I am just as miserable as you are.  Humans are bald and fragile.”

Horumn muttered under her breath and dropped her eyes again.

“But to stay in that mountain and risk discovery is more than we can leave to chance.  If you’re cold, you can get warm.  If you’re tired, you can rest.  What can you do if you’re pinned in by a band of hunting humans?  What can you do if you’re found by them and killed?”

“Even if all they do is hover around the mountain and never actually find us at all,” Amy put in.  “Humans are notoriously slow when it comes to giving up.  They’re not going to be looking for days, they’ll be looking for moon-spans.  And if they were to find something, they could still be picking over the mountain for a year!”

“It was a dream!” Horumn exploded.  Then, rapidly, as though to excuse her outburst, “Sometimes a dream is just a dream!  You’re all losing your mind over this because the Great Spirit touched her once before.”

Kodjunn cleared his throat and sat up.  “You’re right, Horumn.  How many stories are told of the Great Spirit or Urga appearing once and never again?  And how much folly has come from a gulla chasing such visions?  Tovorak Woonag saw the Great Spirit as a child and spent the rest of his life trying to make himself worthy enough for a visitation which never came.”

“Yes!” Horumn agreed, pouncing on the example.  “And he led his tribe to one disaster after another!”

“So let us have a test,” Kodjunn suggested.  “We will stand you and Olivia outside and ask the Great Spirit to strike dead the one who is wrong.”

Silence.

Horumn and Olivia both stared at him, conscious of every eye in the room open and upon them.

“Horumn?” Kodjunn prompted.

As one, the gulla and the human looked towards each other.  Their gaze met and held as the entire tribe watched.

The sounds of breathing seemed very loud.

“Well, look,” Tina said reluctantly, and now she spoke in gullanese.  “Even if someone does come to look for us, they won’t be looking everywhere.  I guess we only have to worry about getting this much distance behind us for the first few days.  After that, we can make good, warm camps and transport our people and supplies more carefully.”

There were murmurs of agreement as flying gullan eyed the grounded ones, but Tina’s mate grabbed at her wrist, glaring disapprovingly as he hissed, “No one asked you to speak, woman!”

“These are wise words,” Vorgullum said, moving his stare from Horumn to Gullnar.  “I hear them, Tina.”

Tina was released.  She rubbed her wrist, pointedly not looking at her mate as she stalked over to where Tobi and Doru huddled and sat with them instead.  Doru, watching Gullnar, tucked his folded wing around her.

“What say you, Eldest?” Vorgullum asked quietly.

Horumn grumbled under her breath and finally looked at Olivia.  Just looked, as opposed to glaring or sneering.  Resignation aged her.  “You don’t want to be here either, do you?”

Olivia sighed, and placed a hand over the bulge that was her baby.  “What do you think?”

“Fine.  No challenge tonight.”  Horumn lay back down and folded one arm over Bolga’s sleeping shoulders.

Olivia threw a glance over her shoulder at Kodjunn as she started to lie back down and he offered her a faint smile.  Shaking her head, she curled back up in Vorgullum’s arms.  It was still a long time before she could sleep.

16

Lorchumn crawled out of the snow bank the next day at dusk, froze at the top, and slid back down.  He looked wide-eyed and almost panicked, and the sight of him sent of ripple of fear through the waking tribe.  Seeing him, Olivia had a heart-stopping moment of terror when she wondered if all she’d managed to do with Urga’s warning was move them all directly into the path of some massive search and rescue operation.

“Goats!” Lorchumn hissed, leaping over two gullan to grab a spear.  “Goats everywhere and all upwind!”

A muffled scramble for weapons ensued as a dozen gullan and Tobi slipped out through the snow pack.

A short time later, there was a bleating cry of alarm, several animal screams, and then silence.

The gullan women at once began to spread out the coals for cooking with a resolute, almost grateful air.  Vorgullum appeared in the opening, trying to tug a carcass behind him into the caves.

Olivia had never seen a mountain goat before.  She’d always pictured them as being, well, goat-sized.  Bigger than a dog, but smaller than a cow, so to speak.  Although this animal did, technically, fall within that range, it was easily as big as Vorgullum and must have weighed some three hundred pounds.

“One for each of us,” Vorgullum panted as he finally managed to haul it inside and drop it by the fire.  “Olivia!  This hide will look better on you.  Help me get it off.”

There wasn’t time to do a proper curing of the hide.  He gave her a knife and had her scrape the blood and fatty residue off the inside layer of the fleece, then cut a hole in the center and had her pull it on, wool-side out, to wear like a Mexican poncho.  Messy, smelly, and imperfect, but, as Vorgullum distractedly observed, it would keep her warm until there was leisure enough to do it over, assuming they ever bothered.

They filled up on goat-meat, eating as much as they could manage and bundling up the rest.  What they could not carry, they would leave behind and fetch later, from the safety of the next camp.  As soon as it was completely dark outside, Horumn saved some coals and put out the fire, and they all filed out into the snow to take off again.

Vorgullum swept his eyes over his tribe and, satisfied that all were present, said, “It will be another long night of travel.”

“So if you’ve got to go,” Amy interrupted.  “Go now.”

He eyed her blackly, then shrugged his wings and nodded.

17

Five days and nights passed in this fashion.  Each day, just before dawn, someone would find a hiding hole just big enough to contain the tribe and secluded enough to be safe for a fire.  If their food supplies were getting low, game came to them—usually goats, but also deer, moose, and once, a handful of bears, which the superstitious gullan (who knew damn well bears don’t come in handfuls) didn’t want to kill.  Night by night, the glow of human habitation grew sparser; they left the distant towns behind them, and then the roads, and finally even the little sparks of houses went out and they flew over darkness.

As the morning of the sixth day began to lighten the horizon, Olivia tugged at Kodjunn’s silvery mane to make him look at her.  “Put me down,’ she ordered.  “Put me down, I need to see.”

He obediently tipped a wing as a signal, then swooped low to the ground and landed on an uneven peak.  She climbed out of his arms, took a few steps, and peered intently at the horizon.  All around her, gullan were dropping curiously out of the sky and waiting for her to speak.

The tree-line looked familiar, as did the peak of the mountain on her left.  There was the lake, just up ahead, but there should be a valley here somewhere, a green clearing with a smaller lake and a few evergreens sitting in the hollow scooped out between two rows of mountains, and she didn’t see it.

“Is this the place?” Vorgullum asked, scanning the forest.  He didn’t bother to keep either a hand or eye on Cheyenne, who sat docilely at his feet.

“Not quite,” she hedged.  “But I think we’re very close.  There should be a valley, between two mountain ridges.”  She hunkered down and drew lines in the snow.

He studied the drawing closely, looked at the rising color in the east, then waved some of his hunters over.  “Scatter,” he commanded.  “Look for this place.  The rest of us will stay here.”

The gullan jumped into the air and soared off.

“Please don’t tell me you’re lost,” Amy said, close by.

“I’m not lost,” Olivia replied obediently.  “I just don’t know exactly where I am.”

They waited as the sky grew lighter and lighter.  The first arc of the sun had just come up over the tree line when they heard a baying cry of gullan excitement.  “I found it, I found it!  Exactly as she said!”  Wurlgunn came in a little too low, smacked his legs against the rocky ground, flipped over and knocked himself out on an ice-pack.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Beth grumbled, slogging through the snow.  She lifted up his head, patted his cheeks, and waited for his eyes to flutter open.  “Lover?” she said sweetly.

“Found it,” he mumbled.

“Which way, oh hunter of my heart?”

He lifted his head out of her hands, looked left and right, then dropped down again. “Wait until the ground stops moving.”

“But the Great Spirit sees fit to break my wing,” Murgull muttered unkindly.  “Wurlgunn?  Oh, yes, he can fly, but keep old Murgull on the ground.”

“Hush,” Beth said without looking up.

Wurlgunn struggled to get upright, took two rolling steps towards Olivia, and stopped again.  He touched his head, his arm, Beth’s head, and then turned in a full circle.  “There,” he said confidently.  “Follow me.”  He threw himself back into the air.

Vorgullum marked the direction Wurlgunn took, then fixed Cheyenne with a considering stare.  “Look at me,” he said quietly.

She did, but half-flinching.

“I am going to leave,” he said.  “Do I have to kill you before I go?”

Cheyenne’s chin quivered and she clenched her jaw.  One tear slicked down over her cheek.  She shook her head.

“Doru, watch her.  Kill her if she so much as stands.”

The huge hunter at once stepped up and planted the butt of his spear in the ground before Cheyenne, glaring down at her with an expression that all but commanded her to stand up.  Cheyenne covered her face with her hands and began to cry in hoarse, furious sobs.

Vorgullum turned his back on her and reached out for Olivia.  He looked wary, as if expecting her to back away.  When she came to him, he closed his eyes as if in pain.  “Kodjunn,” he said.  “Come with me.  The rest of you, stay here.  Do not make a camp.  If the Great Spirit wills it, we will have true rock around us tonight.”  He lifted off, beating his wings hard against the frozen ground until he had enough lift to level out and soar away.

It wasn’t long before Olivia recognized the place, just as it had appeared to her in the dream.  The little valley between the divided mountain range, the waterfall and the lake, the miles and miles of forested foothills.  Most importantly, there was not a sign of civilization to be found, not as far as the eye could see.

“Where is the opening?” Vorgullum asked, circling over the highest peak.

She took her arm off his neck to point at the place she remembered standing with Urga, and he dropped out of the sky, landing almost exactly where she had stood.  And there it was, a rift in the rock several feet deep and wide, leading almost straight down.

Vorgullum set her down and peered cautiously down.  He sniffed the air, filtering the varied scents, and shook his head.  “I smell no gullan.”

“Then what are those?” Olivia asked.  She indicated ancient holes gouged out of the rock, worn down by time and season, but recognizable as gullan clawholds.

Beside them Wurlgunn had landed, painlessly this time.  Kodjunn circled the aerie once more, then dropped and crashed experimentally into the high wall of the opening.  He clung there expertly, looking down.

“So,” Vorgullum said.  “We should have a look, I suppose.”

“A good thing one of us came prepared,” Kodjunn added, reaching into his belt pouch and coming up with a flashlight on a cord.  He slung it over Olivia’s neck, and then turned it on.  “Down you go,” he said.  “If you get eaten by snow-snakes or something, remember to scream.”

“I think I can manage that,” Olivia agreed, pulling out her climbing spikes.

“You are not going down there alone,” Vorgullum growled, shooting daggers at Kodjunn with his eyes.

“No, Kodjunn is going with me.  If there are snow-snakes in there, better he gets eaten than you.”

“Thank you, Olivia.”

“That is not funny,” Vorgullum said quietly.  “You are carrying my son.”

Olivia sighed, turned to face him.  “Correct me if I am mistaken, my mate, but I am the only one on this ledge we are absolutely sure the Great Spirit wants to keep alive.”

“Someday, remind me to tell you what happens to those who challenge the spirits,” Vorgullum countered, but held his tongue while they advanced to the lip of the opening.

“You go first,” she told Kodjunn.  “I’ll use the holes you make.”

Kodjunn flicked his eyes in mute apology at Vorgullum, who shrugged unhappily, then began to lower himself into the chasm.  Olivia followed at a close distance, stopping every so often to shine her light into the shadows.

It was a long way down.  The rock blocked the wind out, and returned some feeling to Olivia’s hands after the first twenty feet, but then the temperature started dropping all on its own.  Olivia had never climbed so far before, and after several minutes her arms began to make mutters of protest.  She looked up and could no longer see light, although she knew the sun must be up.  She looked down, aiming her light past Kodjunn’s body, and could just make out a flat place at the bottom, made rocky with debris and fallen chunks of stone.  “That looks like the ground,” she said.

He was twenty feet further down than she, and could jump.  He landed hard, but picked himself up and peered around.  “There are tunnels here,” he announced.

She climbed as far down as his freshly-bored clawholds went, then dropped into his arms.

He did not immediately release her, and for a moment, it seemed as though he might speak.  At length, somewhat unwillingly, he put her down.  “Shall we see if we can find the commons?”

They walked down passages and through caverns made dusty with disuse.  Finally, they found a junction with a private passage leading to old gullan lairs.  They were virtually the same as the ones Olivia was accustomed to, attainable only through a narrow, vertical chute and opening on fairly small, sparsely furnished chambers.

“How long do you think it’s been empty?” Olivia asked.

He knelt by the pit and picked at the shreds of time-stiffened hide that padded it.  The old leathers flaked apart in his hands like pie crust.  “Long enough.  But they left, they didn’t die out. They took plenty of things with them.”

“Why would they leave?”

He shook his head.  “They might have been threatened by humans, or by famine or disease.  The game might have left them.  The water gone bad.  It might have been a thousand things, Olivia.  If we can find the sigru, perhaps we will find the story.”

They climbed out of the deserted lair and continued their search.  Olivia’s watch registered twenty minutes before they found the commons, not adjoined to a nice, wide mainway, but at the center of a series of winding passages like the spokes of a melted wheel.

“We are deep, deep in this mountain,” Kodjunn said admiringly.  “And look at this, Olivia.”  He indicated what appeared to be furrows crawling along the walls and parts of the high ceiling.  “This cavern was not always here.”

“They left wood in the fuel bin,” Olivia observed, aiming her flashlight at a deep trench that ran the length of the back wall.  “Wow, there’s even candles in the lamps!”

“We should start lighting them then, and send Wurlgunn and Vorgullum back to the others.”  Kodjunn walked with her for a few steps, then took her arm and stopped.

She watched him, shining her light at the ground between them.

He seemed to be searching for the right words to say.  At length, lacking them, he shook his head in frustration and started walking again.

So she said it for him.

“You still desire me.”

He stopped again, but wouldn’t face her.

“You know why that’s impossible.”

“You have no idea,” he breathed.  “You can’t know what it’s like to be near someone, to want someone so desperately that you can’t even hear your own name when it’s called.  I dream of you…in ways that I should only dream of the spirits I serve.  I breathe you, Olivia.  I can still put out my hand and feel just how your body filled it.”

“You have a mate, and so do I.”

“All those weeks I waited for Cheyenne,” he mused.  “Never knowing if she was ever going to let me touch her.  All that time, I thought of you, dreamed of you, ached for you.  When she let me lie with her, I thought it might be the same.  It wasn’t.”  Now he faced her.  “Will you meet with me in secret?”

Just like that, Olivia thought.  Just as though he were asking her to tea.  She honestly did not know how to answer.

The silence dragged on, and he dropped his gaze and shrugged.  “You have a mate I could never compete with, and would not, even if I could.  I have Cheyenne.”  He winced.  “But I will learn to be content with this.”  He started to move away from her and she followed, shining the light on his heels.

“Why?” she asked finally.  “Why me?  Amy is smarter.  Ellen is prettier.  Hell, lots of them are prettier, so why me?”

“Why?”  He kept walking and did not look at her.  “Because even in the worst of your pain, you took me in your arms and filled my empty heart.  It was the first time I ever felt as though, in loving a woman, I was loved.”

Now she felt guilty.

Sensing it, he added, “I never meant to have these feelings.  I tried to deny them, but they are always with me.  Sometimes, when I look at you, I see you through other eyes, in another place.  I see sand all around us, and at your back is the water—more water than I have ever seen in my life.  There are waves, much larger than the waves in a lake.  And you are kneeling there beside me, so beautiful.  You bend over me and you are smiling.”

He reached the wall and reached back for her.  She twined herself around him and he began to climb to daylight.  “Strange,” he murmured.  “But when I have this vision, I am more patient.  Almost as if I think that I will actually have that time with you someday.”

“Anything is possible,” Olivia conceded.  “But don’t expect it in the very near future.”

“No,” he agreed, working his way steadily upward.  “Too much has happened unexpectedly already.”  He climbed in silence for several seconds, and then added, “Still, there is a mystery that surrounds you, Olivia.  And I have been a part of that mystery.  I will be a part of it again.  I am certain of it.”

The trouble was, so was she.

BOOK II

THE GREAT SPIRIT

CHAPTER ONE

DARK MOUNTAIN

1

All morning, gullan came in from the cold to the slightly less-cold hub which would be the new commons.  The strong fliers were kept busy ferrying their flightless kin and other supplies as the day dragged on, while the rest of them slept.  Olivia and Kodjunn together collected ancient candles wherever they found them in the abandoned lairs and began to light the tunnels from the entry shaft to the commons, from the commons to the waterway, and anywhere else that Olivia thought might be useful.  At her direction, some of the other women—gullan and human together—began to clean up a little, lighting the many hearths in the commons, preparing hot broth for their exhausted people, and arranging what furs they had into sleeping spaces.  By nightfall, it had begun to feel at least a little like home.  She knew it was nightfall only because Doru came in with the last of them, saying, “You should see it out there, Vorgullum.  There’s not a spark to be seen but the stars in the sky.”

“No humans?”  Vorgullum asked, brows climbing.

“None.  I don’t know what we’ll do for rua,” Doru added heavily, fingering his spear with a brooding frown.

“Does that mean we can fly by day?” someone asked, and all the tribe looked at Vorgullum.

“I won’t answer until I better know this land,” he said at last.  “For now, no.”

There were murmurs, but what little disappointment came with them seemed forced.  Olivia supposed she could understand that.  There had been enough sudden changes.

“We will sleep here tonight,” Vorgullum said, looking around.  “Tomorrow is soon enough to claim our lairs.  Is there a place to put the women?” Vorgullum asked next, directing his question to Olivia and not to Horumn, she noticed.

“We found the kitchen,” she answered uncertainly.  She’d even lit the way there, thinking that it would make a good dumping ground for all their supplies until they’d managed to sort everything out.  “I didn’t explore much further than that.  I don’t know if there are any lairs around it—”

“It will do.  Horumn, settle your charges and see that the safe females are made available.  Have I any hunters able to fly?”

He had a few, all of them with human mates to feed, and Olivia doubted that was coincidence.

“And I want you to rest,” Vorgullum concluded, bumping his brow lightly against Olivia’s.

“I don’t think I can just sit around and do nothing yet.  I’ll help the women settle in, okay?”

He frowned, but gave her a reluctant nod.  “Don’t wander,” he told her.  “I don’t know this mountain.”

“I promise.”

He nodded again with greater confidence, then found a spear and raised it to Doru and the others.  “Our last hunt as the tribe of Hollow Mountain,” he called.  “When we return, we feast as hunters of…Dark Mountain!”

There were some cheers, but they were lackluster at best.  It had been a long journey and while sentiment might run high, they were all tired.  If Vorgullum was disappointed in his tribe’s reactions, he did not show it, but only made a gesture to gather his hunters and led them out.

“God, I hope they find something,” Amy remarked, watching them go from the shelter of Kurlun’s arm.  “It’ll be a hell of an omen if they don’t.”

“Hush, my mate.  Bad luck can find its own way in.  We don’t need to invite it.”

“Want to help out?” Olivia asked hopefully, offering Amy a flashlight.

Amy looked at it, then at her.  “Honey, you know I would—”

“It’s okay.”  Olivia lowered the light self-consciously, trying to smile.  “It’s been tough.”

“And Junior here is really doing some gymnastics tonight.  Maybe when he, she or it settles down.”

“Murgull?”  Olivia found the old gulla sitting by herself, her eyes shut as she rubbed restlessly at her left shoulder.  “Do you want to see where the women’s tunnels will be?”

“If I did, I would be there.”  Murgull opened her eyes to glare at her, then slid them shut again.  “I’ll see them soon enough, won’t I?  Little pest.  Leave old Murgull be.”

Olivia retreated, a little hurt, then went to Horumn, who certainly seemed to have her hands full trying to organize the many women, including weeping Bolga and half a dozen others much like her.  “Can I help?” she ventured.

Horumn’s face screwed up, but she didn’t spit.  Instead, she seized Victoria from the throng surrounding her and thrust her into Olivia’s arms.  “Take this.  No one walks alone, you maggots!  Find a friend!  If you have no friends, find an enemy!  Take all you can carry!  Go!  Yawa, help me!”

Victoria blinked at her slowly, without recognition.  Her eyes were glazed; her skin, death-cool and ghastly to touch.  Olivia had to resist the urge to wipe her hand after letting go of her.  Instead, she found a pack of supplies light enough for her to carry and headed out.

They were the first, and they were not immediately followed.  Olivia walked and Victoria plodded complacently beside her, arms dangling, staring.  It was awful.

“Where are we?” Victoria asked, after several minutes had passed in uncomfortable silence.  Even her voice was dull and dim.

“We’re in the new mountain,” Olivia told her, stomach knotting.

They walked.

“What…What happened to the old one?”

“We had to leave.”  Olivia looked at her despairingly.  “We’ve been flying for days, don’t you remember?”

“I thought I was dreaming.  I…dream.  Sometimes.”

“Didn’t you even notice the cold?”

“It’s always cold inside me,” Victoria said, and it was the last thing she said during the rest of that walk.

When they reached the honeycombed caverns at the end of the tunnel, Victoria found a bench and sat, staring slackly into the palms of her hands while Olivia cleared rusted pots from the cooking hearth.  She’d just gotten the first fire lit when Horumn arrived with Bolga firmly in her grip.  “So,” the old gulla said, giving the cavern a dour looking-over.  “Smaller than the last one.”

“This is just one of the cooking chambers,” Olivia pointed out.  “There are three others adjoining it.”

“Bah.  Leave that!  You and all your hairless kind are useless with fires.  If you want to help, stay out of my way.  Yawa! Find a place for the safe ones to do their rutting!  It’s a new home, new mountain, new world; there’s not a man out there who won’t want his prick gripped tonight.  Crugunn, stop your chattering and get to work!  Thurga, you and Rumm go back for the supplies and bring it all here.  If we gave them a chance, those stag-heads would take it all and leave us with nothing.”

“Yes, Eldest.”

“Yes, Eldest.  Furluu, Golgun, this way.  If you have that one, I have Chugg,” Yawa said, and took a flashlight to explore the nearest side-passages.

Olivia followed her with Victoria, trying not to stare too overtly.  Even after all this time, Olivia hadn’t had the opportunity to really speak with Yawa.  She rarely left the women’s tunnels, so their paths seldom had the chance to cross, but Olivia had often wanted to meet.  Yawa had something of a notorious reputation, one that was perhaps even more formidable than Olivia’s own.

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” she ventured as Yawa shone her flashlight through first this doorway and then that.

“Is it?” the gulla said indifferently.

Furluu and Golgun, the two ‘safe ones’ who could take care of themselves, exchanged glances first and then giggles, although they quieted when Yawa glanced back at them.

“I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“I’m sure you have,” said Yawa in a cold voice.

Olivia didn’t try again.  She could remember well enough Bundel telling her they said Yawa was all ice and claws, but she was good, and maybe it was true, but she sure wasn’t going out of her way to prove it.

They looked at two more caverns and suddenly Yawa stopped and swung around.  “All right,” she said tightly.  “What have you heard?”

Caught out, Olivia could only stammer at her.

“I thought so.”  Yawa started walking again, her jaw clenched with anger.  “Who was talking about me?”

“Bundel.”

Yawa stopped walking, so suddenly that Furluu bumped into her.  After a moment, she started again, now sending Olivia troubled, sidelong glances which continued off and on while they investigated several more caverns.  “This should do,” she said at last.

“It’s a kitchen!” Golgun protested.

“That’s right, it’s a kitchen,” Yawa shot back testily.  “You have running water to clean up in, a hearth of your own in a communal space, and six adjoining chambers—one for each of you and two to spare.  In fact, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time convincing Horumn to let you keep it, so why not stop complaining and start settling in?”

Chagrined, Golgun and Furluu took possession of the other two women and Yawa turned away.

“Wait, shouldn’t we help?”

Yawa wasn’t waiting for her, but just kept walking.  “It’s their place now, let them do it.”

It was either follow or stay and stare down Victoria while the other safe ones unpacked whatever supplies they needed to make the Red Light district of their new mountain more comfortable.

Olivia followed, running a little to catch up.

The walk was long, dark, and silent.

“Bundel told you about me.”

“He said you were a good person.”

Yawa grunted.  After a while, she glanced at her and said, “What else have you heard?”

“People don’t seem to like you much,” Olivia said.  “But no one talks about why not, if that’s what you mean.”

“Hm.”  Yawa walked on for a few more minutes in silence, and then abruptly said, “I had the red fever when I was in my first days.  It makes a she-child barren, if she survives it.”  She uttered a little grunting laugh.  “The old leader actually told my mother to put me with the other female children so that they would catch it as well.”

“Jesus!” Olivia gasped.  “And what if it killed them?”

“Dead or barren, still they make no new young.”  Yawa turned to spit.  “My mother cut her claws across his face for the asking and hid with me deep in the mountain until the fever was gone.  But the damage was in me.  I grew, knowing what must happen to me.  I was full of rage in those days.  I cursed the Great Spirit for making me this…this receptacle for the heat of an entire tribe.  I could feel them watching me every day that brought me closer to my first season and to the right to mate with me.  When it came on me, I asked old Murgull to help me.  And she did.”

Yawa laughed a little, as if still surprised after all these years.  “I was frightened of her my whole life.  That terrible face!  That terrible tongue!  But I had no female family living by then…and I did not know who else to ask.  I thought that she might kill me in a kind way, but instead she saw to it that the ritual of the Journey was performed before witnesses and got me out of the mountain unseen.  Females don’t go on Journeys.  It isn’t exactly forbidden, but it is unheard of all the same.  If the leader could have stopped me, I know he would have.  I was afraid that he would set his hunters after me, so I flew far to the south and lived alone beneath Urga’s moon.

“When I returned to Hollow Mountain, by the laws, I was a hunter, with the right to demand one gift of the old leader.  I demanded the right to stay forever out of the Eldest’s care.  That is why the males of the mountain do not like me,” she finished, tossing her short horns with a fierce smile.  “Because I refused to open myself to every goat-head with a scrap of meat to feed me.  The old leader gave me his fist and would have sent me to the Eldest anyway, but old Murgull put her hand on me and so he let me go.”

“That’s all she did?  Put her hand on you?”

“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?”

With obvious reluctance, Kodjunn turned away from the paintings and the role of storyteller, and helped Olivia deeper into the spiraling cave.

Olivia ran her eyes along the walls as she walked.  She couldn’t translate much was what she was seeing, but she could guess at partial meanings.  Here were pictures of different game animals (including, she saw with amusement, a herd of woolly mammoths) and methods of hunting them.  As the spiral tightened, they came to a map of the mountain, one that showed where the water collected and how it flowed through the different caves, where the waste water deposited, and where any openings were.  She wanted to stop, but Sudjummar coaxed her onward, saying, “After the mountain is marked, the stories of the tribe are told.  Here, Olivia!”

And there, apparently.  He and Kodjunn leaned in close to the wall, examining the paintings in silence.

Olivia wandered up ahead, shining her flashlight down the walls until there were no more images, only lengths of blank, smooth rock which terminated after thirty or fifty feet into a rounded point.  “Do you see anything interesting?” she called absently.

“A bad fire here,” Kodjunn replied.  “They lost the game and all the plants and had to get creative about what they were eating.  This could be good to know.”

“And there are humans around here somewhere,” Sudjummar added.  “Because one of their leaders made a point of forbidding his hunters to take their cattle or, oh this is interesting, or their women.”  He lit the next lantern and walked on, giving the walls cursory glances as he went, and stopped just before the paints did.  “Sigruum!” he called.  “Here we have it!”

Kodjunn and Olivia joined him and studied the walls.  Kodjunn’s brows rose slightly as he read what was shown.

“So,” Sudjummar said finally.  “At least it wasn’t disease.”

“What happened?” Olivia asked, looking in frustration from one to the other of them.  All she saw were shapes, worn by time to mere abstractions.

“It seems,” Sudjummar explained when Kodjunn remained quiet, “that one of the hunters chose to defy the old law about not killing human cattle.”

“Oh?”

“Or taking human women.”

Olivia blinked.  “Oh.”

“When he was discovered, he challenged his tovorak for leadership of the tribe and won.  Soon, there were many humans mates among them.  And many young born to them.”  He glanced at her, troubled.  “And they were well…at first.”

A faint chill touched her.  She told herself it was the air.  “But?”

“Some…illness took them,” Kodjunn said.  On the section of wall before him, a wingless woman raised her hands—and the death-grey lump between them—to the featureless sky.  Her mouth yawned open much wider than any human mouth could, reminding her unpleasantly of Mojo Woman, there at the end.  The flickering lamplight made her seem to sway and jabber, but the grey thing in her hands remained motionless.  Kodjunn started to touch the wall, covering the flaking image, then lowered his arm again.  “The children died.”

“All of them?”  That chill grew stronger, creeping along her spine like claws, but she managed to suppress the shiver they wanted to tickle out of her.  “But what could—Were they poisoned?”

“Who would poison a child?” Kodjunn asked, recoiling.

“Someone who did not want to see humans bearing them, I suppose,” Sudjummar answered, but he was frowning.  “In any event, the tribe decided it was a curse and that their new leader had brought it upon them.  They cut his wings and threw him from the highest peak, but the children kept dying.  They…You really don’t need to hear this, Olivia,” he finished, and caught a firm hold on her arm.

She dug in her heels and peered at the wall.  “Is that a pit full of bodies?”

He and Kodjunn exchanged glances.  “Yes.”

“Human bodies?”

Sudjummar bent his head, then looked at her.  “Desperate people do terrible things.”

“What happened to the rest of the tribe?” she asked.

“Would you live in the place where so many angry spirits walked?”

“You lived over the depths back in Hollow Mountain,” she pointed out.

“That doom came about because of our compassion,” Sudjummar countered.  “This one, from their cruelty.  In any event, they left.  And the Great Spirit would not lead us to a haunted place to build a new home.  Even if there are spirits—”  His gaze dropped to rest upon her rounded belly.  “—surely they will be freed when they see the good that has come of our joining.”

Olivia’s eyes had a way of straying back to that painted pit, filled with human figures drawn in death-grey hues.  “Surely.”

“Come out of here, Olivia.”  Sudjummar took her arm again, and this time, she let him.  “The sigruum will have much work to do restoring the archives before your story can be told.”

“Mine?”  She looked back at Kodjunn, startled, but he was lost in the wall once more.

“You are a part of our history now,” Sudjummar told her, leading her back out of the spiraling sigru.  “And when your Somurg is born and all who gather here see him strong and whole, you will be a greater part still.”

“I’m not certain I want to be great.”

He shrugged.  “That’s why they call it notoriety—”

“And not popularity,” they finished together.

He let go of her arm and put it around her shoulder instead, laughing.

She let him do that, too.

3

That night, as Olivia heaved herself up the chimney into her new lair, she found herself thinking over the idea of herself immortalized in gullan legend.  The idea was a little discomfiting, but not as disturbing as she supposed it should be if she were truly a modest woman.  She wondered how she would be drawn, and in what color.  As near as she could tell from the archives, black was used to indicate ordinary people and things; red was for importance, such as leaders and spirits; while death came in shades of grey.

“Perhaps a nice yellow,” she said to herself.

“What was that?”  Vorgullum looked up from the fire.

“Kodjunn and Sudjummar took me to the archives.”

His brows rose.  “They did?”

A curious reaction.  She hesitated in the act of loosening her robe’s ties.  “Wasn’t that all right?”

He had to think about it.  “I have no objection,” he said at last, slowly.  “You are my Olivia and you may go where you will in my mountain.  But I’ve never heard of a woman in the sigru.”

“Oh.”  Uncomfortable now, she fussed with her robe.

“What happened here, did you see?”

She told him briefly and without speculating on exactly what had happened to the human-born children.  He absorbed it all and at last nodded.

“Of course, we have no way of knowing what happened to them after that,” she finished.

“They flew south,” he replied without hesitation.  “And joined with those in Frozen Mountain, from which tribe our own divided in the long ago days.  And so we have earned the doom that came upon us.”  He sat and brooded over the fire, then surprised her with a short laugh.  “That is oddly comforting.”

“What makes you think—”

He shrugged, first with his wings, then with his shoulders.  “I heard the other half of that tale from the old leader, as no doubt he heard it from the leader before him.  I’m a little surprised Kodjunn said nothing, but knowing him as I do, I suspect he was only half in his own head, if it was the first time he had seen the sigruu.  He’ll dream it tonight, most likely.”  He glanced around at her and his head tipped.  “You look tired.”

“Not tired, only pregnant,” she assured him, and peeled off her robe, noting as she did so that in another month or so, she would have to find one in a larger size.  And not just around the middle, where Somurg slept, but around her swelling breasts as well.  Belly, breasts, ankles…God!  Everything was growing but her bladder.  Heaving a long-suffering sigh, she lowered herself into the pit and just lay there for a while.  Baby Somurg flipped himself over inside her and began to gear himself up for a long night of keeping Mom awake.

“See how healthy he is,” Vorgullum remarked, smiling with pride. He came into the pit and placed a hand over her belly, testing Somurg’s punches.  “He is so…alive!  How much longer before I can hold him?”

“Soon enough,” she replied, watching him with a smile.  “Just think, by this time next year, there will seven babies crying up the caves.”

“What a pleasant thought,” he said, and spooned up against her, leaving his hand where it could be punched at.  “Our Somurg will scream the loudest.”

“Of all the things to pick to be proud of,” she groaned, and he nipped at her shoulder.

“Amy will birth just behind you,” he continued.  “Sarabee after her.  Liz, Anita, and Ellen after that.  Cheyenne last of all.  That leaves Wurlgunn’s Beth, Doru’s Tobi, Gullnar’s Tina and who else?”

“Carla,” Olivia offered.  “And Karen and Sarah J.”

“Mmm.  Seven babies, even without them.  Seven in a single year.  Never in all my memory has there been so much new life among us.”  He nuzzled her neck, but it seemed a mechanical gesture.  When she rolled towards him she saw him staring meditatively towards the hearth.  “Seven,” he mused.

“And you could be happy with only six if you had to.”

He jerked his hand off her as if she’d caught fire, but his expression was not one of shock, but of shame.

She sat up, nodding.  “Tell me you didn’t drag Cheyenne all the way here just to decide to fling her off a new aerie.”

His chin lifted.  That old, familiar glint came coldly into his eye.  “I don’t trust her.”

“That’s not a good enough reason to kill someone.”

“I envy you at times, that you have such luxury to think so.”

“Vorgullum, please…”  God, she could not believe she was saying this.  “Think of healthy young.”

He nodded, gingerly eased his arm around her again.  “For the child, I can wait.  But you must have some chat with that beast.  Tell her there is a number on the moon-spans of life she has remaining if she does not earn my trust, and that number is seven.”  Then he set his jaw and said nothing more.

4

Olivia was with Murgull when she died, three weeks later.  Murgull had been complaining of aches for some time, but no worse, really, than she ever did. And then, one morning she simply never got out of bed.  Olivia waited in the women’s commons for her lessons until mid-day, then went to find her.

Murgull lay curled in her pit, breathing in hard, shallow pants.

“Murgull?” Olivia said, somewhat shrilly, and rushed to her.

“Oh,” Murgull grunted.  “You.  Look how big you are, like a boulder!”  She started to reach for her, then gasped and fell back.  “Too soon, always too soon.  You go on alone…little sister.”

“No!”  Olivia raced back to the mouth of the tunnel, shouting for help, for Horumn, for Tina, for anyone.

“Remember…your promise,” Murgull panted.  One hand rose, groped clumsily at her chest, and fell again.  “And if…If the child you bear is whole…you must show me…your little frog…your little Somurg.  You must hold him high…where I am sleeping.”

“Don’t talk like that!”  Olivia ran back past Murgull’s pit to fumble at potions and herbs. “What can I get?  Murgull, what can I get for you?”

“A grave,” Murgull groaned, and died.

Olivia shook her, called her, and finally slapped her.  Murgull’s last breath escaped in a ghastly rattling sigh, and then her rigid limbs slowly unlocked.  The air seemed to chill, as though in the passage of a soul.

Olivia clutched her arm, her own blunt fingernails sunk in the thinning hair.  Her lip quivered.  “Murgull?” she said hesitantly.

There are things I need to do, a cold part of her thought.

But she couldn’t leave.  It was tradition.  Someone had to stay with the dead, and make it ready for burial.

Olivia rose woodenly, stumbled to the entry room, and called down the hall from the doorway.  Murgull’s lair had been very close to the women’s commons.  It wasn’t long before someone answered nervously, just outside.

“Murgull is dead,” Olivia said.  “Murgull is dead, and I don’t know what to do.”

The sound of running feet was her only reply.  She sank down onto a bench to wait.  Minutes alone with the dead were hours, and finally Horumn came.  The old gulla did not look at Olivia, only went to Murgull and gazed at her.

“So,” Horumn said softly.  “So.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Olivia repeated, hearing the helpless voice of a lost child.

“You go, Olivia,” Horumn said.  “I will do what needs doing.  Tordurk is finding a grave for her.”

“I don’t want to leave her,” Olivia said, and then the tears came.  She stumbled towards the entry chute, but Horumn caught her arm and embraced her awkwardly around the great swell of her belly.

“Hush, human,” Horumn murmured.  “Old Murgull did not want to leave you, either.  Wanted to see your little frog born.  The Great Spirit had greater plans for her, and so she goes.  Be happy, Olivia.  A life of pain is over.”  She patted Olivia’s back, and then held her back at arm’s length.  “There are secret things I must do, alone with my cousin.  You go, Olivia.  Go, now.”

Olivia nodded, wiping at her wet eyes, and left them.  She wrapped her arms around her baby-hard body and staggered down the passage, sobbing inconsolably.

After a while, someone, she couldn’t tell who, came and put an arm around her.  She leaned into the warm body, and let herself be led away.  She heard voices, and one embrace was exchanged for another—the strong, familiar arms of Vorgullum.

“What happened?” he asked. “What hurts? Great Spirit, is it the child?”

“Murgull,” she managed.

Vorgullum’s grip tightened.  “Murgull is dead,” he said, and then said it again.  And again.

“I was there,” she wept.  “I saw her die.  I felt her soul go past me.  It was cold.”

He rocked her, silent.  All around them, talk was beginning, and there was fear more than sorrow in their voices.  Olivia cried herself empty, there in the commons, while the cavern filled with gullan.  No one said much, but eyes were moving continuously towards Olivia and away.

Tordurk returned just before dawn.  He was an older gulla, with patches of grey hair over his body and a twisted scar on his chest where he once claimed to have been stabbed by a drunken human in a brawl.  Slumped with exertion and haggard by grief, the scar stood out on him like a bolt of lightning.  He gazed at Olivia with hollow eyes for a moment before coming over.

“I knew her well in my youth,” he said.  “I always meant to do great things in her name.”  He spread his dirty hands, empty but for blisters, then lumbered off to meet with Horumn.

It was dusk again before the body could be moved.  No one had left the common cave.  If anyone slept, it was in fits and snatches caught against the wall.  Some spoke of Murgull’s youth, some of her wisdom and way with medicines, but no one said her name.  There was some laughter, some tears, but too few of either, Olivia thought.  She herself seemed to float in a void without feeling, scarcely aware of Vorgullum’s presence beside her.

When Horumn and Tordurk appeared, bearing the wrapped body between them, Olivia rose and started forward.

Vorgullum stopped her.

When she swung toward him, her heart breaking and full of challenge, she saw his eyes, and knew she would not be allowed at the burial.  She tried anyway.

Vorgullum listened patiently to all her rambling and half-coherent reasons why he had no right to make her stay, and then his hand on her shoulder tightened and eased her firmly back down and onto the bench.  She began to weep.  The other gullan in the commons gave them space, muttering uncomfortably amongst themselves, but Vorgullum only stood there, gripping her shoulder and waiting for her bitter tears to stop.

“I hate you for this,” she said before she could stop herself.  “You know I’m not going to run away, you know I’m not, and you’re keeping me here anyway.  I will never forgive you for this.”

She wasn’t being reasonable.  In the back of her mind, she knew it.  Everywhere else, she raged.

Vorgullum watched Murgull’s body carried away.  Even after it was gone, he continued to wait, until Tordurk and Horumn had surely made their labored way out of the mountain.  Only then did he release her.

“Some things I will not risk,” he said.  “Not even for your love.”

He left her.

5

Olivia went to the women’s tunnels and sat for hours as gullan workers passed back and forth before her staring eyes, doing the last of their labors before they were allowed to fall into their crowded beds.  They talked to each other, laughed with each other, just as if she weren’t there.  And maybe she wasn’t.  She felt locked in grief, drowned by it, and she wasn’t even sure it was all to do with Murgull.  ‘We will never be one of them,’ Tina had said.  They could try as hard as they liked, but they would always be prisoners.

Eventually, she was alone, with a single candle left burning as a token acknowledgment of her presence here, or perhaps it had been left for the old gulla female who sat across the women’s commons from her, guarding the tunnels from opportunistic males who might be tempted to take advantage of Horumn’s absence.

Vorgullum did not come to bring her home.

In the middle of that empty night, Horumn returned.  Olivia could hear the wet slide of her foot and the striking of her staff as she made her tired way across the cave, and then she heard it stop.

Silence.

“So,” said Horumn, and started walking again.  “Come with me.”

She went.

Horumn led her through the tunnels to wide room with a single, unoccupied pit at its center, one with three curved benches set around it in the shape of a horseshoe.  The pit had been prepared for sleeping with many thick furs and sleeping bags.  The benches kept a jug of water, a small stack of magazines, and a lantern within easy reach of the sleeper.  Apart from a few backpacks, some extra furs, and a pile of antlers at the far end of the room, there were no other furnishings.

“Is this where you live?” Olivia asked.

“Ha!”  Horumn dragged herself over to the lantern and lit it.  “It is where you live, for now.”

“Vorgullum doesn’t want me back?”

“Eh?”  Horumn peered at her over the flickering top of the lantern, then turned her head and spat. “You humans!  You whining, milk-mouthed humans!”

“He wouldn’t let me see Murgull buried.”

Horumn hooked her hand through the air and glared at her.  “The dead are still close,” she said.  “Do not call her by name.  She was cruel enough in life and death…death can change a soul.”  She grunted, looking warily around the empty cave, then took the lantern to a hook on the wall and hung it up. “Of course he didn’t let you go, fool.  The dead are hungry, the grave is cold, and your little son swims helpless below your heart.  Ha!  Your mate will let all you frogs run together when you stamp your foot, and abandon the home of his ancient fathers for your dreams, and pluck down the moon should you ask for it with tears on your naked face, but some things he will not risk.  Nor should he.”

Olivia looked at the floor, the ceiling, the unpainted walls.  “Where are we?” she asked at last.

“It is our birthing room.  You will stay here until your hour comes.  No more climbing up into a hunter’s lair.  It is time for you to rest.”

“Oh.”

With the added light of the lantern, she could see that what she had at first taken for antlers was actually some sort of chair, lashed together from dozens of carved wooden struts and poles.  Now that she was looking at it in the light of the room’s purpose, she could see how her legs were meant to go, propped up and wide apart on one of three sets of stirrups, or which of two armrests she might grip for leverage when she got ready to push.  There was even a second, smaller bench, little more than a footstool, nearby for the midwife to rest while the labor dragged on.  It was supposed to be Murgull sitting there.  She supposed now it would be Horumn.

“How many births have you assisted in?” Olivia asked, running her fingertips over the curved back of the chair.

“Many.”  Horumn shrugged, looking weary.  “Twelve I had of my own.  Nine are dead.  Tordurk is my eldest, now.”

She looked at the gulla closely.  “Tordurk…?”

“I fought with her over that,” Horumn admitted, seating herself heavily on one of the curved benches around the pit.  “And when she refused to release him, I fought with him.  Silly now, I suppose.  Such a bitter battle, and it divided us, all three.  I called her corpse-face, and she went weeping into the night.  Tordurk came to me and called himself orphan.  But she would not speak with him more, my words had done that much.  He refused to take another mate, I berated him for wasting his good years with a barren woman.  Stupid.  Pointless.  Not ten years later, all mates would be divided, all coupling forbidden.”

“I’m sorry.”

Horumn gazed into space for several seconds, then looked stonily over at Olivia.  “I was her friend, you see?  Her cousin.  I was supposed to have all her secrets.  But she was stubborn, refused to give me even the meaningless apology you throw about so eagerly.  She took my son and seemed to think that I should ask her pardon for it.  Ha.  She chose to live alone rather than bend her neck to me.  For years and years…until you came.

“How I hate you, Olivia,” Horumn said wearily.  “You removed me forever from her heart.”

Olivia looked away, returned her distracted stare to the birthing chair.  She could not bring herself to be angry now, but she knew she would be hearing those words for a long time to come.

“I am old,” Horumn muttered.  “Too old.  I never intended to live so long.  Had always planned to die in spite, and make that old bat beg forgiveness from my fat, dead body.  Even in death she is having the better of me.”

“You’re grieving,” Olivia said.  “So am I.”

“And we are alone.  The others—”  She flapped a hand as though waving off a foul stench.  “They will miss only her knowledge, her power.  They will not miss her, because they did not know her.  Even Tordurk did not know her, much as he thinks he did.  You and I have seen her black, withered heart and until you have seen that, you have not truly seen her.  But we are different, Olivia.  You will grieve for her and go on.  I will die of it, I think.”

“You don’t mean that, Horumn.”

“No?  Ha.”  She stared morosely at the birthing chair, then heaved herself upright and took up her walking stick.  “But you stay here now, Olivia.  Stay on your back and weep your tears.  Weep for me, if you can.  All my tears are gone.”  She limped off down the tunnel, leaving Olivia alone.

6

She stayed in the birthing room for five days, stubbornly observing the gullan rites of mourning even when no one else did, and on the morning of the sixth day, when the hide flap that sealed away her room from the rest of the women’s tunnels shifted aside, it was not Thurga or Crugunn to see if she was ready for a bowl of rabbit stew of a jug of tea, but Vorgullum.

“I didn’t know men were allowed back here,” she said after that first silence grew too heavy to hold up.

He came inside and let the hide flap drop behind him.  “They aren’t.  And Horumn is not so obedient that she will give me more than a moment, so let me speak.”

“I don’t hate you,” Olivia blurted and covered her eyes.  “I don’t.  That was a horrible thing to say.  You had your reasons and…and even if I didn’t agree with them, I should have respected you enough to obey you.  I’m sorry.”

“Olivia—”

“You’ve given me a lot of freedom even when I know it meant breaking your traditions.  I’m sure you’ve had to defend me more than once, and when the whole tribe was watching, when it really mattered, I yelled at you.”

“Would you let me speak?” he said, exasperated.

“Sorry.  Go ahead.”

He stood there, rubbing at the base of his horns and glaring at her.  “Well, now I don’t have anything left to say.”

“I could go apologize in front of everybody.”

“Everybody does not need to hear it,” said Vorgullum firmly, coming to kneel beside her in the pit.  “It’s enough that I did.  You are a good mate to me.”  He hesitated, then brushed the backs of his knuckles along her cheek.  “I’ve missed you.”

“I could come home with you,” she offered, but he was shaking his head by the second word.

“Your time is close and yours will be the first birth to this tribe in more than thirty years.  You will stay here, my Olivia, under Horumn’s eye.”

Thirty years.  Olivia looked up at him as he stroked her hair, and felt herself beginning to frown.  Thirty years?

“Vorgullum, how old are you?” she asked curiously.

“Fifty-three years come summer,” he replied.

She forgot she was pregnant and tried to sit up fast.  Pain at the sudden movement shot up her spine and wrapped her belly, so that she performed a kind of jerking curl instead.  “What?” she hissed through clenched teeth.

He had stopped petting her and gripped her shoulders instead, well on his way to panic.  “Are you hurt?  Is it the baby?”

She managed to shake her head and say again, “How old are you?”

“Fifty-three,” he said again, perplexed.

“You told me you were young!” she accused.  “I know you are.  I’ve seen old gullan!”

“I am young,” he answered, looking baffled.  Then a thought occurred to him and she could actually see it creeping in behind his eyes.  He drew back, his brows drawing thunderously together, and said, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-five,” she answered.

He leapt back, leapt, as from the thrust of a spear or the lunging claws of a wildcat.  “Great Spirit!” he gasped.  “How old is Beth?”

“Nineteen, I think.”

The fur on his neck and shoulders spiked out in shock and horror.  “Nineteen?” he thundered.  “Nineteen years?  Olivia, she’s a child!  Wurlgunn is mating with a child!  Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Nineteen isn’t a child!  How old was Murgull?” she countered.  “Two hundred?  Three?”

“Three, or so near as to make no difference, but she was the oldest in all the world.”  He hesitated.  “How long do humans live?”

“Ninety years, sometimes.”

They stared at each other.

“I had imagined a whole life with you,” he said, stunned.

Olivia hadn’t consciously imagined much beyond the birth of their son, but now she realized that she, too, had pictured growing old together in some way, not growing old alone while he stayed frozen in time.  “The others need to know this,” she said at last.  “I doubt anyone has thought to ask their mate how long gullan live.”

“But we’ve all seen humans,” Vorgullum was saying, almost to himself.  His eyes were huge, ringed with white.  “We’ve seen the books, we’ve seen every kind of human in those books.  They’re small when they’re young, and grey and wrinkled when they’re old.  We just assumed…”

“How long is childhood?  Will I die before my son is grown?”  She felt a kind of cold dread at the thought, and was relieved when he shook his head.

“He’ll wean before his first year is done, and walk by his second.  He should speak reasonably well before his third year begins, and learn how to keep himself clean before his fourth.  His wing-skin will begin to split at some point between his eighth and tenth year, and he’ll be ready for his first flight perhaps as young as fourteen.  Females enter their first season when they are as young as twenty-eight, but males can couple as early as their twenty-first year.”

So.  She would live to see her child grow, maybe even to have a mate and child of his own.

Unexpectedly, she found herself thinking of Kodjunn’s vision, and the Great Spirit’s promise that he would come for her in his flesh and lead her out on some great journey.  Where had her mate and child been in that revelation?

“I’m not going to think about this now,” she said slowly.  “But the others must be told, and as soon as possible.”  She drummed her fingers on her stomach, then said, “I’d better tell them myself.  I need to see how the others are doing, anyway.”

“Yes,” he agreed, and his gaze darkened.  “And I should have chat with mine.  Great Spirit, strengthen me.  I will have to catch Wurlgunn when he faints.”  He went, his head lowered as though he were going into battle.

Waddling over to the small commons of the women’s tunnels, Olivia located Thurga among the workers and asked her to bring all the humans to the birthing room.  The female gulla went without question, and returned after Olivia had settled herself on a bench to say that the humans were coming—all but Cheyenne, who didn’t want to ‘waste her time’ with Olivia, and Tobi, who was hunting.  Shortly thereafter, Horumn shuffled in to say that the human under her care refused to attend.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Olivia said when she heard this.

Horumn shrugged her sloped shoulders.  “It is so with this one.  She sits.  She eats.  She couples with them that come to her.  She does not look at us, does not come to us for chat during long dull hours of night.  They call her Umma, shadow, because she is not really there.  But it falls to me to keep her, and so I carry her message.  She will not come.”  Horumn turned on her clubfoot with difficulty and shambled off.

By that time, the first of the humans were already arriving, talking as they came and giggling nervously under their breath.  When they were all gathered, Olivia asked Thurga to leave, and tied her hide-flap shut for whatever protection against eavesdroppers that gave her.

Amy lowered herself onto a bench with a muffled groan, then tipped a bird-bright eye at Olivia and said, “What’s wrong now?”

“You’ll never guess what I just learned,” Olivia replied, and told them.

With only one exception, the collective humans were stunned.  That exception, of course, was Amy.  “Oh, I already knew,” she said breezily.  “See, I had my birthday in August and he came home and I was all crying and acting like an idiot.  He came over all concerned and wanted to know what was wrong and I was trying to explain about humans and birthdays in my considerably limited gullanese.”  Amy smiled a little.  “He went out that night and got me a present.  Gotta love the big guy.”

“What did he get you?” Beth asked, and immediately looked around, blushing.  “I mean, you know, I’m curious.”

“Three pound box of Godiva chocolates and a goose-down comforter for the pit.  Also an electric can-opener, but we can overlook that.  Anyway, the point is, we were talking and I asked him if gullan celebrated birthdays.  He said they marked them, but didn’t celebrate anything except the first year.  He said he was born in winter, and when winter rolled around, he made a point of telling me that he was one hundred sixty-two years old.”

A ripple of astonishment.

Beth, still curious apparently, asked, “Did you get him a present?”

Amy’s eyes sparkled evilly.  “Oh, you can say that.”

“I can’t believe ya’ll didn’t say something,” Anita said, sounding hurt.

“Honestly, it never occurred to me to think you didn’t know.”  She looked around at them with genuine bewilderment.  “And I still don’t think it matters much.  I mean, heck, it’s not like it affects us much.  I’d feel different if it meant I was going to be pregnant or nursing twice as long, but the ratio of human to gulla infantile development seems to be one to one-point-two for the first three years, except that they wean a whole lot faster, and for every year from about the third on to pre-pubescence—”

“Fascinating, Amy, now shut up,” Anita said, laughing.

“I’m just saying—”

“If you didn’t know your mate’s age, then it’s a good bet he doesn’t know yours, and Wurlgunn is going to freak,” Olivia added, glancing at Beth.

“Good point,” Amy agreed, blinking at Beth and some of the other younger humans.  “Their females don’t have their first season until they’re older than I am.  If you were a gulla, Beth, you might not even be fully fledged.”

“Robbing the cradle, huh?” Anita asked and winked at Beth, who blushed.  “You know, I think Murk and I might be about the same age.  That’ll be a comfort to him.  Still, my last season lasted near two days and let me tell you, what I wouldn’t give for a nice, sedate old man like yours, Amy.”

“Like my what?” Amy asked, and performed a flawless double-take as she absorbed Anita’s meaning.  She burst out laughing.  “Sedate old man?” she echoed, slapping a hand over her brow.  “Oh my God!  I’m going to tell him you said that!”

“Um, yeah,” Liz said, eyeing Amy warily but addressing Anita.  “My new lair is, like, right next to hers.  You could bottle his libido and put Viagra out of business.”

“Oh, he never had a chance,” Amy wheezed.  “Once he paired off with me, the poor dope was doomed.  And putting aside for the moment the truly inspiring stamina of my personal Tower of Power, nobody in this mountain would call Kurlun old to his face and get away without a good walloping.  He’s got at least fifty years to go before he slides into that category.  Right now, he’s just pleasantly matured.”

“Tower of Power?” Anita echoed, one eyebrow climbing.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass one way or the other,” Sarah B. interrupted.  “No offence, Amy, but most of those furballs aren’t tripping over themselves to bring us can openers.”

The laughter died.

“So he’s going to outlive me.  Whoopee.  I expected that from the start.  I know it’s hard to remember, but some of us are still here against our will.”  She got to her feet, one hand resting on her slightly swollen belly.  “And in five months, I’m going to give birth to something he put in me, and I’m going to have to do it alone because all I’ve got in place of a doctor is a former receptionist.”  Sarah B. looked once, bleakly, at Olivia. “No offence.”

“None taken.”

“So who cares how long they live?  Seriously.  There are real problems here, people.  Let’s not go making new ones up.  Okay?  Okay.”  She headed for the door, muttering under her breath.

That seemed to be the cue to break up.  The humans left more or less the way they came, in small groups, talking intently among themselves, until Olivia was left with a handful of pregnant women and Beth, who hung awkwardly back by the door.  They all stood around her, looking at her expectantly.  She looked back at them, unsure of what they wanted.

“Well,” Amy said slowly.  “Don’t you want to check me out?  Former receptionist beats nothing at all in my book.”

“Please,” Ellen agreed.  “I know it’s only been a week or so since the last time, but there have been some…changes.”

“It wasn’t exactly my specialty,” Tina said, coming forward, “but I know the basics of the baby biz.  I’m sure after all this time with Murgull, you could probably give me lessons, but between us, we’d ought to do all right.”

“Oh,” Olivia said, and looked around uncertainly.  “Okay.  Um.  Why don’t you have a seat, and I’ll use that room as a kind of examination room.  Tina, can you get us some lanterns?”

She took Amy back first, running her through the examinations that Murgull had taught her, to which Tina added one or two significant questions, and Amy proved an easy patient.  Her worst complaint was muscle cramps, and when all Olivia could think to prescribe was nettle-leaf tea, Tina had a new diet and exercises to recommend.  Even if Amy preferred to aim her questions at the receptionist instead of the Emergency Room resident, she seemed comfortable with the advice she received and that was what mattered.  She went away in a positive mood, and Anita came right in, just like a real doctor’s office.

“Have a seat,” said Tina, before Olivia could say anything.  “How are you feeling?”

Anita sat down, looking pale and a little tired, but her usual cheerful self for all that, complaining of nothing more than a mild, lingering cold and a bit of a stiff neck, and as Olivia was getting ready to trot out Murgull’s blend of raspberry tea and bloodbalm root, Tina bluntly said, “You’ve got an iron deficiency.  You eating your liver?”

Anita’s pretty China-doll face screwed up in a pucker.  “I hate liver.”

“Gee, that’s too bad, because now you’re going to eat a lot more of it.  You also need more liquids, and I want you to come by every day for a vitamin.”

“Oh come on!”  Anita looked imploringly at Olivia.

Olivia blinked at her and pointed at Tina.  “This is a doctor,” she said.

Anita went, grumbling and leaning on the wall, and while they waited for the next patient to come waddling in, Tina dropped onto the examining bench beside Olivia and gave her one of those frank, I-do-not-care-about-your-feelings stares that she was so good at.

“You’re a lot better at this than I thought you would be,” Tina said.

It wasn’t at all what Olivia had been expecting to hear.  “Um, thanks.”

“This medieval medicine thing scares the stuffing out of me.”  Tina leaned back and folded her arms, propping one heel up on the bench in an admirable display of flexibility.  “I don’t even know what the hell bloodbalm root is.  Anita might have a real name for it.  She knows a lot about herbs and gardens and all that.  Used to work in a plant nursery, she said.  Of course, the plants that grow here are all are different.  You might want to check and see if we’ve got any bloodbalm before we start prescribing it.”

“Murgull brought some, but yeah, I think after things settle down back at Hollow Mountain, we should try to transplant as much of the old garden as we can,” Olivia said tentatively, not at all certain just what a task like that might entail.  “I’m sure it won’t all grow, but some of it might.”

But Tina nodded.  “Good idea.  You’re not thinking about just going back to stay?”

“Vorgullum won’t.  I haven’t asked, but I know he won’t.  Even if he wasn’t so sure the Great Spirit wanted us here, this mountain is much more secluded.  He feels safer here.”

“Uh huh.  Look, I’ve been thinking. I know a lot of what Horumn knows, and you know a lot about what Murgull knew, and I think keeping it that way is such a bad idea I can’t even describe why.  We need to do some talking here—you, me, Horumn and Anita—and get on the same page with this holistic herb thing before we open up the Dark Mountain Community Clinic.”

“I agree.”

“And I want to minimize your part in that.”

To this, Olivia could say nothing.

“I don’t have any complaints with the way you’re doing things,” Tina went on, frowning only very slightly.  “This would be a whole lot easier to say if I did.  But the thing is, I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be the go-to girl when it comes to everyone’s health when you can’t give it your full attention.  You’ve got a job and it’s being Vorgullum’s mate.  Vorgullum’s pregnant mate, no less.”

“Hey now!”

“I know, I know.”  Tina laughed a little and shook her head.  “Can’t you just hear Gloria Steinem rolling over in her grave?”

“I don’t think she’s dead yet,” Olivia said, trying not to be hurt and failing miserably.

“My point is, I see you working around here.  I see you trying to do everything the gullan women do, putting yourself on display so that all us other humans will pick ourselves up and join in.  I see you talking to that man of yours, and talking him into some wild ideas I’m fairly damn sure he would never consider if you weren’t around, like putting a spear in Tobi’s hands.  And this business with Mojo Woman—”

“I don’t know what happened with her,” Olivia said quickly.

“I don’t care.  You did something.  Hell, I don’t care if you pulled a magic wand out of your ass and zapped her to death with it.  I really, really did not want the lady dead, but from everything I’ve heard, dead is what she needed to be.  So fine.  As far as I’m concerned, she needed to be dealt with and you did it.  Kudos to you.  I don’t care, I only bring it up because it’s one more thing that is going to distract you from doing the doctoring around here.”

“Hey—”

“You’ve been busy.  I know.  But Murgull wasn’t the first person to die after we got here, honey, she was the ninth.”

Olivia felt her mouth drop open.  “What?”

Tina merely shrugged and nodded.  “They’ve all been older and not in the best of shape, just exactly the sort of people you’d expect to be doing poorly anyway, and when you move as far away as we did, you’re going to run into a whole slew of new bacteria and new viruses that your body has no defense against.  I expected to see some casualties, is what I’m saying, but I also expected to see you come around and have a look at the rest of us once it started happening.  But you’ve been busy, and I’m sorry, but if people have to get their medicine without x-rays or blood tests or penicillin, they still deserve to get it without distractions!”

Liz peeked around the tunnel-mouth, rubbing her still-small stomach and chewing her lip, clearly unwilling to intrude.  Olivia managed a smile for her and held up her hand, fingers splayed.  Five more minutes.  I’m busy.

“I…I understand what you’re saying,” Olivia said, once Liz had ducked away.  “I hadn’t realized I was so…I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, and I don’t want to cut you out,” Tina told her.  “I’m just saying, me physician, you assistant, you know?”

Olivia nodded, and because that silent agreement seemed so pouty, dredged up enough goodwill to add, “I’m sure you’re better suited for it.”

“Better trained, anyway.  Amy says that doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference down here, but I say it does.  It matters whether you get antibiotics or a feather dipped in water which has reflected the image of the full moon, you know?  On a somewhat less catty note, it still matters whether your doctor washes her hands between patients.  You do, I’ve seen that, but did Murgull?”

“Sometimes,” Olivia said, knowing those times were few and far between, but compelled to protect the memory of her dead friend.

“Horumn doesn’t.  And none of these people wash their damn hands before they start cooking, let me tell you.  I have seen them rolling goat-manure into fuel logs and then jump right up and start hand-mixing acorn meal.  I’ve been doing all I can to teach these people about basic hygiene, but as long as they all consider you the head healer, all I get are patronizing smiles and poo-flavored bread.”  Tina gave her a long, assessing look, then let the other shoe drop.  “I can’t make you back off, obviously, but this is something we’ve all talked about.”

“You—?”  Olivia’s mouth worked a little.  She tried to laugh and failed.  “More secret meetings?”

Tina shrugged.  “Not with everyone.  Me and Tobi, Amy of course, and usually Beth, Anita and Sarah J.  Sometimes Liz and Ellen.  We took a vote.”

“Was it unanimous?” Olivia asked and immediately wondered why that mattered.  “Never mind.  You’re right, and I know you’re right.  And if you voted, that I have to respect that.  I’m not the boss of you.”

“Yes, you are.”  Tina said immediately and with a complete lack of rancor.  “And that’s fine.  We need someone in charge, someone we can trust to stand up for us, and you do that really well.  Tell you what, you stand me up and delegate me your representative in the healing arts tonight, and I can guarantee everybody washes their hands in the kitchen by tomorrow.  As for this doctor-thing, look, Murgull needed to take you in.  That was a big deal and it needed to be seen.  But we have to go beyond one woman who knows everything, or even two women.  We need a real clinic down here, and honey, you’ve got enough problems being magic.”

“I’m not!”

“Being pregnant, then.  I’m not trying to bust your chops here. I’m muscling you out and I know it, but I’m only doing it because it’s the right thing to do.  It’s nothing personal.”  She made a face as soon as the words left her mouth and stalked a few steps away, muttering to herself.  When she reached the wall, she swung around and came back, her expression set and determined, but chagrined.  “It’s always personal when people say stuff like that, but not this time, I swear.  I need you to do what you’re doing around here, and even if I didn’t, I still like you.”

“Thanks.”

Tina watched her critically.  “So we’re good?”

“We’re good.”  Olivia nodded towards Liz, still hovering in the doorway.  “Your next patient, Doctor.”

Tina backed up, frowning, then turned around and gave Liz a beckoning, impatient wave.

“A clinic,” Olivia said, testing the idea.  “Wow.”

“It’s ambitious, I know, but I really think it needs to happen.  If nothing else, it’ll give some of the older gullan a place to work where experience means more than how fast they can move or how much they can carry.  I have some ideas for how to set it up, I just need you to convince Vorgullum to let me do it.  Have a seat, Liz.  How are you feeling?”

Liz complained she was still morning-sick, to the point where she often went all day without being able to hold anything down.  “And as miserable as that makes me,” she said waspishly, “I still have to deal with Gormuck wanting to know if he can do anything to help.  I told him he had his chance to help and he knocked me up anyway!”  She rolled her eyes contemptuously.  “And he burst into tears.  Can you believe it?  I spent the whole night hunched over a bucket, puking up apologies.  Big jerk.”

“Raspberry mint tea,” said Olivia.  “In little sips all day.  Tell Gormuck you need it.  Running back and forth to the women’s tunnels for tea will make him feel like he’s doing something useful.”

“Tea is good, but severe nausea can sometimes be related to low blood sugar,” Tina added critically.  “Tell him he also needs to keep you stocked with little snacks.  Christ, I wish we had a glucometer,” she muttered.

“Little snacks?” Liz groaned, clapping both hands over her face.  “If I have to eat one more giant hunk of greasy meat—”

“No, no, think crackers or…You know, let’s go talk to Horumn about what she can put together in terms of a biscuit and then we’ll go see your man together, okay?  Ellen’s still waiting out here, Olivia,” Tina called, walking Liz out.  “You can handle her without me, right?”

Just to let her know where she stood.  Olivia smiled crookedly.  “Sure.”

Tina gave her the other half of that smile.  I know, I know, those matter-of-fact eyes said.  But it has to happen.  Me physician.  You assistant.

And she did have a lot on her plate.  Olivia gave her a goodbye wave that turned into a hello for Ellen.  “It’s nice to see you,” she said.

“Oh, I’ve been around, but I know how it is.  Settling in and…and all that.”  She shifted on the bench to allow Olivia to begin the examination.  “I’m doing all right, I think, but I did want to ask about stretch marks? Not that I’m going to be in a bikini anytime soon, but Mudmar already thinks I’m ugly as sin on Sunday, and now he says I’m coming up ‘stripey’.”

Olivia looked up from Ellen’s belly in honest surprise.  “He thinks you’re ugly?”

Ellen laughed, actually reaching out to pat Olivia’s head as if she were a dog that had just performed a trick.  “God, you’re sweet.  Yes, he thinks I’m ugly.  Still.  You know, I used to model…sort of off-off-off-media.   Shots of me from the hips down in Bayer’s Blue Jeans, and shots of me from the neck up for Oxy Extra-Medicated.  The closest I ever came to real celebrity was being elected Little Miss Cherry in the Sandal County Fruit Festival.”  She shook her head, smiling over Olivia’s shoulder at the far wall.  “But Mudmar still thinks I’m little and clammy and bald…and flat-faced.  I never thought I’d meet a man who wanted me to have a bigger nose.”

“That’s…I mean…I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, the good news is, he thinks you’re ugly, too.”  Ellen patted her head again and then stood up and smoothed down her loose-fitting flannel shirt.  “I hate feeling so shallow, but if he’s going to cheat on me, at least he’s consistent about his standards.”

“Is he?” Olivia asked, struggling to rise to her feet.  “Cheating on you?”

“Well, perhaps that was a poor choice of words.  Yes, he’s got a girl on the side.  The same girl he’s had for about fifty years, I guess, since he said he’s been meeting her in secret since he was fledged and now I have a pretty good idea of just how long that is.  In a way, he’s cheating on her with me.  I don’t mind.  He loves her.  Imagine not being able to live with the person you love.  And he’s very open about things with me.  He says that if I want to be with another man after the baby is born, he won’t stop me, provided I take precautions.  We’re very civil about our infidelities…we’re practically British.”  Ellen waited until Olivia had settled herself on the examination bench.  “Do you need to catch your breath?  I could take you back to your room.”

“I can find my way.  I’m okay, really,” Olivia assured the other, smiling.  “I just need to sit here a while and count my blessings after listening to all those troubles.  All I have is a sore back and a tiny bladder.”

“Well…if you’re sure.”  Ellen stepped back and looked uncertain.

“I’m sure.  Scoot.”  Olivia chuckled under her breath.  “Practically British,” she repeated, shaking her head.

Ellen smiled.  “Duruna is going to move in with us pretty soon, I think.  I invited her.  To help me with the baby, as an excuse.  How British is that?”

“Are you done?” a timid voice called.  “It’s me, Beth.”

Ellen and Olivia exchanged farewells, and then Ellen retreated, nodding at Beth as she slipped sideways through the narrow doorway.  Beth stood awkwardly on one leg, rubbing her foot against the back of her knee and performing curious little washing movements with her hands that made her look, in the uneven lighting, a little like a raccoon.

“Come in, Beth,” Olivia began, and motioned her towards the bench, feeling only a weary sort of gratitude that, whatever this problem was, it couldn’t have anything to do with a baby at least.  “Can I help you?”

“I hope so.”  Beth sat down and clasped Olivia’s hands with a look of such wide-eyed longing that she appeared more like a child of twelve than the woman she was now.  “Make me pregnant!”

7

“What do you mean, make you pregnant?” Olivia echoed, aghast.  “Who do you think I am?”

“Please, Olivia!” Beth urged, squeezing her hands to the point of pain.  “Please, I’ll do anything you say!”

Olivia forced herself to calm down, and when she spoke again, it was with gentleness.  “It’s not a matter of doing what I say, Beth.  You told me yourself you couldn’t.”

Beth dropped her gaze, and a moment later, she released her grip on Olivia and folded her hands in her lap.  “Because of the abortion,” she agreed.  She looked up again, her eyes huge and hopeful.  “But you could help me, maybe?  You could use your magic powers.”

Olivia wanted to laugh, and it was only by the fiercest of internal battles that she managed not to do so.  “I don’t have any magic powers,” she said, when she could trust herself to speak.  “I keep making the most ridiculous crap up, and it keeps coming true, but I swear I’m not doing anything.”

“What about the dream you had?” Beth asked.  “That was magic.”

“It can’t be magic if you don’t mean to do it,” Olivia insisted.

Beth’s whole body seemed to crumple, starting with her face.  “You won’t help me,” she said in a quavery voice.

“I don’t…oh hell,” she muttered, and sat down beside her.  “Tell me about the abortion.  Maybe it wasn’t so bad as you thought.”

Beth gave her a brief glance that told Olivia at once that it had been exactly as bad as she thought.  She fiddled with her hands for a short time, and tensely began, “I was thirteen, and a junior counselor at summer camp for little kids.  Jim was one of the real counselors.  He was twenty-eight.”

Beth paused and slid a glance her way, scouting for disapproval.  Olivia frowned, but said nothing.  Beth relaxed minutely and continued.

“We had sex a lot.  Every night of camp, and sometimes in the middle of the day, if we had the chance.  It hurt at first, but he told me it would, and then it got better and I liked it.  Two weeks later, the little-kid camp closed and I went home.  I realized I was pregnant when I started throwing up a lot.  I told my mom I had the flu, and she didn’t suspect anything.  I was afraid to say anything to anyone, and I didn’t even know how to contact Jim.

“Then my birthday came, and he called me.  I guess he got my number from the camp files.  He said he had a present for me, and he wanted me to sneak out and meet him.  So I did.  After my party, I knocked the screen out of my window and climbed out.  I ran about three blocks away and he picked me up and took me back to his place.  His present was some sex stuff, and he tried it out on me and took a lot of pictures.

“When he was done, and before he took me home, I told him I had skipped my period.  I was afraid that he would say he wasn’t the father, or just throw me out, but he listened to me and said not to worry.  He drove down to the all-night supermarket and got a pregnancy test.  It was positive.  I started to panic, but he said he would fix things.

“Three weeks after that, he came to my house and introduced himself to my mom and dad.  He said I had been so helpful during summer camp that he wanted me back to help with the fall camps.  He had brochures and everything.  My mom and dad agreed to let me go.  I packed my camp stuff and they drove me to the bus station.  I took the bus one block and got off.  He was there.  He took me to his house.

“He gave me a leather kit like you can buy in craft stores, the kind where you make your own moccasins?  He told me to put it together, and then he made some phone calls.  That night, he woke me up and put me in the car.  He never told me where we were going or what was going to happen.  He took me to a building.  Another man brought me into a little room and strapped me down to a table.  He gave me a shot.  I was scared and crying, because now I realized what was going to happen.

“Then he brought out a machine, like a vacuum cleaner with a…a roto-tiller on the end.  He stuck it up inside me and started moving it around.  It hurt.  I was screaming and struggling, and he was swearing at me and slapping at me, and finally Jim grabbed my hips and pinned me down.  All this blood came out, and it just kept coming out.

“The doctor stuck a towel between my legs, and Jim picked me up and carried me back out to the car.  I cried all the way to his house.  I bled all the way, too.  That night, I had the most painful cramps I’ve ever had in my life.  I was screaming and rolling around for hours.  I bled all over everything, and Jim stood there and smoked and watched me, looking all sweaty and scared.  Finally, the blood stopped.

“Three days later, he took me back to the doctor.  The doctor shoved a little flashlight up me and looked around.  He said, ‘It’s like the craters of the fucking moon up there.’”  Beth grew quiet, staring off into the wall.  “I don’t remember much, really, but I remember him saying that.  And the way he said it.  Kinda laughing a little, you know?  Like it was…funny.”

“Beth—”

“So Jim took me back to his house.  I kept crying and couldn’t stop, and finally he hit me.  Then he got all sorry, and apologized about everything, and then he put me in bed and did some sex to me.  He kept telling me that it was fine now, that I’d never have to worry about getting caught again.”  Beth stopped and it took a few seconds for Olivia to realize the story was done.

“You never told your parents?” she asked.

Beth shook her head.  “I went home with my new moccasins and said I had fun.  I never saw Jim again and I never went back to camp.”

“But you never saw a real doctor, either?”

“What was the point?”  Beth ran her hands through her hair and sighed.  “Olivia,” she said hesitantly.  “I didn’t ever plan to be here, but now that I am, it’s like God gave me a second chance.  Wurlgunn is—”  She uttered a high, incredulous peal of laughter.  “He’s the most amazing man I’ve ever met.  He’s not too bright and he’s so clumsy, but he loves me so mu-uh-uch.”  She folded into tears, still trying to speak.  “I used to think he was a monster.  I thought he was ugly.  Now I think he’s beautiful.  And he thinks I’m beautiful.  Me!  If Vorgullum opened up the mountain tonight and told me I could go home, I would still want to be with him and I want to have his babies.  Please!”

“I just don’t know what you think I’m going to do.”

“Maybe you can’t do anything.”  Beth knuckled at her eyes and looked at her hopefully.  “But I know that no one else can.  So I thought that, if you tried, maybe something would happen.  If nothing does, well, I’m no worse off than before.  I just figured, you know, what could it hurt?”

Olivia closed her eyes briefly, but took Beth’s hand.  “I’ll try, okay?  But nothing’s going to happen.  I’m not magic.”

“Sometimes you are,” Beth said, so trustingly that Olivia found it difficult to meet her eyes.  She sat on the bench beside Olivia and closed her eyes, waiting, holding Olivia’s hands to her stomach.

Oh Jeez.  I don’t know what I’m doing, Olivia thought despairingly.  She didn’t want to simply fake it, not at the expense of Beth’s faith, as misplaced as it may be.  Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to recall just how it had felt to be suffused with power, as she had been when she confronted Mojo Woman, but there was nothing.  Nothing.

Great Spirit, Olivia thought, afraid to say it out loud, in case nothing happened.  Or in case something did.  Great Spirit, I know I’m not magic, but if you heard me before, please hear me now.  Please.

No reply, not even in her head.

After several minutes of silence, Olivia got ready to tell Beth to forget it and go home.  Despite the lanterns set around them, the cavern had become almost brutally cold, and Olivia could feel her skin prickling with gooseflesh.  She started to say something…and couldn’t.  Her breath continued to blow easily in and out of her lungs, and surely her heart continued its steady beat, but the rest of her was locked into place.  She couldn’t move.

“Behold me.”

Olivia’s eyes wrenched open and saw the winged woman of moonlight and stars, looking lean and strong despite an obvious pregnancy near to term.  She tried to gasp and couldn’t, tried to flinch back and couldn’t, tried to give trusting Beth some kind of warning and could only sit there silently as the Great Mother of the Moon gazed indifferently down at them.

Not a hallucination.  Not a dream.  This was happening.  This was Urga.

“My mate sends me,” Urga said.  “What do you require?”

Olivia cut her eyes at Beth, but Beth’s eyes were closed and her features strained with concentration.  She wants a baby, Olivia thought, doing her best to make those thoughts clear.

Urga looked at Beth.  She came forward without walking, floating like the moon across the sky.  She reached down, a vaguely finger-like growth protruding from the meaty lump of her hand, and touched Beth’s flat stomach.

Beth jerked, gasping, then cried, “I felt that, Olivia!  You’re doing it!”

“She is cold inside,” Urga observed.  “Jagged as an empty chasm.  There can be no child for this woman.”

It was wrongly done, Olivia protested.

Urga smiled at her. It was not a comforting sight.  “It is the way of things for evil to be done to those who do not deserve it.  If not for wickedness in the world, of what value would virtue be?”

Without miracles, Olivia countered, who would have hope?  Urga’s smile seemed to slip, and Olivia took advantage of the indecision.  This woman has faith in me, that I will somehow be able to restore her.  I know I don’t have that power, but I believe that you do.  Please, Urga, all she wants is to be able to follow your example, to be a faithful mate and a devoted mother.

“My example,” Urga echoed, still so cool, so far removed from the things she said.  “I have no interest in the desires of Bahgree’s children.  Let her strike bargains with you.  Let her fill your wombs.”

You made her mortal, Olivia argued.  She’s long dead now.

“Nothing born of power dies forever,” Urga countered, and threw Beth an expression of extremely mild irritation.  “But why should I concern myself with this human?  The spawn of my ancient enemy are none of my affair.  When she is cured of her injuries, what is to prevent her from inciting her fellows to beg me for favors?”

She won’t know that it was you at all, Olivia replied, and could not quite contain her exasperation with Beth and the whole Olivia-the-Great routine.  She’ll blame it all on me, and I’ll have to deal with her fellows and their favors.

Urga actually seemed to consider that.  “So.  It is not this woman’s plea at all, but your own?”

Yes, Olivia told her.  If you can do this, if you can help her, then that’s my plea.  Please help her, Urga.

Urga’s empty eyes narrowed.  Her lipless mouth curled in an awful, clay-like smile.  It was a terrible expression, terrible because it was cold and loveless and somehow full of scorn.  “Then I may not refuse.  So be it.”

The brilliant aura that surrounded Urga began to flow along her body, collecting in her fingertips.  The light grew until Olivia had to close her eyes, and even then, the light penetrated her mind and turned it all to cold, white pain.

Olivia heard Beth let out an ear-splitting scream and she opened her eyes in fear.  Urga’s hands were inside Beth, and the light was flooding off her body, filling Beth from within.  Beth’s skin began to glow faintly, pulsing with the beating of her heart.  Her head was flung back and her nails dug little moons in Olivia’s hands.  On her face was an look of purest rapture.

“What damage was done here?” Urga wondered to herself.  “I feel ended life.  I feel the terror of a child and the pain of the child she carried.”

Can she be healed? Olivia asked uneasily.  Urga’s words had been spoken with absent-minded interest, not with any real depth of emotion, and even now she seemed only to be standing idly by to watch Beth teem with living light.

“All things are within my power that come of woman’s creation.”  Urga removed her hands from Beth’s body, and the blonde slumped over with her head in Olivia’s lap.  “Such cruelty,” she said absently.  “Not unexpected from one of your treacherous kind.”  Urga paused, and then touched her hand to Olivia’s brow.  “Daughter of Bahgree, my mate and master desires you to be happy, and as it pleases me to see him pleased, I have done as you requested.  This woman is healed and shall conceive.”

Olivia sent her thanks, but Urga only dropped her hand to her side, unaffected.

“You are mortal,” the apparition said simply.  “Your time upon this world is swift and forgettable.  You are not worth my jealousy for all that my eternal mate yearns to have you clasped in passion.  Yet his will is great and I must obey.  Therefore, know this: He has commanded me bear his son through you, and so it shall be.  My hand shall be upon you the night you bring forth.”  And with that, Urga stepped back and slowly faded away.

Olivia felt the curious block that had prevented her from speech and movement break, and she realized that Beth was hugging her and crying with happiness.  She patted the woman awkwardly as Beth alternately praised and thanked her.

“Go home, Beth,” she said at last, trying to peel the small blonde off her.  “Go home and be with Wurlgunn.”

Beth stumbled up, took a lantern, started to thank her again, and then fairly flew from the room.

Olivia gathered the other lights and went back to her birthing chamber, exhausted and depressed.  Again, the threat of destiny, of forces beyond her control loomed over her like a sword suspended by a thread.  By this time tomorrow, the whole tribe would think that she had healed Beth’s barrenness.

Just what she needed, more worship to take up her time while she worried about the Great Spirit and his clasp of passion.

8

The females of the tribe took turns staying with Olivia during the last few days of pregnancy.  No males were to be allowed near until after the baby had been born, and then, only Vorgullum would be permitted to see him.  The tribe as a whole would not be able to view either mother or child until three nights had passed, a tradition born of too many years when three days meant the difference between knowing a child might live and giving it time to die.

Olivia was bored, hurt, and so tired she sometimes fell asleep while eating.  She rarely moved out of bed except when her bladder demanded it, and even then she only moved just as far as the washroom canal.  She began to have what Tina too-callously dismissed as Braxton Hicks contractions (“Nothing to worry about,” she kept saying, just like Olivia’s uterus tying itself in a pretzel knot every ten minutes all damn day for three days running was on her list of medical complaints just under stubbing a toe), and then to leak embarrassingly from her breasts.  Any flicker of joy she had ever managed to feel for her impending motherhood collapsed under the combined weight of leg cramps, backaches, varicose veins and bone-leaden exhaustion, until all she wanted in the wide world was for this to be over.

The gullan staying with her offered some relief.  They would rub her back and legs, wipe her down with damp cloths, and try to keep her engaged with light-hearted stories of what was going on elsewhere in the mountain, but Olivia found it increasingly difficult to respond to them.  She floated in a sea of numbing weariness, with nothing to do but wait to go into labor, and yet, when it finally happened, it still managed to come as a surprise.

Of course, she’d been having pains all morning—horrible, watery ones that seemed to wrap around her entire abdomen—but she hadn’t thought of them as contractions, because they didn’t last very long and they were awfully irregular. And Somurg had dropped heavily into her pelvic girdle a week ago (“That’ll make it easier for you to catch your breath, huh?” said Tina, as Olivia’s bladder was flattened under Somurg’s enormous head), so she knew she was coming to the end of it.  All the same, her first thought when she felt the warm gush of waters flood out between her thighs was that she’d gone and wet the bed for the first time since she’d turned six.

“Crugunn!” she groaned, trying to heave herself up and out of the pit.  “I hate to do this to you, but I’ve made a mess.”

Crugunn, heating water at the hearth for yet another massage and sponge-bath, came at once to help her stand, then bent and scooped up the soiled bedding, taking a deep and astoundingly cheerful sniff prior to taking it away.

And then she stopped.

Sniffed again.

Crugunn gave the bedding an unaimed toss towards the wall and took Olivia firmly by the arm before she could finish staggering over to the nearest bench.  “Lie down,” she said, still cheerfully.  “Your time has come.  Thurga, find Tina!”

“It has?” Olivia said, feeling stupid as yet another cramp took her in its fist and squeezed.  She let Crugunn put her back to bed, her own hands pressed over the bulge at her belly, unable to believe it was really happening.  She didn’t feel any different.  “But…I thought there would be some sort of warning…”

“Like your water breaking?” Tina asked, striding into the room with a polka-dotted backpack full of her medical things in one hand and a flashlight in the other.  Horumn followed her.  “This is how it’s going to be,” Tina began as the ancient gulla lowered herself with an arthritic grunt to her knees in Olivia’s pit.  “Horumn’s going to handle the actual delivery while I try to keep things clean and organized and learn something.  Crugunn, your job is to stand right there and make sure no one comes in or out unless I ask for something.  Thurga, you get to do my running around if I need something, got it?”

“Yes, healer!”

“Yes, healer!”

“Yes, Tina,” Horumn grumbled.  Her hands on Olivia’s body were strong and gentle, guiding cushions and furs into place behind her to help her sit up, supporting her hips as brand new sheets—fresh from their plastic packaging—were slid underneath her, and moving with confidence and unerring skill to massage the worst of the pain away when the contraction finally eased.  “Are you well, Urgarna?”

“Well?” Olivia echoed, suddenly on the verge of panic and tears.  “I’ve never done this before, how would I know if I’m well?  I’m not ready for this.”

“Bah, you whining humans,” Horumn sneered, and shone Tina’s flashlight between her open thighs.  “Twelve times I’ve gone to the birthing bench and I think you are well, eh?  So.  Try to rest.  You have all day yet.”

Rumm stuck her head in the cavern and said, “Vorgullum is at the entry.  He says he will come to see his mate.”

“No,” Horumn said.  “He will not.”

Rumm went away.  Horumn helped Olivia roll onto her side and began to rub her back and legs as Tina pinched Olivia’s wrist between her fingers and studied her watch.  Rumm returned.

“Vorgullum is at the entry,” she said again, sounding amused.  “He says there is no iron door in this mountain and he will see his mate.”

“He will not,” Horumn said, still calm.  “Take a double handful of women and block the tunnel.”

“He is a large male,” Rumm said, looking dubious.

“Then arm yourselves,” said Tina, still watching her wrist.  “Find Tobi.  That should hold him off.”

Rumm nodded reluctantly and withdrew.

Horumn hushed Olivia as she began moaning Vorgullum’s name miserably.  “We must do this thing, Good Mother, we must.  If, Great Spirit let it not be so, you or the baby were to die this night, would you wish your mate to remember you screaming and bleeding in his arms?”

Olivia shuddered and tried to twist away from the awful image.

Horumn patted her and wiped her face.  “It is because you care for him that you must not allow him to come near.  Now put it from your mind, Olivia Urgarna.  Focus your thoughts on your child.  Send him thoughts of welcome to this world.”

Olivia looked at her watch whenever one of the early, watery contractions ebbed through her.  For the next two hours, they came closer together, but still at irregular intervals.  Then they started coming five minutes apart, and getting stronger.  At seven in the evening, Olivia was crying out with pain every three minutes, and Horumn was rubbing her belly and shoulders constantly.

“All righty!”  Tina gave her thighs a slap and stood up.  “I think it’s showtime.  Ladies, let’s get her to the birthing bench.”

Olivia felt strong hands on either side of her lifting her off her bed and setting her on her feet.  She walked through a thick fog to the bench and was lifted into it.  Her legs came apart and were fit in the supports.  There was a cushion at her back, warm cloths wiping the sweat and tears from her face.  She was aware of all these things in the most detached way; the pain had all of her.

“She is ready,” she heard Horumn say.  “You must be strong, Good Mother.  The pain will increase.”

For a while, Olivia was all right.  The labor was more intense, the contractions longer, but she thought she was coping with it rather well.  Thurga came to rub her shoulders and her soft, leathery hands felt good.  Her deep, soothing voice sang in her ear and gave her something besides pain to dwell on, and that was good, too.

But hours went by and the pain just kept coming, and no matter how hard Olivia pushed, nothing seemed to be happening.  Pain, God, pain swallowing her up like a python swallowing a goat—first crushing and then consuming her.  At one  particularly vicious spasm, Olivia screamed for two full minutes, insensible.  As the pain finally eased and her voice faded in the air, she realized she could hear Vorgullum howling for her, far back in the caverns.

“Control yourself, damn you!” Horumn snapped.  “The more you fight, the longer this will last.  The first child is always difficult.  You must gather your strength, remain calm.”

And that was almost reassuring.  Almost…if not for the fact that she could also hear Tina and her matter-of-fact mutters:  “This is taking way too long.  Thurga, you better get the knives ready.”

“Behold me, mortal.”

She turned her head and saw a faintly glowing figure in the corner of the crowded cave.  “Urga!” she cried.

The light coalesced into Urga’s now familiar form, swollen thick with her own child.  “It is time.” she said, and came gliding across the floor.  She paused when she reached the pit, a faint frown touching at her face.  “What are you doing?”

Olivia’s answer was another rusty shriek as her entire lower body tried to rip itself inside-out.

Urga’s lips curved in the very smallest of smiles, but her eyes remained cold and dead as distant stars.  “Foolish woman.  Did I not say you were to have the birthing of my son?  How could you think to bear him without me?”

“Then help me!  Please!  Help me!” Olivia screamed, only dimly aware of what startled and disturbed effect her cries had upon the others in the room.

“Help you?  Not for all the pleas in the world would I help you this time, daughter of Bahgree.  I answer only my mate’s command.”  Urga floated forward, passing right through Horumn as she knelt between Olivia’s bent legs, then turned and fell back into Olivia’s body.

Cold.  Olivia gasped, clawing mindlessly backwards as gullan hands restrained her, unknowingly holding her for their goddess to consume.  Urga was the moon inside her, a terrible tidal force aligning all of Olivia’s human body to her own ruthless will.  She could still hear Horumn speaking to her excitedly, but Horumn had ceased to matter.  Her head turned at Urga’s direction; she studied the frame of the birthing bench around her with alien, incurious eyes.

Foolishness.  Mortal trimmings for an act she had been first in all the world to perform.  Scorning the padded hand-grips at her sides, Urga cupped Olivia’s stomach, bent forward, and bore down.

Horumn cried out, not with horror, but with happiness.  “Blanket!” she shouted, and a dozen gullan rushed to obey.

Urga worked swiftly and in silence, ignoring the rushing gullan around her, the insignificant cries and coaching.  The human at her back alone distracted her; she felt as thorns each pinch of the human’s hand at her wrist, heard every word as River’s water splashing over bones, but did not allow it to divert her from her purpose.  She kept pushing, feeling the pressure ease with every contraction until it slid suddenly out and she saw the baby in Horumn’s hands.

Covered with mucous and short, slimy fur, the child was coffee-colored, with thick flaps of furry skin surrounding a fat, wrinkled body.  Its undeveloped wings folded over its back, sealed to the body with a thin, whitish membrane.  Two dull nubs of bone marked the base of what would one day be a span of imposing horns.  And between them, running from the crown of its head all the way down its spine to just above its bottom, was a narrow silvery stripe that would someday be a dead-ringer for the one Kodjunn had.

Horumn stuck her finger in its mouth, swabbed out an amazing amount of gummy mucous, then flipped it onto its belly and smacked it once on the back.  The baby drew in a gasping, offended breath, and released it in a hoarse cry.

Somurg.

Urga stood up, her lean body rising easily out of Olivia’s, and looked down at the infant raging in Horumn’s hands.  There was no sign of motherly affection or remorse about her as she turned away.  Her purpose was to deliver new life and her purpose had been completed.  The child, inevitable result of that purpose, was no longer of any consequence.  “I am done with you, daughter of Bahgree,” she said, already beginning to fade.  “Await the will of my mate.”

Then she was gone, reality snapping back into three dimensions around her.  Horumn wept steadily as she toweled the baby off and she was not alone; every gullan in the room sobbed freely.  There was pain again, and smells and sounds and every caustic sense vying at once for her attention, but there was also Somurg—Somurg, her son.

Olivia put out her arms and soon he filled them.  She brought him in close and he turned his face into her breast, howling over and over in his scratchy, brand-new voice until he heard her saying his name.  Then he stopped crying and just lay there, hitching in baby breaths and beating at her now and then with twitching fists.

“Is he healthy?” Olivia asked shakily.

She meant to ask Tina, but Tina was only frowning at her, so she turned her anxious eyes on Horumn instead.  Horumn nodded, too overcome to speak.

“I want my mate,” she said, and it was not a request.

Crugunn got up and stumbled into the tunnel.  A very short time later Vorgullum raced into the cavern and came to Olivia’s side.  He reached for her, but it was a cursory touch; Vorgullum had lived thinking only of healthy children since before their abduction, and now, at last, he saw one.

“Oh,” he said quietly.

“Do you want to hold him?” she asked, offering the baby up to him.

But he shook his head and prodded Somurg tentatively with one blunt claw instead.  The baby gave the invader a punch, then grabbed the finger and looked cross.  The tiny hand could not even close around Vorgullum’s finger, and yet he was trapped.

“Our son, Somurg,” Olivia said.  “We are a family, Vorgullum.”

“Family,” he whispered, and just kept staring.

“Not a mark anywhere,” Horumn exclaimed.  “No mottles, no sign of weakness or deformity.  His wings are solid and firmly bound.  His bones are strong, and see there!  Oh, great tovorak, behold his crest!”

Vorgullum moved his uncaught hand to brush lightly at the wet spikes of silver crowning the baby’s head.  “Yes.  His crest.”  He glanced at Horumn and it must have been a meaningful glance because the other gullan quickly gathered themselves up and left them.  Only then did he turn his gaze on her, his eyes strangely subdued.  “The moon is full,” he told her.  “Tonight, Urga brings another son of the Great Spirit to this world to be born.  I think it is our own.”

Olivia felt her arms tightening around her baby and forced them to relax.

“And that should be a good thing,” he went on, looking back into Somurg’s scrunched and unhappy face.  “It has always been a good thing before.  The children of the Full-Moon become tovorak, become sigruum, become legend.  I should be honored.”

Olivia found herself fussing with the blanket, hating the heavy silence that lay between them.

“I will try to feel blessed,” Vorgullum said at last.  “I will try to believe that it is my son at the center of all these signs and omens.  Not you.”

“Not me,” she agreed, and smiled at him, wishing she believed it, too.

9

Three days later, Vorgullum presented his son before the entire tribe as Olivia stood beside him.  Somurg slept through most of it, waking only when his father lifted him high over the assembly, at which point he let out a lusty bellow and was handed promptly back to Olivia for quieting.

She leaned herself against the wall and tucked Somurg inside her robe, smiling faintly as he attached himself to a breast and fumbled around until he managed to get some milk.  “I thought this was supposed to be instinctive,” she said chidingly, and he thumped her on the chest with one balled fist as though to say, ‘Less talk, more milk.’

“Don’t you want to sit down?” Amy asked from beside her.

“I would love to sit down,” Olivia replied.  “And if I ever manage it, I’m going to have the bench bronzed.”

Sarah J. burst out laughing.  She wiped her eyes, sniggering, and only then noticed that everyone was looking at her.  “Sorry,” she said, grinning.  “But I know exactly what you mean.”

“You’ve had a baby before?” Amy asked, somewhat surprised.

Sarah J. shook her head, peering at what there was to see of Somurg.  “My sister.  She was a just a kid, still in school, vanishing goy boyfriend, the whole song and dance.  My parents…”  She shrugged.  “She had to give it up, and she hated them for it, but honestly, it was the right thing to do.  God, that’s a cute kid.  Like a cross between a baby and a puppy.”

Olivia beamed.  She supposed it wasn’t exactly the sort of compliment that ought to go to a new mother’s head, but she couldn’t help herself.

“I’m in no hurry, though,” Sarah J. added, straightening up.  “As soon as Doru finds out you’ve got a bun in the oven, he takes your spear away.  I’m only just getting good with it.”

One of the female gullan hovering nearby edged a little closer.  “You actually hunt?” she asked, in the tones of one who has heard it before and still can’t believe it.

“Yup.”  Sarah J. put her shoulders back with a great deal of pride.  “Got a rabbit yesterday and helped Doru take down a deer the day before.  With a spear.  Eat your heart out, Ted Nugent.”

Far from looking impressed, the female’s expression was obviously one of mild revulsion.  “But…Sung does not hunt for you?”

Sarah J. seemed nonplussed by this reaction.  “Well, sure he does.  And I hunt for him.”

“A mate should provide for you.”  The female groped for something more to say and finally tossed her hornless head.  “If he cared for you, he would see to it that you never needed to leave the mountain.  That is his duty!”

Sarah J. was beginning to look a little annoyed.  “No, his duty is to knock me up.  In the meantime, we all need to eat, so he hunts and so do I.”

“Hang on,” Amy interrupted, lifting one finger like a referee’s flag.  “Are you saying a female never leaves the mountain?  For any reason?”

“Not after we are mated!” the female said with a derisive flap of her folded wings.  “If I had a strong hunter to bring me meat, why would I choose to spend my days scratching at the earth for roots and berries? And I note that your Kurlun does not allow you to hunt!”

“I would,” Kurlun said, and everyone jumped a little and watched him stride over to join them.  “If I thought she wanted to.  I’d carry her out of the mountain any night she asked me, just to see my Amy in the moonlight.  If she wished to bear my child beneath the stars, I would take her out even then, and if I thought it could be done, I would have Sudjummar make her a pair of wings for her own.  Now go on,” he said quietly, “and tell me I do not care for her.  Tell me, Sorluu, that I do not provide for her.”

The female hunched, lowering her eyes to the floor, and said nothing.

“Hm.”  Kurlun eyed her a moment longer, and then turned his back on her and bent to bump brows with Amy.  “I would couple with you by starlight anytime you asked me,” he stage-whispered.

“When you couple with me,” she whispered back, grinning, “there are always stars.  Stars and moons and suns.”

He nipped lightly at Amy’s lips and moved away.  “And by the way,” he called, “Sarahjay is a damn fine hunter.  This tribe is fortunate to have her spear, and Sung is a fool if he is not proud of her!”

“I am,” a gulla called and gave the rock beneath his feet a solid smack with the butt of his spear.

“So there,” Sarah J. said.

Sorluu was still staring at the floor.  “I meant no insult,” she said softly.

Sarah J.’s smile faded and Amy looked slightly uncomfortable.

Sorluu’s breath hitched a little.  “All the old ways are changing.”

She retreated, not only from their little group but all the way out of the commons.  Back to the women’s tunnels, perhaps, were she could be confident of her place in the world.  Sarah J. watched her go, frowning.  “I think I hurt her feelings, but she hit a little too close to home.  Sung doesn’t like that I hunt.”

“He said he was proud of you.”

“Yeah, when Kurlun set him up.  And he’s quiet about it when we’re out doing our thing on the game trails, because Doru’s usually around.  But when we’re alone, it’s different.  Especially when I catch something and he doesn’t.  Oh, he doesn’t go at me like Gullnar does Tina, but still…I hate to see a man emasculated in front of his friends.  I got to see enough of that growing up.”

“I wish I knew what to tell you,” Olivia began, and Amy said, “Tell him he’s a tiger in the sack.”

A startled silence gave way to a wave of half-smothered giggles lively enough to draw a few curious glances.

“It helps if you can say it sincerely,” Amy added, watching them with a sagacious eye.  “But say it anyway.  Moan, groan, toss yourself around.”

“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.”

“How are you, Cheyenne?”

The redhead rolled her eyes hard.  In a sunny singsong, she chirped, “Oh, fine, thanks.  How are you?  How’s your hubby?  How’s that fucking little fleabag you squeezed out?  While we’re at it, how’s the fucking weather?”

Olivia swallowed a hot stone of anger, unclenched her hands and took two good breaths to calm herself.  “I’m fine, thanks for asking.  Vorgullum is fine.  Somurg is in exceptional health.  There’s still snow on the ground and ice on the mountain, but Vorgullum says that spring is coming.  Are you getting enough to eat?”

Cheyenne shook her head, tight-lipped.  “You are really something else, aren’t you?  Whatever.  I only asked for you because I can’t get Tina.”

“If that’s supposed to hurt my feelings, you better try again.  I’d pick Tina over me any day.”  She gestured towards the nearest bench.  “Lie down, please.  Let’s just get this over with.”

Cheyenne got up and shucked out of her crude-cut breeches.  She straddled the bench and lay back, gripping the stone as though keeping her hands from locking around Olivia’s throat took tremendous effort.  “Kodjunn wants to fuck you,” she said.

Olivia, just opening her pack, threw the whole thing down and said, “Jesus Christ, is that what you called me up here for?”

Cheyenne finally smiled, and it hardened her features even more.  “You can fuck him if you want to.  You must have liked it, since you went to the trouble of keeping Vorgullum from finding out.  And I know he liked it.  He’s still dreaming about it.  You make his furry cock hard every night.”

Olivia slung her pack back over her shoulders.  “If you ever have a real problem, let me know,” she said tightly and headed for the door.

“Wait!”

Was that a tremor in Cheyenne’s voice?  Olivia looked back.

Cheyenne’s head was bent, her brow knotted with something that did in fact resemble concern.  Without looking at Olivia, she said, “There’s… Something’s wrong with the baby.  Or puppy or whatever the fuck it is,” she added in a sudden, angry rush.

Olivia lowered her pack and came back into the light.  “All right,” she said.  “What’s the matter, exactly?  Is it pain?  Have you felt the baby yet?”

“Hell, yes, I’ve felt it.”  Cheyenne curled her lip, trying to disguise her fear with scorn, but her voice shook just slightly.  “That’s part of the problem.  It moves…in a weird way.  I can’t explain it, but I don’t think it’s normal.  Or whatever passes for normal with these furballs.  I…I think I’m going to lose it.”

Olivia raised Cheyenne’s shirt, exposing a hard yet substantial stomach.  “You’re pretty big for four months,” she remarked.

“Is it some sort of infection?”

“Just lie back.  I’ll have a look.”  Olivia retreated to the washroom to wash her hands.  When she returned, Cheyenne was on her back on the bench, legs apart, holding her stomach in both hands and staring at the ceiling in a detached, brooding fashion.  “Try to relax,” she said.

“Do I look hysterical to you?  Jesus Christ.  Just do it.”

Olivia began by placing both hands on Cheyenne’s belly and moving the uterus back and forth gently as she tried to locate the baby.  When she found a head, she cupped it and felt gingerly inside.

“Christ, it’s like the conception all over again,” Cheyenne muttered.  “Why you’d want to fuck that thing I’ll never know.”

“Did you forget you doused me in Murgull’s potion?” Olivia snapped.  “Can you please be quiet and let me concentrate?”

“You got what you deserved.  I asked you for help and you gave me that fuck-happy piss instead.  I’m glad he raped you.  I hope it hurt.”

“Kodjunn is manifestly incapable of raping anybody, and no one is impressed with your bullshit anymore, so shut up.”  Olivia stood up, walked to Cheyenne’s left side and started again.  She found the head in the same place, cupped it gently, and again probed from within.  “Does this hurt?”

“No, but your hands are fucking freezing.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Olivia…Olivia, seriously, what is wrong with you?”  Not hostile, but spoken with what seemed like genuine frustration and confusion.  “If you were watching on the news about some chick who got kidnapped, would you be saying she wasn’t raped just because she quit screaming?  Do you call putting chains on her getting her in the mood?  I mean, where are you coming from?”

“You know, I could ask you the same thing.  What do you think you’re going to accomplish by being this nasty all the time?  It’s not going to help you escape, and it’s sure not endearing you to anyone.”

“I don’t get that, either.  It’s like all of you have rocks in your fucking heads!  We were kidnapped!  We are being held against our will!  We are being impregnated by fucking monsters!”

“Listen,” she said tightly.  “There are a lot of other women here besides you and me.  Most of them are trying to make the best of things with gullan who really don’t like them all that much, so just what do you think will happen if you give those gullan a reason to distrust us?  They’re not going to hand us a bunch of lovely parting gifts and show us the damn door!”

“No, they’re going to throw us off a fucking cliff!” Cheyenne shot back.  “What’s wrong with you?”

“Olivia?”  Bodual’s voice, concerned.

“I’m fine,” she called.  To Cheyenne, she added, “Just be quiet.”  She placed both hands on Cheyenne’s belly and this time, instead of rocking the baby, she tried to turn it.  When she had succeeded in moving the lump to one side, she reached again between Cheyenne’s thighs and used two fingers to probe, all the while staring intently at Cheyenne’s belly.

She felt the pressure on her fingers relax.  Simultaneously, Cheyenne’s skin bulged slightly.  “The hell?” she muttered, frowning.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Cheyenne said, eyeing the ripple of flesh dubiously.

Olivia felt her mouth drop open.

“So what is it?  Is it some sort of infection?  It is, isn’t it?  Would you say something, you dumb bitch?!  I swear to God if you don’t—”

“I think you’re having twins,” she said.

“—tell me what the problem is, I’m going to…what?”  Cheyenne blinked rapidly, then pushed herself into a sitting position.  “What did you say?”

“Two babies, Cheyenne.  Twins.”

Cheyenne gaped at her, and then looked down and gaped at her own hard stomach.  “You’re joking!  You’re not joking?  Twins?  Really?  I mean, that’s actually kind of scary, but it’s—”  She let out a loud whoop of relief and shouted, “I’m having twins!  Jesus! I thought I was dying!”

“Olivia!” Bodual bellowed, and she heard him bound up the shaft and come for her, no doubt with his spear at the ready.  When he saw Cheyenne laughing and Olivia calmly cleaning her hands, he shouldered his weapon, but kept his wings fanned and his horns lowered.  “Watch yourself, beast.”

Olivia ignored him for now, tapping Cheyenne on the shoulder.  “I recommend that you rest as much as possible, and really start watching what you eat.  When spring gets here, you’re going to choke down a lot of greens and they’re all bitter as hell, so you better get used to the idea now.”

“Fine, whatever,” Cheyenne said dismissively.  “Send me all the salad you want, I’m eating for three!”

“I will,” Olivia replied, smiling in spite of herself.  “Do you want to tell Kodjunn or shall I?”

“Why?  Oh, yeah, sure, whatever.  If you think he’ll be interested.”   Her expression tightened suddenly and she turned a black look on Olivia.  “But you want to make damn sure he knows that I conceived them, I’m carrying them, and they belong to me!”

Cheyenne’s English may have been beyond Bodual’s understanding, but the combination of her look, tone, and pointing finger proved too much for him.  He lunged forward without warning to seize Olivia and push her behind him.  “Are you threatening my leader’s mate?” he growled.

“Hey, when I threaten her, you’ll know.”  But she backed down, snatching up her breeches and retreating to the end of the bench to put them on.  “Get the fuck out of here, would you?  I’m naked.”

Bodual kept his grip on Olivia and kept his gaze on Cheyenne as he backed out of the cave.  He nudged her towards the access chute and she went, rolling her eyes a little but permitting him to defend her.  A moment later he joined her in the tunnel, still growling deep in his chest.

“Should never have brought her,” he was muttering.  He tipped a distinctly indulgent glance at Olivia, and added, “We tolerate her for your sake, and for the child she carries, but she’s dangerous.”

“To quote Horumn, she is far enough along that she is hobbled.”

Unknowingly echoing her own response, Bodual snorted.  “Hobbled?  Ha!”  Bodual shook his head, casting a mistrustful glare over his shoulder at the chute.  “Not that one.  And I tell you, I’m not afraid of the Beast herself, but I hate to think what she wants with that baby.”

Olivia looked back at him uneasily.  “What do you mean by that?”

“Oh Olivia,” he said, and shook his head.  “Do you really think she gave in to Kodjunn for any other reason?  You and I both know he’d have never forced himself on her and never mind how many seasons she had.”

“She didn’t have much of a choice, Bodual.”

“If you say so.”

“If she’d kept refusing Kodjunn, Vorgullum would have given her to a new mate.  Someone who didn’t have Kodjunn’s patience.”

“Maybe.”  Bodual shrugged, eyeing the open hole of the chimney.  “I can think of a few gullan mean enough to want her, sure enough.  But you saw her just now, Olivia.  She’s too damned happy about sparking.  Think.  Think of the sorts of things it must take to make that Beast happy.”

That sounded altogether too much like he had a point.

“Speaking of babies,” Olivia said, deliberately changing the subject.  “What is it called when a woman carries more than one?”

“In what?” Bodual asked.

“In her belly, of course.”

“More?”  He could not have looked more shocked than if Olivia had claimed Cheyenne was carrying a litter of kittens.  “How many more?”

“She’s going to have two of them,” Olivia explained.

“At the same time?”

“No, about two moons apart.  Yes, of course at the same time, you stag-head,” she said, exasperated.  “It happens sometimes with humans.”

“Not to gullan.”  He stopped himself and furrowed his brow.  “At least, not to real gullan.  Sometimes it happens in stories, but only when one of them grows up to be a great leader and the other is evil.  Horumn might know if there’s a word for it, but I don’t.  Ho!” he said suddenly, raising one hand.

Olivia turned to see an old gulla coming down the tunnel toward them, spear in one hand, bucket in the other.  “I thought you might want to be there,” this fellow said to Bodual, not without a certain sympathetic tone.

“Already?”

“So it would seem.”

“Ah, hell.”  Bodual winced and gave Olivia a pointed look.  “If you want to know why ‘Poor Doru,’ you’d better come with me now.”

She really should go find Kodjunn and give him the news about Cheyenne and the coming twins…

She followed Bodual to the commons.

It seemed quite a lot of people were in on whatever was happening tonight.  Nearly all of the hunters were here with their human mates, although there was very little of the sort of chatter that usually accompanied a gathering.  No one laughed or told stories, no one’s kill roasted on the fire; the air itself seemed charged with foreboding and every eye was on Vorgullum.

He stood in a close ring with Doru, Tobi and Tina, his arms folded and face set in an expression of equally mingled amusement, confusion, and concern.  The four of them conferred for quite a long time, mostly the two gullan, but at the end of it, Vorgullum nodded and said something to Doru that caused Tobi to start bouncing on the balls of her feet.  Vorgullum addressed Tina briefly, flicked his claws to point past her to the crowd of idling gullan and humans, and then turned and ascended the center rock.

Olivia left Bodual’s side and came all the way into the commons to get a good view, wondering what on earth was going on.

“Doru,” Vorgullum called.  “Come before the tribe.”

Doru, with Tobi tight at his side, approached the rock, and then turned.

Olivia felt her stomach clench.  Tobi was so excited, she seemed to be on the edge of spontaneous combustion, but Doru, although smiling broadly, looked like he had taken the butt of a spear to his gut.

Doru said, “This human is Tobi, bound to me this past year as mate.  She is young, strong and clever…and she loves another.  I would be severed from our bond, to free her for her true mate.”

Well, this was a surprise.  Olivia scanned the crowd again, trying to guess which gulla was about to come forward and claim giddily-bouncing Tobi.

“Gullnar,” Vorgullum called.  “Come before the tribe.”

Astonished, Olivia could only stare as Tina’s mate, with his human also at his side, came forward and faced the crowd.  For a male about to claim the human that presumably loved him, he looked singularly unhappy, almost angry.

In a low voice, not meeting anyone’s eyes, Gullnar stated, “This is Tina.”  He was quiet for a long time, and then growled in the back of his throat and added, “There is no child.  I would be severed.”

Olivia’s first glimmer of understanding occurred only after Vorgullum fanned out his wings and said, “Doru, Gullnar, stand away.  Tobi, will you have this female for your mate?”

“I do!” cried Tobi, leaping wildly into the air.

Vorgullum started to laugh, caught himself and fixed her with a stern eye.  “Tobi, will you provide for this female?  Will you starve to feed her in times of famine?  Will you take her children and raise them to be tribe?”

“You bet!”  She was bouncing again, smacking her fists together.

“Tina, will you refuse this…Tobi?” he finished, starting to smile again.

“I didn’t come this far to back off now,” Tina replied, grinning.

Tobi flung herself into Tina’s open arms.  They kissed, not a polite bridal peck at all, but a passionate mashing of mouths that left Olivia somewhat agape.

The gathered gullan exchanged a few glances and small shrugs, then unleashed a stone-shaking roar of celebration while the humans looked, by and large, utterly dumbfounded.  Gullnar stood there, plainly furious, and when it became clear that no one was coming over to commiserate with him, he stalked off without a word.  By comparison, Doru waited patiently for Tobi to release her new mate, then enfolded her in his arms and wrapped his wings close around them both.

“Be happy, be well,” Olivia heard him say.  “But let me be…at least a little sorry.”

“Thanks, Doru!  You’re the best!”  Tobi clapped him hard on the back and ran back to hug Tina again.

Doru took a deep breath, looked down at his empty hands, took another, then threw back his horns and shouted, “Bring on the thumperjuice!  I have bedding and warm furs to feather that nest in your new lair!”

“Jesus Christ,” Olivia heard someone whisper at her shoulder.  She glanced around and saw Amy’s dark eyes fixed on Doru with stunned pity.

“Did you know?” Olivia whispered back.

“About Tina and Tobi?  Heck, yeah.  I knew that back at High Hill.  Did I know they were going to do this?  No.  Look at him.  My God, how can he stand there laughing?”

Tina saw them watching and came over, clearly embarrassed to some small degree but still grinning.  “I can’t believe it. I just got married!”

“Congratulations,” Olivia said, and smiled.  “I think you could use Tobi to drill through the wall.”

Tina turned to watch Tobi bouncing on her toes while gesticulating wildly to a group of gullan.  She laughed.  “I know, she’s been doing that ever since I agreed to go through with it. We’ve been talking about it for a while, since before the move, even.  Neither of us has gotten pregnant, and that was the really thorny bit.”

“What, you mean it would have been easier to split up if you were?”  Amy cocked her head.  “Just when logic would dictate you needed a mate the most.  What kind of sense does that make?”

“Tobi hunts,” Tina said with a shrug.  “And I heal.  We’re both entitled to a full hunter’s share of the game anyway.  Being provided for wasn’t the issue.  Babies were.  See, the same-sex thing is actually no big deal down here—call it the inevitable coping mechanism of making procreation punishable by death—but whether we’re gay or not, we still have to make babies for Vorgullum.  But it’s been all this time and neither of us has sparked, you know?”  She gave the room behind her another glance, this time in Doru’s direction as he passed cans of Bud Lite around to Tobi’s well-wishers.  Her smile was gone.  “Then one day, I was over visiting and Tobi looks up and asks him outright how hard it would be to get a divorce.  Poor guy, it had to rock him.  He sat there and he said, ‘Have I hurt you, my Tobi?’  No.  He said, ‘Where will you go?’  She thumbs back at me and says, ‘Meet my lover.’  He looked at me, he looked at her, he looked at me, and then, I swear to God, he makes this ghastly smile and he shakes my hand.”

Tina was silent for a little while, watching Doru and Tobi together.  She said, “So he got up and started gathering Tobi’s stuff and he took it down to this cave we’ve been using to, you know, meet in.  And he cleaned up the wall and got paint from Kodjunn and taught Tobi how to make the mate-welcome markings for good luck.  And then he went with me to Gullnar and told him the good news, told him like it was good news, and the whole time Gullnar is looking like he wanted to haul off and punch me in the face.  But there’s Doru, who is simply enormous, and he’s got that massive paw on my shoulder and he’s doing this hearty impression of someone who’s very happy for me so Gullnar let me get my stuff and go.”

Amy whistled, low and sorrowful.  “I didn’t realize,” she said.

“Nobody realized.  Well, he may have told Bodual, but he might not have because poor Bud’s been having troubles of his own.”  Tina shrugged, beginning to smile again as she watched Tobi start up the disc player and lead Thurga out into the center of the room.  “The two of them are probably going to get pounding drunk tonight.  Still…”  She trailed off, her expression at once rueful and wistful.  “I have always wanted something like this, to get up in front of everyone and get married and have a big party.  Ironically, I never could have done it if I hadn’t been hauled off in the night by a bunch of bat-men.  So I guess I ought to pay my dues and join the don’t-wanna-go-back club.”

“Membership is pretty informal,” Olivia said.  “Meetings every second Tuesday.”

“Bring a dessert,” added Amy.

11

Olivia left the party when the thumperjuice started flowing freely enough to start a wave of gullan voices raised in tribute to Ricky Martin, and departed for the lower fathoms of the mountain, still in search of Kodjunn.  Since he hadn’t been either at home or in the commons, she knew she’d find him in the archives, and sure enough, she could see the yellow glow of candlelight spilling out of the spiral at a hundred paces.  When she drew even nearer, she could hear Kodjunn humming to himself.

“Sigruum,” she called, stopping a polite distance away.  “Are you busy?”

He appeared in the tunnel mouth almost before she finished speaking, and beckoned her in, looking distracted, but pleased to see her.  “What brings you here?” he asked, lighting a few more candles for her benefit.

“Which do you want first?  Tribe news or Cheyenne news?”

His face shadowed briefly at her name, then climbed resolutely back into good humor.  “Tribe news,” he said.

“Tobi and Tina just got mated.”

“They’re already mated, I thought.”  He started and looked at her.  “Oh, you mean to each other.  Poor Doru.  How’s he taking it?”

“When I left, he was passing out presents and drinking heavily.  Why is it that no one ever says ‘Poor Gullnar?’  He lost his mate, too.”

“Gullnar…”  Kodjunn waved one hand through the air and headed back into the spiral.  “Understand, Olivia, this was Gullnar’s chance to have a mate the way it was supposed to be done.  He’s old enough to remember that, a little.  When Vorgullum selected him as one of those who would take a human, he was eager to have one.  He’s not really a bad man and he wanted to be a good mate, but he wanted to be a good gullan mate and I think there must be a difference.”

“There must be.”

“He wanted Tina to stay in his lair when he hunted and she insisted on going out and letting herself be seen by other males.  He wanted her to dress his kills when he brought them to her and she sent them off to be butchered by other women.  He wanted her to take food from his hands when the feasts were held and she went off to be a healer and got her own share.  He wanted her to praise him in the pit…I think we both know how vain a hope that was.”

“You know that no one told us any of these rules,” Olivia said.  She meant for it to be an explanatory tone, maybe even one of apology, but it came out frustrated and a little resentful.  “This is the first I’ve even heard of them.”

“Vorgullum didn’t want to chain you up with expectations.  He knew you would be having a difficult enough time.”  Kodjunn glanced at her, smiling.  “And then there was you.  And Vorgullum thought if everyone followed his example, all the humans might turn out like you.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“Anyway, instead of being proud of a clever, strong-willed mate who can heal her tribemates and bring new life safely into the world, Gullnar has been very loud about how her behavior embarrasses him.  Hearing that puts out a lot of the light of sympathy, especially when the others have no one at all to share their pit.  Gullnar found himself frustrated by a lack of sympathy and a mate he considered unfeminine and wild.  And then…”  Kodjunn glanced at Olivia and away again.  “Shortly after we arrived here, Gullnar found his mate in the commons dressing some of Wurlgunn’s latest hunting wounds with several other males close by.  He ordered her back to his lair.  She refused to go.  He lost his temper and he hit her.”

“I never heard about this!” Olivia said, shocked by that fact much more than the story itself.  After all, she’d been living in the women’s tunnels quite a bit, home of Crugunn, of whom it had often been said that she must have four ears and two tongues to keep up with all the gossiping she did.

Kodjunn shrugged his wings, the casual gesture belied by the pinched look of disgust that drifted across his face.  “It’s not forbidden for a man to hit his mate.  Even if she is a human half his size, apparently.  Tobi wasn’t there, thank the spirits, or things would have been much worse, but in any case, Gullnar earned himself no pity by striking down a healer as she went about her work.  But I do feel for Doru.  He’s been trying so hard to make a friend of his Tobi.”

He tipped his head to one side, staring at the wall as if seeing Doru, or perhaps Gullnar, standing before him.  “It’s good news for the humans, at least.  One should always be free to choose a mate from love.  These are terrible times, Olivia, but there should be some happiness.”  He shook his horns out and forced a smile, lighting more candles. “And now to bite the bee with the honey,” he said.  “Tell me of Cheyenne.”

“There is no change in her condition.  I just thought you might want to know that she’s carrying two babies.”

“In what?” he inquired, fixing a candle onto a jut of stone.

“In her belly,” she said, beginning to laugh.

He looked just as surprised as Bodual had.  “Is she?  Are you sure?”

“Hey, do I come down here and ask if you’re sure about what these little smudges look like?”

He started to smile, paused, and said cautiously, “Do you think she’ll allow me to keep one of them?”

Olivia’s smile wavered.  He saw it, and his excitement melted back into resignation.  He shrugged his wings.

“So be it.  My hopes were not high.  Is she happy?”

“She seemed pretty pleased with herself when I left.”  Unsettlingly, she heard an echo of Bodual’s words: Think of the sorts of things it must take to make that beast happy.  When she looked up, Kodjunn was studying her face as if he could read her mind.  “But,” she said slowly, “Vorgullum is right to have someone watching her.”

“Yes.  It isn’t like her to be pleased, is it?  I’m glad you came, Olivia,” Kodjunn said, changing the subject.  “I’ve been working on your story, and I wanted you to see it.”  He put out his hand.

Another ghost-voice, Cheyenne’s this time, but Olivia crushed it before she could listen to what it said.  She took Kodjunn’s hand and let him lead her deeper into the archives.

He had put in a lot of work already, painstakingly restoring the old images with fresh paint, and she paused several times to look at scenes she had missed during her initial tour of the sigru.  If he was impatient with these constant interruptions, he gave no sign.  On the contrary, he seemed quite proud each time she pulled at his hand and peered closer at the wall.

“This is new,” Olivia remarked, standing in front of the three broad black lines that separated one tribe’s history from the other.  Kodjunn had put in a brief introduction to Hollow Mountain’s tribe, then introduced Vorgullum, who was depicted as a red gulla much taller than the rest of his tribe.  His image alone poured a white liquid over a small building, while a small group of gullan clustered around it, waiting.

“Behold,” Kodjunn said dramatically, ushering Olivia down to the next sequence of images.  “Here is your history!”

And there it was, all right.  In the group of abductees, Olivia stood out.  She was drawn much taller, for one thing, and her hair was streaked with vibrant red.  Also, while the others were cringing and weeping, she was drawn standing erect and proud.  Hers was the only image looking directly at the gullan.

In the next panel, Olivia and Vorgullum walked side by side to the overpass while the other unremarkable gullan carried their unremarkable women, all of whom had their faces turned away.  Olivia put her arms around her captor, and they flew away, staring into each other’s eyes.

“That’s nice,” Olivia said, smiling.  “But it’s not the way it happened.”

“Close enough,” Kodjunn said, shrugging his wings.

Still smiling, Olivia moved to the next wall to continue the story.  And clapped a hand over her gasping mouth.

“What’s wrong?”

“That,” Olivia stammered.  “That’s a little…graphic.”

Kodjunn studied the images, bewildered.  On the wall, the captured Olivia and the gullan leader were having enthusiastic sex.  A tiny yellow light was being kindled between them.

“Olivia,” he said, exasperated.  “That’s where babies come from!”

“I know that, but you could still be a bit more discreet!”

“This is important,” he insisted.

Unconvinced, she moved on.  Here was Olivia gathering in the other humans and trying to teach them gullan ways.  Here was Olivia pouring liquid into bottles while surrounded by images of herbs.  And here…

“For pity’s sake, Kodjunn, you did it again!” she exclaimed.

“Somurg of Three Fathers,” he reminded her.  “It has to be shown.”

Another image of Olivia and a dark gulla, within whom was the red, wingless figure of the Great Spirit, lying together while the spark of life inside her grew and turned red.  A trick of the flickering candlelight made the two figures seem to shudder and writhe.

“Besides,” Kodjunn said uncomfortably.  “No one reading this will know who that was meant to be.  They’ll assume it was the tovorak.”

Now here was the Great Spirit speaking through a gulla and showing favor in the form of gold light on Olivia’s body.  Here was Olivia pulling a grey-painted demon out through a kneeling human’s mouth.  And here was the dream that warned Olivia of danger.  The tribe moved, and there were three thin lines reminding the reader to check the first tribe’s history before continuing with the birth of Somurg.  The last image stopped, simply stopped, hanging in the center of the wall like an unfinished sentence.

“Is there more?” she asked, brushing one hand against the rock.

“Not yet, but there will be.  I’ve dreamed some of it already.”

“Dreamed?”  She tried to laugh, which was difficult to do when he simply looked at her.  “It’s hard enough to live up to my reputation.  I’d hate to have to live up to dreams as well.”

“The dreams of the sigruum are different from the dreams of other men.”

There was no safe way to argue with that, especially with the memory of her last name in his mouth so sharp in her mind.  And after Urga’s second visitation, she could have no doubt that the gods he claimed spoke to him were real.  And if they were real for her…

“What do you dream?” she asked haltingly.

“I dream of you.”

Cheyenne’s voice dripped like poison in her ear: You make his furry cock hard every night.  She tried to shake it off, but it wouldn’t shake far, not with Kodjunn’s calm eyes resting on her with such undisguised heat.

Her silence did not discourage him.  He came a small step closer, reaching up to pass his hand once over her hair, never quite touching her.  “You burn in me like fire,” he murmured.  “You course through me like water.  You blow through me like wind.”

How unfair, thought Olivia.  She loved him no more than she did Vorgullum; the thought made her want to touch him, just to lay her hand along his arm, but it was all too easy to imagine where a sympathetic touch might lead when he looked at her like that.  She kept her hands to herself and said simply, “Nothing can happen, Kodjunn.”

He only shook his head, smiling ruefully at the tips of his talons.  “So I have tried to tell myself, but my dreams say differently.  I see you in the sand before that great, dark water with the river that runs beside it.  I see you bending over me and I hold that image close to my heart.  But I think…I think you have been wise to teach your healing ways to Tina as you have done.  As I ought to teach what I know of our histories,” he added, looking back at the wall with longing.  “Because I think that we are leaving and I think it will be soon.”

“But, my son—” she protested, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Has his own destiny.  Who knows?  Perhaps you will come back to him.”  He glanced aside to run his eyes over the painted rock, still smiling.  “Anything is possible, Olivia.  Anything at all.”

“Isn’t there any chance that your dreams are just, you know, dreams?” she asked, but without much hope.

His smile widened.  “No.  Ha.  Not much.  Fate is like a storm.  You can let it bend you, or you can make it break you.  One way or the other, the storm always has its way.  Now our storm is beginning, Olivia.”  He took his hand off the wall and faced her again, fanning out his wings to fill the narrow tunnel.  “What will you do?”

CHAPTER TWO

BEGINNINGS

1

She did nothing.  Don’t dwell on it, she’d told Liz, and it was good advice whether you were talking about delivering a baby or going on a journey for a god.  There were plenty of other things to do in Dark Mountain, not the least of which being all the things that came with having a newborn baby bat, and so she worked on them instead.

And it was while she was working on them—nursing Somurg in the commons while humans and gullan women scraped and softened the latest batch of cured hides—that Thurga tapped Olivia on the shoulder and said, “Amy is asking for you.”

Olivia sprang up, jarring Somurg out of his comfortable sucking sleep and into furious screams while everyone stared at them.  “Is she in labor?” she demanded, hurriedly burping him.

Flustered, Thurga backed away.  “She didn’t say so.  She is only asking for you.”

Olivia gave her the baby and set off at a run down the hall to the lair Amy had been sharing with Crugunn, Rumm, and several other gullan women, since she refused to move into the actual birthing room until, as she put it, there was a damned good reason.  Personally, Olivia felt that having to share one pit with five gullan was a good enough reason, but it had been difficult enough just to convince her friend to come to the women’s tunnels, so she didn’t push it.

Rumm jumped up when she charged inside, revealing a perfectly contented-looking Amy quietly sewing herself a shirt.  “You got here fast,” she observed.

“How far apart are the contractions?”

Amy rolled her eyes.  “I am not having contractions,” she said.  “I told that twit there was no trouble here.”

“Then why did you call me?” Olivia asked, now that the pleasantries were out of the way.  “Are you experiencing any discomfort?”

“You’ve been nine-plus months pregnant, you know damn well how comfortable I’m not,” Amy retorted.  “I just wanted to get my daily check-up out of the way early so I can take a nap.  You know how it is:  Ask for Olivia and you get a massage, ask for Tina and you get a physical.”

Olivia laughed and gave the gullan women a wave to clear them from the room for a little privacy.

“And I’ve been having contractions,” Amy said when the last of them was well and gone.

Olivia stared at her, then jumped up and raced to the door.

“Oh, don’t have a fit,” Amy said crossly.  “I think I’ve had two real pains in the last hour.  I’ve got scads of time.”

“Well, then, what—?”  Olivia didn’t even bother to finish the question. She just sat there and silently demanded an answer.

“I figure just because I’m having contractions doesn’t necessarily mean I’m in actual labor,” Amy explained.  “But I’m not sure, so I thought it would be best to have you around, as opposed to the whole circus.”

“Oh.”

“But I would like my legs rubbed,” Amy said wistfully.  “And my back, if you could.  My, you look trim.  How’d you lose the weight so fast?”

Olivia smiled as she knelt in the pit and started massaging Amy’s legs.  “All the running around I do and you have to ask?”

“You could take it easy for a while.”

“Yeah, but I don’t really want to.  Once you’ve been safely delivered, I’m going to take Somurg and present him to Murgull.”

“How long will that take, do you think?”

“Just the one night.  I told Vorgullum I wanted to make the trip by myself, you know, on foot.”

Amy nodded, rolling onto her side.  “He said no?”

“He said quite a few things, actually, but no was the gist of it.  The only reason he’s letting me do it at all is because I promised Murgull I would.  They’re big on promises here.  So he caved, but I only get the one day and he might just decide to stick around when I do it.  You know, protect me from afar.”

“Heap Big Husband,” Amy agreed, and looked suddenly depressed.  “Have you seen Kurlun?”

“He’s out there in the front of the women’s tunnels, where he’s been pretty much since you got here unless Vorgullum drags him off to hunt.  The only thing he needs is a carton of cigarettes to be chain smoking while he paces up and down.”  Olivia worked her way down to Amy’s ankles.  “He’s probably going to stay there until you deliver.”

“That’s a comfort,” Amy said drowsily.  “I miss him more than I ever believed possible.  You know, he gave me a baby shower?  He gave me a baby basin, sort of, and some blankets and some toys and another electric can opener.”

“Now you have a matched set.”

“Same model, different color.  I use them as bookends.  Now I just need some books.”  Amy rolled onto her back, then pulled a blanket over her sizable bulk.  “I can’t wait until this kid arrives so I can jump on my man.”

“So you say now,” Olivia teased.

“I don’t care how much it hurts,” Amy insisted.  “I’m needing a lot of loving.  I’m going to—”  She broke off with a yawn, then mumbled the rest of what she’d been saying, and fell asleep.

Olivia sat with her until Thurga returned nearly three hours later with a meal for Amy in one hand and Somurg against her shoulder.  Thurga handed the baby over, looking deeply ashamed of herself.  “I did not realize I had been away so long,” she confessed, and shot Amy a worried glance.  “She really must eat.”

But Thurga would never wake her, and she’d be mortified if Olivia did.  The world of dreams was both real and treacherous; to pull one from sleep too early could lose a person’s soul forever.  Olivia gave her friend a solemn nod, surreptitiously tickling her son’s back right between his webbed baby-wings.  Somurg, predictably, responded with a sleepy howl of protest, which yanked Amy safely out of sleep.  A baby’s cry, Olivia had learned, like any other call of warning heard in nature, was exempt from taboo.

“Ah, you waken!”  Thurga, relieved, brought Amy her bread and a bladder of goat’s milk.

“Of course I waken!  Turn off the siren, why don’t you?”

But Somurg had already decided that having his wing-skin tickled wasn’t quite the violation it had first seemed and was settling down on his own.  He grumbled some, socked Olivia in the breast, and went back to sleep, snoring just like his father. Olivia sat down, watching Amy drink her milk through grimaces as she rubbed her stomach.  She looked so tired and sore…and lonely.

“Thurga,” Olivia said suddenly.  “It’s time to move Amy to the birthing room.  Make sure the bench is cleaned and get some fresh towels in there.  I’ll sit up with Amy until morning if you can take care of Somurg tonight.”

“You honor me,” Thurga stammered.  She looked in disbelief from one to the other of them, then uttered a little bay of joy and ran from the room.

“God, they’re easy to please,” Amy remarked, looking after her.

“Are you still having contractions?”

Amy’s eyebrows rose.  “Off and on.  Why?”

Olivia stood up, leaning Somurg against her shoulder and running her hand down his soft pelt.  “When Somurg comes here, the gullan are going to follow.  We’ll be alone in the birthing room when you go into serious labor.”  She glanced over her shoulder at the empty doorway, and then offered Amy a small smile.  “Whereupon, I intend to sneak Kurlun in to see his baby born.”

Amy’s eyes went wide and then she let out a little squeal and clamped both hands over her mouth.

2

Amy cleared her throat.  Olivia looked up from where she was sitting and nursing Somurg, an act that was entertaining not only her sleepy son, but the three gullan women who were supposed to be seeing to Amy’s needs.

In English, keeping her voice very calm and genial, Amy said, “My contractions are five minutes apart and getting stronger.”

Olivia nodded and stood up.  Speaking to the gullan in their own tongue, she asked them politely to leave, since Amy was feeling moody and wanted to sleep.  “I can keep her comfortable until dawn,” she said.  “My son should sleep now.  Fetch me if there’s any trouble.”

They scarcely needed to be asked twice.  The gullan left, the three of them crooning in close-part harmony as they carried Somurg away.  Olivia waited until they were good and gone, then took up a large blanket and wrapped herself in it.  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she told Amy.  “Try to relax and take deep, slow breaths.  Whatever you do, don’t push.”

Amy nodded, closing her eyes and composing herself as though for sleep.

Olivia hurried through the narrow passages and open caves of the women’s tunnels, passing no one…until she reached the women’s commons and Horumn, dozing on a bench before the simple hide flap that separated the women’s tunnels from the rest of the mountain.  Olivia hesitated, took two silent steps forward, and stopped again as Horumn’s eyes opened.

The two of them looked at each other—she with dismay, and the Eldest with uncanny understanding.

“It is not done,” Horumn said finally.

“You had a good reason for wanting to keep Vorgullum out,” Olivia told her, creeping a little closer.  “No one knew what was going to happen then.  But I have no reason to think that this birth will be any different from mine.”

“It is not done,” Horumn said again, unmoved.

“Lots of things aren’t done,” Olivia said, “until they are.  You had twelve babies, you told me.  Didn’t you ever want your man’s arms around you when they came?  Look me in the eye and tell me Amy shouldn’t have Kurlun with her just because it is not done.”

The old gulla made a face, then sighed and looked away.

“So be it,” Horumn said at last.  “Because it is Amy and because they truly love one another.  Don’t ask me again until your mate makes it law.”

Olivia moved fast, before the Eldest changed her mind.  Kurlun sat alone outside in the tunnels with a single candle, his head in his hands.  He looked up before she could speak, and an expression of absolute horror took hold of his entire body.

“What has happened to her?” he asked.

“Come with me, quickly,” she whispered and smiled.

His mouth opened slightly as he realized what she was offering, then he leapt up and scanned the empty tunnel before running towards her.  She shrugged off the blanket and he wrapped himself inside it, ducking down low and holding his head awkwardly back to try and disguise the great length of his horns.  Olivia led him past Horumn, who had once more adopted the appearance of deep sleep, and brought him swiftly to the room where Amy lay.

Olivia hung the blanket over the open doorway while Kurlun and Amy embraced.  “I hope you were right about quick deliveries running in your family,” she said, peeking once out into the tunnel before letting the blanket close it off.  “Somurg doesn’t sleep through the night.”

Amy labored quietly, with Kurlun helping her to sit up or roll over.  He massaged her as his voice rose and fell in soothing words Olivia was not meant to hear.  Now and then, Amy would whimper or groan, but muffled the sounds against his body as he stroked her hair.  It did not seem long at all before she called for Olivia in a strained, soft voice and said, “I think it’s time.”

“Good.  Kurlun, help her to the birthing bench,” Olivia commanded, and went to wash her hands.

“What in the hell goes on here?”

All three of them, Kurlun included, jumped and screamed a little.

Tina came inside in two swift strides, letting the blanket drop behind her.  She did not look happy.  “Are you in labor?” she demanded.

“Um.”  Amy looked at her stomach, then pointed at Olivia.  “It was her idea.”

“And I was just coming to get you,” Olivia said, glaring at Amy.

“Oh we are going to talk about this later, lady, I promise you that.  Kurlun, get her to the birthing bench and what are you doing here anyway?” she finished, as surprise bloomed over annoyance.

Kurlun also pointed at Olivia.

Tina’s next long look was a great deal more thoughtful.  “Okay,” she said at last.  And then she pointed.  “You’re on probation.  I’ll try to keep the tunnel clear, but if you need me for any reason, you holler.”

“I will,” Olivia promised.

Muttering under her breath, Tina marched herself out, and Olivia hurried over to kneel between Amy’s open legs.  “Good God, you’re crowning!” she blurted.

“I told you we were quick.  I want to push now.”

Olivia checked the baby’s position, and shrugged.  “Go ahead.”

It didn’t take long at all from that moment on.  Olivia caught the baby and held it in one arm while she emptied its mouth of mucous.  She was about to turn the baby over and swat it when it uttered a foggy cough, yawned hugely, and started breathing all on its own.

“Why, you smug little thing,” Olivia chided, and the baby grunted.  “Tina, it’s out!  Kurlun, would you like to hold your daughter?”

“What do you mean, ‘it’s out’?” Tina demanded from the hall.

Kurlun opened his hands at once, wide-eyed and speechless, shoulders bowing as he took her tiny weight.  Father and daughter stared at each other in silence as Tina came in to look Amy over; they may as well have been alone in the whole world.

“She sees me,” Kurlun said at last, and began to smile.  “She knows who I am.  Don’t you, little bat?  You know your sire!”

Olivia went to Amy and found her staring at her new family with nearly the same wild-eyed shock that Kurlun had only just begun to shake off.  “Are you all right?” Olivia asked.

“I’m going to cry.”  Amy looked around as though dazed—at the walls, the birthing bench, the blanket over the door, anywhere but at another person.  “I’m not a crier, Olivia.  I’m not anything I used to be.  I’m a mother now.  I have a child.  Look at her.”  She started to giggle, and the giggles turned into tears. She wiped at them, sobbing, “Oh, can you believe it, she’s got my nose!”

“She is beautiful,” Kurlun insisted.  “I have never seen such a fine, full coat on a newborn.  Look, a little tooth!  It means she will be fierce, as fierce as her mother.”

“A tooth,” Amy wailed.  “Just see if I nurse her with a tooth!”

“A milk tooth,” he amended gently.  “Oh, Amy, please don’t cry.  She is such a perfect little girl.”

“That’s why I’m crying,” she tried to say, and held out her arms for her daughter.

Kurlun wouldn’t exactly give her the baby, but he knelt again by Amy’s side so that she could gather them both up in a single embrace.

Tina’s hand fell on Olivia’s shoulder.  “You did good,” she said quietly.  “If you do it again, I will kick your ass square.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Tina gave her a pat and let her go.  Feeling very proud of herself, Olivia helped Amy out of the birthing bench and back into bed.  By the time she had cleaned off the bench and disposed of the soiled towels, Amy had changed her mind about nursing a toothsome baby and was curled on her side in the bed with Kurlun beside her, watching her daughter feed with huge, awe-filled eyes.

3

Three nights later, Kurlun proudly climbed the center rock in the commons and lifted his daughter into the air for all the tribe to see.  The baby opened her eyes and peered at the crowd curiously, sneezed, and scrubbed busily at her eyes.  “My daughter,” he announced.

“And I’m still pissed, by the way,” Tina remarked, watching him.

“I said I was sorry.”

“Behold my fierce one,” Kurlun said.  “See, she is silent like an owl on the wing.  When she came into Olivia’s hands, the Good Mother knew her at once and called her by her name.”

He beamed over at Olivia, who must have looked as baffled as she felt, and said, “She is Smugg.”

Olivia started to laugh, and caught Amy’s eye to gesture at the proud father.  Amy rolled her eyes and shrugged helplessly.

Vorgullum himself went to inspect the new arrival, pronounced her perfectly-made, and started up the celebration.  When that was done, he returned to Olivia’s side and grinned down at Somurg.  “Ours is much more handsome,” he whispered.

“I think so, too,” she whispered back, and they smiled at each other.

“So,” he said, easing Somurg out of Olivia’s arms and cradling him expertly.  “The weather has been fair and our son is strong.  If you still wish to take him to your teacher’s grave, I am prepared to allow it.”

It would have been easy to become indignant at these words, much less the lofty tone in which he spoke them, but this was a concession he was making and she knew it.  “Thank you,” she said.

“There are human rites you wish to perform, I suppose,” he said, and managed to hide most of his discomfort at the thought.  “And I will leave you alone to make them.  But I mean to carry you there, and I mean to carry you back.  You will have one day…one day and the greater portion of two nights,” he amended grudgingly.  “Is it enough time?”

“Yes,” she said, and leaned into his side.  “You are very good to me.”

He leaned into hers.  “I know.”

Somurg suddenly let out one of his rare happy howls, waving his chubby arms wildly over Vorgullum’s shoulder.

“Oh,” Kodjunn said, sounding surprised.  “Hello.”

Vorgullum turned toward him, but Somurg twisted in his arms, reaching for Kodjunn and wailing.  Defeated, Vorgullum offered the baby and Kodjunn, not without hesitation, took him.  Somurg settled at once, seized a handful of fur in one hand, dropped his head sleepily against the Kodjunn’s shoulder, and stuck two fingers in his mouth.

“What news, sigruum?” Vorgullum asked, eyeing the baby with mild disbelief.  Somurg was many things, but a people-person was not one of them.

“Actually,” Kodjunn hedged, glancing at Olivia, “I just came to ask if it was true about Olivia sensing Smugg’s name.  Did you hear it in a dream?”

“No, of course not,” Olivia sighed.  “‘Smug’ is a human word.  It means confident.  I only said it because she started breathing on her own.”

Kodjunn nodded to himself, rubbing Somurg’s sealed wings and humming thoughtfully under his breath.  The baby began to tug on Kodjunn’s pelt in time to the tune.  “It’s still a good name,” he decided at last.  “If a strange one for a female.”

“How is your mate?” Vorgullum asked, pointing with his chin towards Cheyenne, who sat alone by the fire.

“I wouldn’t know,” Kodjunn replied, his tone carefully neutral.  “She moved into the women’s tunnels two nights ago.”

Vorgullum’s brows drew thunderously together.  “Did she indeed?  Who provides for her?”

“I do.”  Kodjunn shrugged, making Somurg squeal and giggle.  “Those are my young in her belly, for all that she means for me never to know them.”

Vorgullum looked up, his hard eyes narrowing.

“She would never harm them.”

Vorgullum dismissed that with a flex of his talons.  “You don’t believe that and neither do I.  She means harm in every breath of her and I will not give her the chance to spread her poison.  I will have them taken from her after birth.”

“She would rather die,” Olivia said at once.

“No, she would rather you die,” Kodjunn corrected.

“We will have no shortage of nursing mothers.  The infants will survive.”  He rested his eyes again on Cheyenne, still sitting and watching the gullan with her mask of bitter calm.  “If she bends to my command, I will permit her to see them upon occasion.  If she resists me, I will kill her.  Either way, she will not have those lives to raise against us.”

“Vorgullum!” Olivia gasped.

He merely looked at her, his jaw set and his eyes cold.

“I advise you not to tell Cheyenne of your decision,” Kodjunn said after a lengthy silence.

“You can’t mean to surprise her with something like that?  She’s certain to fight you then!” Olivia objected.

“And if she knows it’s coming, she’ll throw herself off the nearest jagged cliff,” Kodjunn said.  “Those are my children she’s growing and I won’t let her stubborn hatred destroy them.”

“But you think she would not harm them if she believed she were free to bear them in peace?” Vorgullum asked, and thought about it.  “Olivia,” he said finally, “You will examine Cheyenne, and tell her that her womb is weak.  Force her to take to her pit for the remainder of her time.”

“Vorgullum, she has four moons to go!”

“Would you rather I put her back in chains?” he inquired.

She set her jaw, shook her head.

He continued resolutely, staring over her head at the wall.  “I will permit her to stay in the women’s tunnels, but she is no hunter to have earned a private lair.  Send her to stay with…with Yawa.  Yawa is sensible and strong and has no patience for stupidity.  If the beast makes trouble, I trust Yawa either to contain it—”  He glanced at Olivia and away again.  “—or to inform me.”

“She’s not stupid, Vorgullum!  She’ll know at once that she’s under guard again, and when you take those babies away from her, she’s going to be furious,” Olivia warned, her voice barely audible.  “And you…how can you ask me to take away a mother’s children?”

“Olivia,” he said, and took a deep breath.  He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and looked at her again.  With what must have been enormous effort, he kept his voice down, but could not disguise the burning pain in his words.  “Olivia, you are all my pride and pleasure, but I command you, as the leader of this tribe of which you are a part, to obey me or be punished.”

Kodjunn gathered up Somurg in his arm and quietly left them.

There was a split-second when Olivia considered the merits of another public shouting match with real yearning, but she knew already that it wasn’t going to work.  It might feel good for a little bit, but it wouldn’t work.

So she threw her arms around Vorgullum’s neck and hugged him close instead.  “I will obey you, of course I will!” she whispered.  “You are my strong mate, my great leader, and you don’t have to command me!  But think about what you’re saying!  No woman would let her babies be taken from her!  You will make her attack you!  I would attack you, if it were my baby!”

He frowned slightly, but only slightly, and that was all he did.

She seized his head and kissed his unyielding mouth, then pulled away and said, “I’ll do what you say, but I beg you to reconsider.”  She clasped her hands beneath her chin.  “I beg you, Olivia begs you!”

No one was actively watching them, Olivia knew.  No one was close enough to see her dramatics to warrant close attention.  This moment was still theirs, but if she stood like this for very long, searching his eyes with her whole body in an aspect of supplication, she knew the tribe would start wondering what was going on.

And he knew it, too.  He reached up and enfolded her hands in his, tenderly.  “I can’t promise to change my mind,” he said.  “But obey me in this:  Go to Cheyenne and tell her that her womb is weak, as I have said.  I will think on your words while you present our son to your teacher’s soul.  When you return, I’ll make my judgment known, but you will submit to my will.  Agreed?”

“Agreed!”

He released her, shaking his head.  “Olivia, your words are always wise, but you are too kind-hearted.  If that beast broke your arm and left you for dead, you would beg me to spare her life.  No!” he said, as Olivia flinched.  “You wouldn’t speak against her at all, but tell me you fell and broke it yourself.”

Olivia stood silent, feeling an old ache in the soles of her feet.

Vorgullum shook his head again and touched her cheek.  “You must understand that I do these things for your sake, as much as for mine.  I can’t afford to remain here in the mountain and wait for Cheyenne’s hour to come.  The snow is melting.  The humans must have left Hollow Mountain by now.  Olivia, we will be leaving soon.”

She wasn’t surprised, exactly, but she felt the bottom drop out of her world anyway, and stared at him with naked horror.  “Oh Vorgullum, no!”

He set his jaw, kept his voice low and even.  “It will take many days to find a suitable hive.  We hunted for yours more than a moon-span.  We’ll take them to Hollow Mountain until they have learned enough of our speech to live comfortably among us and then we will bring them here.”

“You can’t do this!  Not again!”

“What I cannot do,” he said, “is heal my tribe with the thirteen humans remaining to us, even if they all should spark.  I will go.  I will take them.  I will end their human lives and hurt their human hearts.  And when they have mates among my people, when they are gentled and they are tribe, when they have healthy young of their own to show me…I will do it again.”

She could not look at him.

He did not look at her.

Across the commons, Somurg shrieked laughter and slapped at Kodjunn’s snout.

“Don’t do this.”  She couldn’t believe she’d said it, even after she heard the words hanging in the air.  “Please.”

Vorgullum bent his head and kept his lips pressed tightly together.

“Don’t do this,” she said again.  “One of us went mad!  Two of us have died!  Victoria might as well be dead!”

“And seven have sparked!  That weighs heavier than any pain or death.  Healthy young.”  He shook his head firmly as she began to protest and his voice became steel.  “You will not turn me from this path, my mate.  You can hurt me with your words, but you can’t change the way of things.  Not this time.”

“You can’t possibly think the humans will sit back and let it happen a second time!”

“I am certain they will do exactly that.”  He reached up to trace the quivering curve of her jaw with the tip of one claw.  “Oh, my Olivia,” he sighed.  “Did I take so much pleasure in your pain that you think I would wish it on even one more human?  Did I?”

“No.”  She looked away from him to Kodjunn, watching them with Somurg in his arms.  The expression on the sigruum’s face and the baby’s was the same.

Vorgullum tracked her gaze, smiled faintly.  “The more I see him, the more I see your shadow,” he said.  “He is looking at me now with your eyes.”

She felt her lips form a smile in spite of the terrible cold weight in her chest.  “He has your wings.”

“Let us hope he has my claws as well,” he said.  “I can see him in twenty years, climbing the walls with iron spikes.  Somurg Softpaws.”  He stood up and took a step towards his son, then stopped and looked back down at Olivia.  “I think in many ways that I am better for having known you,” he said gravely.  “And there are changes I will make for you that I would not make for any other, but that goes only so far, my mate.  No further.  We are dying here.”

And this was true and had not changed since the day she had stood in the commons at Hollow Mountain and told all the other enslaved women that she was not going to spend her life hating people, that every species had a right to continuation, that she could forgive them.

Forty more women.  And after that, perhaps forty more.  Or eighty.  Or however many it took to give one terrified, panicked captive to each and every man in this mountain.

“Do you hate me?” Vorgullum asked softly.

Olivia shook her head, and that was true too.

“Will you come to my lair tonight?”

“Soon.”

He nodded, and if he was disappointed, he kept it carefully hidden.  With some small gesture, Vorgullum summoned Kodjunn and took Somurg back into his arms.  He glanced once more at Olivia, a long and thoughtful sideways stare, then turned his back on her and went off towards their chambers, hooting softly at his son while the baby struggled and began his usual angry cries.

Kodjunn eyed his retreating back cautiously.  “I think you’re crazy,” he said in a low voice.

“For going against the will of the leader?” she asked.

He gazed at her solemnly.  “If I were you, I would want him to take care of as many problems as he could before he left me.  Because when he is gone, I have a strong suspicion that those problems will fall to you.  And Olivia, if I’m right, you will have troubles enough.”

A clawed tap on her shoulder interrupted her before she could even begin to question that.  She turned and saw Crugunn behind her, showing her upraised hand in a perfunctory salute.

“Cheyenne again?” she asked wearily.

“No, for a pleasant change.  Carla is in the women’s tunnels, asking specifically for you.  But I think once you see her,” she added cryptically, examining her blunt claws, “you’ll wish it had been the Beast after all.”

4

Carla was waiting, not in the cavern Tina called the ‘clinic’, but in the generous room that had been set aside for Olivia’s use when she came to the women’s tunnels.  Ignoring the examining benches, Carla paced from wall to rounded wall, pale and shaky on her feet.

“Well,” Olivia said slowly.  “You have my attention.  What’s wrong?”

Carla made one final circuit of the room and then sat, gripping the stone bench at either side of her with white knuckles.  “I need a potion.”

“What potion?” Olivia asked, already reaching for a clean bottle to pour it into.  She didn’t have much, certainly didn’t have the extensive stock that Murgull used to have, but she tried to have a ready supply of the more complicated or most-used potions.

“I don’t know what it’s called.  Murgull always gave it to me.  It’s black and tastes like turpentine smells.”

Olivia, picking through powdered roots and dried herbs, looked up with a frown.

“Yes, I’m pregnant,” Carla said testily.  “I need to get rid of it.”

“Get rid of it,” echoed Olivia.  She put the empty bottle down and turned around.  “Why?”

“Because I have no clue who the father is.”  Carla was flushing, but met Olivia’s startled expression resolutely.  “It could be any of maybe fifty of them, so give me the potion, please.”

Olivia stared.  “I don’t have any made up,” she managed.  “I’ll have to brew it.”

“How long will that take?” Carla asked, rubbing restlessly at her stomach as if to loosen the forming life through her touch alone.

“Two days.  Maybe three.  I don’t even know if I have all the things I need…Jesus, Carla!” she exploded suddenly.  “What were you thinking?”

Carla only shrugged, still rubbing herself and looking edgy.  “Oh what, I’m supposed to be faithful?  Sutung knows about me.  I think he knows.  Hell, I don’t care if he does or not.  He broke me in, he doesn’t get to care what I do after that.”

“Yes, but…but…Damn it, Carla!  Just get out!  I’ll tell you when it’s ready.”  She swung back to her worktable and began to rattle bottles angrily.  She heard a low rustle of leather and receding footsteps.  “Damn it,” she snarled, breathing hard.  “Stupid, stupid woman!”

“That one again.”

Olivia spun to see old Horumn standing in the doorway, looking back over her wings down the tunnel.

“Same trouble with her?”  Horumn glanced at Olivia’s face and nodded as if the human had answered aloud.  “So.  She came to see old Murgull often enough,” she mused, hooking Murgull’s name out of the air as she spoke.  “My cousin cursed her also, but always gave her the black drink.  Do you know it?”

“I know it all right, but I’ll be damned if I can make it.  I need black bitterwort…and wormwood…damn it!”  She ran her hands tightly through her hair, snagging on the tangles with little flares of good, grounding pain.  “Maybe if I asked…Jesus, no, he’d know immediately why I wanted it.”

Horumn nodded.  “Perhaps there is a small bottle hoarded away here, some cheerless female’s poison-treasure.  And then perhaps you should give to that one a more lasting cure for her burning loins.”  Horumn shook out her wings distastefully, gestured for Olivia to remain, then limped away.

Olivia sat in her pit and stared down at Somurg, still seething.  She didn’t know how long she waited; time blurred together in a kind of hopeless, helpless anger.  At last, she heard the dry shuffle of Horumn’s footsteps as the older gulla returned and fastened the flap against intruders.

“Here,” she said curtly, giving an old 7-Up bottle a shake.  The liquid within looked thick and evil, staining the green bottle almost as black as the gulla shook it.  “She will know how to take it.  And here.”  From her belt pouch, Horumn withdrew what Olivia at first thought was a large carrot, only a dark brown in color, and considerably thicker.  She didn’t recognize it, and after so many months studying under Murgull, there wasn’t much she didn’t recognize.

“What is that?” she asked apprehensively.

“Barrenroot.  It will do exactly as its name suggests.  Blood will come.  Seasons come.  No sparks.  An evil thing to use, perhaps, when we have so few young, but how much more evil to bring forth new life that does not know a father?  How easy it would be to keep silent, to set brother on sister unknowingly in ages hence, because that rutting beast cannot keep her legs together.”

“What…Oh God, how do you prepare it?”

Horumn studied the root in her hands with a tired expression of disgust, then scraped her claws along one side of it, exposing a white, oily meat.  “It must be peeled, all along the length of it, and then swiftly used.”

Olivia made a gagging noise as she realized where the root was intended to go.  “I thought she would eat it.”

Horumn eyed her coolly.  “She can, if you believe that best.  It is deadly poison.”  She turned the root in her aged hand and thrust it through the air crudely.  “But this way works just as well, and will quiet a womb forever while permitting your little human to fuck her way through the males of the mountain.  Perhaps when she has had them all, she will be more at ease.  Eventually, of course, Vorgullum will have her declared a safe female, and she will come under my keeping on her little naked back.  And perhaps that will not displease her.”

Horumn shuffled forward and placed the root firmly in Olivia’s hand, then closed Olivia’s fingers around it.  “First the potion.  Then tell your human to keep her silly vessel dry for three days at least.  If she cannot manage three, tell her you will tie her down, like that beast Kodjunn keeps.  Then give her the barrenroot.  I think she will accept it.  I think she will not even argue.”

“How could she do it?” Olivia asked gloomily.  “How could she be so careless?”

Horumn snorted.  “Easy for you to say.  You will not spark again for years yet.  You may couple without fear.”

Olivia stared at her, openly astonished.  “What the hell does that mean?”

The older gulla looked back, just as surprised by the shocked venom in Olivia’s voice.  “What do I mean?  Just what I say!  You have a newborn in your arms.  You will not spark again for—”

“What makes you think so?  Just because I nurse a baby is no guarantee of anything! I could catch pregnant again this month!”

Horumn could not have looked more stunned than if Olivia had sprouted wings and flown across the room at her.  “Again?  But no!  You will be many, many years yet!”

“Humans don’t have many, many years to wait between…between babies before…”

Comprehension dawned on both races at the same time.

“Merciful Urga, your mate does not know this,” Horumn breathed.  Her face hardened.  “There are women I know, women I can trust.  They will sneak away from the mountain and find as many of Murgull’s black potion herbs as they can carry.  You will have much use of it, I think.”

“Okay,” Olivia said, gripping the bedding as if she feared falling out of the pit.  “Okay, just what does that mean?”

“It means,” Horumn said grimly, “that your mate believes a human breeds much the same as gullan do, and if you do not have much of this potion ready when he leaves, he will return to a mountain full of many-fathered young.”

“What are you talking about?” Olivia demanded.  “Just because my mate leaves me for a few days doesn’t mean that I intend to try out as many males as I can while he’s gone!”

“What does your intention matter?” Horumn asked.  “He is leaving and he will take many of your humans’ mates with him.  When they go, they will give your keeping over to another.”

“What?” Olivia gasped.  No, tell the truth.  She shouted it.

Horumn recoiled slightly.  After a moment, she said, “Females die.  That is sad truth, but it is truth.  Males must protect them, provide for them.  And your mate is taking many males away on a dangerous journey from which it is possible none of them will return.  You must see that.  Tribe law is clear.  Those with mates must find new mates to care for them in their absence.”

“He didn’t tell me any of this!”

“Nor would he, I think,” Horumn said with a shrug.  “Until he knows who will have you.  The man who possesses the leader’s mate grows tall.  It is a difficult decision for him, to choose a man strong enough to defend you, yet loyal enough to stand quietly down upon his return.”

“Does he honestly think I’m going to agree to this?” Olivia demanded.

Horumn looked at her for a long time before shrugging again.  “If you do not, you may always come to the women’s tunnels, but as a woman without a mate, you will not be permitted to leave again.”

“Oh for—And we’ll all be expected to obey this stupid law?  Even Beth?  Even Amy?  I thought Kurlun loved Amy!  Does he really think he can just toss her at someone else and walk away and that’s not going to hurt her?”

“Human ways are very different,” Horumn said after another pause.  “You concern yourself with feelings and with hurting.  Your mate, he is concerned with death, with starving humans and starving young.  You are brave, I think, and very clever…but you are selfish also.  Still, you may tell your mate about humans and their breeding times.  It may make a difference.  But I will tell you this, little human.”  Horumn’s voice grew hard and cold as steel.  “I would not tell him, if I were Olivia.  I would let him go, believing what he does.  And I would go to the mate he chose for me.  I would do this if I cared for him, because in his eyes are fears enough without thoughts of Olivia’s hurt and Olivia’s feelings.”  With that, she turned and stumped away again.

Olivia sat down on the bench Carla had vacated, feeling sorry for herself and now ashamed that she did so.  After an indeterminable time spent in silence, she had decided only that she couldn’t accept the responsibility for this decision all by herself.  She went out into the tunnels, heading for the baths.

There were no hot springs in Dark Mountain, but that did not mean the tribe did not bathe.  In the time since their arrival, one of the larger caverns at the end of a less-traveled tunnel had been set aside for bathing.  It had been a kitchen of some sort when the previous tribe had used it, and still had both a channel of clean running water and a large firepit which (once the smoke hole had been cleared) could comfortably heat the contents of a huge cauldron and keep it boiling.  Sudjummar had fashioned several large bathtubs and arranged them around the room.  When one wished to bathe, one had only to pick a bathtub and fill it with a combination of boiling water and freezing mountain run-off.  As long as one remembered to refill the cauldron for the next person, the system worked rather well.

Olivia did not particularly want a bath, but the room was usually quiet and a good place to think, just as the hot springs in Hollow Mountain had been.  At the same time, she didn’t particularly want to be alone, so when she heard low voices among the endless splashing of falling water, she did not turn back.

She saw Kurlun first, lounging in a bathtub while Amy nursed Smugg from a nearby bench.  When the graying gulla saw her, he lifted one hand in a lazy salute and greeted her by name.  Then he took another look at her, frowned and heaved himself out of the bath in a spray of water and steam.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, drying himself briskly, as if he expected to be ordered into battle.

“Something…oh God, I don’t know how to say it.  Is anyone else here?”

“No,” Amy answered, looking thoughtful, but puzzled.  “What’s on your mind, hon?”

“Kurlun, are you going with Vorgullum when he…when he leaves?”

Amy and Kurlun exchanged a glance.

“Yes, I am,” he said calmly.

Just as calmly, Amy added, “I’m going to stay with Damark.”

Olivia stared at them both.  “But what if—” she began, and broke off as Amy very minutely shook her head.

“It’s only temporary,” Kurlun was saying.  “Damark is a good man.  He has most of his years behind him, but he’s still a fair hunter on his good days.”  He put on a brave smile and added, “More shame to me if I let such a talented female languish untended.  I mean to return and find her in good practice when she comes again to my pit.”

Amy nuzzled at his chest and cast Olivia a warning glance.

Softly, Kurlun said, “You fear you will not like the man your Vorgullum chooses for you, but I’m certain he would take your preference into consideration.  You must know you have your pick of good, strong hunters.”

When she did not move or speak, Kurlun gently disengaged from Amy and came to put his hands on Olivia’s shoulders.  “And you, Olivia, you will be cared for no matter where you live—in Vorgullum’s lair, or that of his replacement, or your own in the women’s tunnels.  You give us much; you will always be provided for.”

And because she couldn’t ask what her heart ached to ask, she cried, “Why doesn’t he ever tell me these things?”

Kurlun chuckled.  “Because he is a leader, and as my own father used to tell me, being a leader is all about stalling for time while you grow some guts.  I suppose he thinks he’ll cause you less pain if he has only a little time to tell you before he flees into the night.”  He offered her a lop-sided smile.  “Of course, I call that being a stag-headed fool, but then, I’m not leader, am I?”

Olivia giggled a little, made herself hold onto her smile.

Kurlun looked from her, back to Amy, and then released her and said, too heartily, “This gulla is as clean as he is going to get, I think.  Time to take myself back to the hunt.  Amy, my little mink, I will keep you with me until we meet again.”  He bound on a loincloth, chucked Smugg under the chin, and strode from the baths.

Amy looked at Olivia for a long time as steam rose from the water.  “You’ll live, you know,” she said at last.

Olivia sat down beside her.  “How can this not bother you?”

Amy sighed, dropped her hand to her lap and massaged at her belly restlessly, cutting an eerie parallel to Carla.  The only difference was the baby nursing contentedly at her breast.  “So, in comes Kurlun one night,” she said, just as if she were continuing a conversation and not beginning one.  Her tone was light; her face, difficult to read.  “And he sat me down and told me that Vorgullum is getting ready for Round Two of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and he’s been invited along to carry one.  Then he looks me in the eye with that same look you’ve got on right now and tells me I’ll need a mate while he’s away.  ‘A female might be permitted to await her mate’s return,’ he says, ‘but a female with a baby must be cared for.’  And while I’m being cared for, I’m expected to be as enthusiastic, or at least as willing, as I am for my Kurlun.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.  I was getting ready to ask him just what the hell was the point of getting all these humans if they’re going to play musical mates every time they leave overnight when he dropped that bomb about ‘no young can come of it.’  Well, I snuck in a couple questions and found out he thought I was going to be barren for about six years!  So I shut up, and he must have thought I was considering the issue because he started recommending this male or that male to look after me while he was gone.

“We settled on Damark.  He’s even older than Kurlun, if you can dig that, but he’s got the use of both wings and he’s been bred before, so he’s no small shakes at changing wrappings or walking them in the middle of the night.  Kurlun brought him down to meet me face to face, kind of get to know each other, you know.  He seems like a nice guy.  He told me I wouldn’t have to couple with him until I was ready, and didn’t suppose I’d be ready for some time on account of I just had a damn baby, but the expectation is still there.  And while it is allegedly my right to refuse any male, if I do refuse, I go straight to the women’s tunnels.  Do not pass Go.  Do not collect two hundred dollars.”

Now Amy began to look grim.  “I don’t know just how much you know about this, so I’m going to assume you know nothing at all and just say it:  Life in the women’s tunnels sucks on toast.  You don’t have your own room unless you are someone as important as Murgull or Olivia.  Instead, you get one cramped-ass little cave with one pit which you share with two to five other people.  At the crack of dawn, whoever’s on guard duty comes in and wakes everybody up so they can start lighting candles and hanging lamps.  Then you haul fuel logs out and start up the kitchen fires.  Then you take your tired ass up top and start gathering food, or you stay in the kitchen and start cooking it. You make bread, you harvest the daily fungi, you thaw out the night’s portion of meat, and you do it all damn day.  And if there is a hunt, God help you, because you have to butcher it, cook for the hunters, preserve what’s left, tan the hide, draw the cord, render the fat, and cure the bones.  And who’s taking care of Smugg during all this?  Why, you are!  Not that the gullan wouldn’t cheerfully trip all over themselves to play with a baby, but they haven’t invented bottles down here yet, so there’s the score.  Honey, I don’t care who I have to sleep with, I’m not doing all that!”

“What did you plan to do if you got pregnant?”

“Well, obviously, I knew about the potion.  Not the one Carla keeps having to take, the other one.  Horumn knows about it; I’m a little surprised Murgull didn’t.”

“There was a lot we never got around to,” Olivia said bleakly.

“Well…You brew a certain tea and drink it for three nights, then you take the potion, you wait a while, you throw up everything but your toenails for an hour or two, and then you’re good for about a month.  I’ve been talking to the other ladies; we’re all in agreement.  Had to smack some of them around a little, though,” she added, looking dark.  “Sarah B. was just furious, and you know she doesn’t like Burgelbun all that much to begin with.  Karen’s been shacking up with the village eunuch, so no trouble there.  Mudmar’s not even going, so that’s not an issue for Ellen.  Tobi and Tina are taking care of themselves and nobody’s gonna get near Cheyenne.  Nobody’s really happy about the situation, but what choice do we have?”

“Here’s a novel thought, why don’t we just tell them we’re not going to be barren?”

Amy leaned back slightly and raised one eyebrow.  “You think that’ll stop them from going if they think they’ll come home to another man’s baby?  Oh honey.  All this time and you still don’t get how serious this all is for them.”  She shook her head, moved Smug to the other breast, and said, “You tell Vorgullum that and he’ll be devastated, all right.  And then he’ll order his men to give their mates up permanently.  Including you.  Oh yes,” she said, when Olivia opened her mouth to protest.  “He’s only got so many fliers and he’s taking all  but maybe ten of them.  If he thinks he’s got to worry about finding you pregnant when he comes home, he’ll just take Somurg for his new mate to raise and let you be some other man’s mate.  After all, the whole point is a healthy tribe.  He can’t risk blurring the bloodlines, can he?”

“This isn’t right!”

“So?”

Olivia looked down at her hands.

“Don’t do it,” Amy said quietly.  “You can’t stop him from taking those women and I want to go back to Kurlun when it’s over.  You’ve fought like hell for us all this time, but you have got to learn to pick your battles.  You’re not winning this one.”

Her throat was too tight to speak.  She nodded once.

“Ah Olivia, come on, it’s not so bad.”  Amy reached out and patted her knee with a tiny, troubled frown.  “It’s not bad, it’s just…different.  Look, even after everything you’ve done here—and honey, you’ve done a lot—you can’t expect everything to change.  Women have a definite position in this society.”  She flipped a faint smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes.  “It just happens to be on their backs.”

5

“Are you certain you have everything?”  Vorgullum plucked her backpack from her hands and pawed through it without waiting for an answer.  “Wrappings, soap, food, water,” he muttered.  “Will you be warm enough?”

They had made it all the way to the foot of the shaft leading out of the mountain.  She had been trying to leave for more than two hours now, a process made slightly more complicated by his insisting on rummaging through her gear every five minutes.

“You need a shelter,” he declared.

“I’ll be just fine without one.”  Exasperated, she added, “One day, you said.  One day and the larger share of two nights.  You’re sending me away with enough supplies to start my own tribe!”

“Better than to send you away so that you die of cold,” he countered, hooking the words out of the air even as he spoke them.

“Is it that cold?” she asked gently.  “Is it?”

He growled, looked into her backpack, then zipped it up and handed it back.  “I’d feel better if I could stay with you.”

“I know,” she said.

The invitation she did not extend was louder than anything else she could have said.  He heard it, sighed, and looked away.  “Can I do nothing more for you?” he asked at last.

Olivia, with superhuman effort, bit back the words, Yes, you can get us out of here already.  She strapped on a water skin instead.  The truth was, while she greatly appreciated a lift out to Murgull’s grave, she wanted very much to be alone once she got there.  She did not have any ‘human rites’ to perform the way he’d assumed she did, but she wanted to use this unique opportunity to find some herbs for the birth control potion.  Thurga, Crugunn and Rumm had all three been out gathering what they could, but what grew around the aeries themselves was limited.  Gullan could fly, but a gullan woman actually doing so could only attract suspicion (and after a lifetime spent on the ground, none of them could fly well or for long.  During the move from Hollow Mountain, as distracted as she’d been, she’d noticed that most of the females had to be carried).  She, on the other hand, would be free to forage around Murgull’s grave all day, filling her pack with forbidden herbs with impunity.

“I’m ready,” she said, and strapped a struggling Somurg into his travel-sling.

“Do you have—” he began, then stopped.  He opened his arms with an air of reluctance, and thawed only slightly when she came into them and bit at the sensitive spot below his throat.  “Do that again,” he said in his best impersonation of a sexy growl, “And you won’t leave this mountain tonight.”

She was tempted to try it again just to see if he meant it, but settled against his chest instead, and after another long minute, he lifted her up and took her out of the mountain.

He’d promised her the larger part of the night, and maybe it would have been if he’d let her go when she first asked, but now it was close to dawn.  The clouds shone silver in the east where the sun would soon rise; for now, the mountains around them were nothing more than black peaks against a sky scarcely lighter.  The air felt heavy, clean and thick with the promise of rain, and it was beautiful to see it, to smell it, and not to be drugged to the gills or running for her life so that she could appreciate it.

“A cold night,” Vorgullum said beside her.

Here we go, thought Olivia.  “Not so cold.”

“There is still snow in places.”

“In places,” she agreed.  “But it’s melting.”

His jaw clenched.  He stared into the dark and did not reply.

And this was Vorgullum.  He might very well trust her as much as he claimed to, but he had agreed to allow her to go only because he couldn’t argue with the superstitious side of him that made him see her promise to Murgull as something sacred and binding.  No, he would never order her not to go.  He wouldn’t even ask her not to go.  He’d just find every loose thread he could and pick at it, hoping she would eventually get nervous enough to bow out for him.

And she wasn’t going to.  She didn’t know whether or not she really believed Murgull’s spirit was waiting at her grave to see little Somurg (a year ago, she would have known perfectly well that such a thing was impossible, but that was a year before the Great Spirit had ever possessed her to pull Bahgree out of a walking, talking dead woman), but she knew she needed as many birth control herbs as she could possibly find and she couldn’t exactly collect them under Vorgullum’s gaze.  So she waited.

And waited.

And finally, he bent his head and sighed.  “You are such a stubborn woman.”

“I never used to be.  I got that way living with you.”

He opened his arms.  She filled them at once, shifting the travel-sling several times until she found a way to settle it between them, and then put her arms around Vorgullum’s neck.  She looked calmly up into his eyes and waited.

And waited.

Somurg grunted down deep in his sling, sucked noisily on his fist, and quieted.

Vorgullum’s hands came slowly around her waist.  He lifted her and waited some more.

She wrapped her legs around his hips to help distribute her weight and just let the minutes spool out.

“Damn it,” he muttered, and jumped.

Flight was never going to be the amazing, liberating thing that Disney made it out to be.  Olivia tucked her head in close against him so she wouldn’t have to see the world rushing by a billion miles below her with nothing between her and it but Vorgullum’s wings, those wings that the laws of physics demanded could never ever support him.  He flexed his claws for her, assurance in the form of ten sharp pricks that he would never let her fall, but she did not relax her iron grip on him until he swept down and came back into solid contact with the Earth.

The flight could not have lasted more than half an hour, and yet in that time the sky had entirely lightened to a smudgy, uneven grey, and although the sun had not quite risen, she could make out her surroundings quite well.  He had brought them down in a clearing of sorts, the last really open place at the base of the mountain before the mammoth forest blanketing this part of the world closed off all sight.  Some of the many rivulets pouring out of the mountain had come together, splashing noisily down the last rocky lengths until they fell into the deep banks of a swiftly-flowing stream. Beyond some early-morning bird chatter, there was no other sign of life.

Somurg, quiet throughout the duration of the flight, let out a piercing howl as soon as his parents separated and the security of their close embrace was lost.  Vorgullum hooked a claw into the travel sling and pulled it open enough to see his son’s angry face.  His own remained impassive.

“It will be light soon,” she remarked.

Vorgullum did not reply.

“You’re going to end up walking home if you’re not careful.”

“I trust you, my Olivia,” he said.

It seemed an incongruous thing to say, and she must have showed some surprise on hearing it.  He glanced up, read her face, and offered her one of those rare, crooked smiles that made him look so much like Sudjummar.  “It never occurred to you to think that might be at issue, did it?”

“After all this time, I should hope not.”  Now it was her turn to frown.  “Is it at issue, Vorgullum?”

“What, that I release the mate I have once abducted back into the world under her human sun?”  He laughed a little, only a little.  “No,” he said, closing Somurg away from the cold with a pat.  “It would be a lie to say the thought sits easy with me, but I will let you go.”

“You keep saying that,” she observed, “but then you keep waiting for me to change my mind.”

“Hoping,” he said.  “Not waiting.  I think I told you once that optimism is one of my failings.  But I believe you when you say you will return to me.  I would grant no one else such freedom.  Well,” he said, looking thoughtful.  “Perhaps Amy…And I would allow Beth except that Wurlgunn would be certain to stay with her and open his hollow head falling off the first cliff he came to.”

“And Tobi?”

“Oh, Tobi.  Yes, I would permit Tobi.  She will always return to us.”  After a meditative pause, he added, “I think that if I carried Tobi to the human’s hive and set her down in the lair where we found her, she would get back to the mountain before me.”  He smiled again, but it didn’t last long.  He looked up at the lightening sky, then at Olivia, and finally sighed.

“I’ll be all right,” she told him.

“I know.  Follow the stream,” Vorgullum said, pointing into the thick of the forest.  “You will come to a great rock, and beside it, three trees close together with white bark.  One of them is marked, like this.”

In the beam of Olivia’s flashlight, he knelt and drew half a circle rising from a wide V—Murgull’s soul in flight perhaps, or the sun shining between the mountains, or just one more gullan symbol whose meaning had been forgotten by all but the sigruum.  He straightened up, watching closely while she made a big deal out of studying the simple drawing.

“I have it,” she said.  “Should I come back here when I’m done?”

“No,” he said quickly.  “Stay in the trees.  I’ll come to you.”

“All right then.”  She raised her chin, offering her brow for a bump.

He didn’t give it to her.  Instead, he bent and kissed her, and no, it was never going to be like the kind of kisses she used to trade with the humans of her romantic life, but it was still a good one.  “Be safe,” he said when it was over.

“Safe as houses,” she promised.

He didn’t answer, didn’t ask for an explanation.  He only stepped back, opened his wings fully, and sprang into the pale grey sky.  She waved until he was gone from sight, just in case he looked back, but she didn’t think he did.  Then he was gone, and first touch of pink was sketching itself in around the clouds, so Olivia found the stream and started walking.

The grave was just where he said it was, less than an hour’s walk and easy to find.  She found none of the smooth-stalked bonewort plants she needed for the potion, but there were plenty of its bushy-stalked cousin, bitterwort.  She gathered as much as she could hold, as well as some wild godsmint and three gold sunleaf roots.  She felt no guilt at doing this first; of all people, Murgull would surely understand.

But the sun was high by the time her pack was filled, and the sight of it burning in the blue mountain sky after a year underground was overwhelming to Olivia’s senses.  She cleared the snow off a fallen log by the banks of the stream and just watched it for a time, nursing Somurg as an excuse for sitting there, but really only gazing into the vast, open sky.  It was in a kind of daze that she finally stood and raised Somurg high above her head.

The morning light impaled her, burned into and through her as she called his name out loud:  “Here is Somurg, who came from Murgull!  Olivia remembers you!”

There was no answer, no sense of a thousand spirit eyes upon her or a thousand souls trembling in awe.  There was no sense of Murgull.  She stayed dead, and she stayed gone.

And what had she expected, really?  The ghostly echoes of a cracked voice calling her a silly frog?  That familiar, leathery palm smacking her a phantom blow to the side of her head?  Foolishness.  Murgull would be the first to say so.  And yet…how the sun burned down…

Defiance welled up inside her and Olivia lifted her baby again.  “Great Spirit!” she cried.  “Here is Somurg, our son!”

She was glaring right into the sun, and her eyes were welling up with involuntary tears, even as blurred images in pastel colors were burnt into her brain.  She imagined that the sun grew whiter; she imagined that it took a form.  She imagined dark hands pulled Somurg out of her arms and holding him.

She blinked rapidly, stumbling back and gaping at her empty hands.

“He is wondrous,” the Great Spirit said.

6

She didn’t scream right away.  Screaming was the sort of thing a person did when she was sure of what had just happened, and Olivia wasn’t, really.  She kept staring into the piercing brilliance of the man-shaped light before her until it finally shifted and seemed to look back at her.

“Foolish mortal,” it said, sounding amused.  “Were you never warned away from gazing at the sun?”

Still, she stared at him, trying to wash away the after-images left like scars over her vision as she struggled to pierce his radiant glow.  She could see him only faintly, in dark glimpses between slicks of sliding color that left her with only the vaguest impression of an immense man-like figure.  Then that figure was reaching out, and she felt his hand draw over her face, his fingers pressing her eyes shut.

When she opened them again, the sun was back in the sky and she could see the Great Spirit standing before her, regarding her with a small smile.  He was taller even than Doru, the sharp lines of his sky-black body clearly defined beneath a thin, almost incidental pelt; he had no wings.  Three pairs of massive horns, serrated and sharp as knives, cut back from his brow and coarse hair grew in a stiff mane between them all the way down the curve of his spine.  He was naked, and the gleaming thrust of his inhuman erection stood rock-rigid and without embarrassment before him.

Olivia backed up, prevented from mindlessly bolting away into the woods only by the sight of her small son snugly contained in the god’s arms.

“You seem surprised to see me,” he mused. “Why?  I told you we would meet again.  I said that I would appear in my true form, touch you with my own hands.”

“Why can’t you leave me alone?” she cried, and would have struck at him if he hadn’t been holding her son.

He gazed on her with golden eyes, immovable as the mountain.  “I have influenced your life but little.  I did not direct my people to your human home, no more than did I enter the sigruum’s body, as you claimed.  I merely watched, and answered only when I was invoked.”

She shuddered back, shaking her head in helpless denial.  “I didn’t mean to invoke you!” she managed at last.  “I don’t want you to be a part of my life!  I don’t want to ever feel the way I did when I killed Maria!”

“And if not for my protection in that encounter, you would not have survived it.  Rather than revile me, perhaps you should offer thanks.”  He considered Somurg, who was snuggling happily up against him.  “Whether I have your blessing or no, you will give yourself to me.  I think you would not resist if you knew how many lives rest upon the outcome of your journey.”

“Why me?” Olivia demanded.

“Why indeed?  You invoked my name, did you not?  You claimed a visitation of my power.”

She stared at him, dumbstruck, and finally shouted, “I lied!  For God’s sake, I made it up!”

“I know.  Yet the lie intrigued me,” he said, tickling at Somurg’s chin.  The baby promptly seized the god’s claw and chewed on it.  The Great Spirit smiled.  “But think, woman.  Perhaps you meant deception when you called upon me to draw out the demon from your Mojo Woman, but was it a lie when you prayed to me for game?  Was it a lie when you begged healing aid for your young human’s womb?  Three blessings you have reaped from me, and so according to the ancient ways, I claimed you, even you, daughter of Bahgree, and sent Urga to birth her son by me, your Somurg.”  He glanced up, his expression faintly chiding.  “You should be honored.”

“Well, I’m not!  And I’m not going anywhere with you! Can’t you pick someone else?”

“I could,” he said, rolling one mighty shoulder in a half-shrug.  “Yet you interest me.  Why do you protest?  Vorgullum would never question the giving of yourself to me, even if I took you before his eyes.”  His expression blazed briefly with undisguised desire, then subsided.  “But I would spare you that, because it would displease you.  Nevertheless, I will have you.”

She did hit him, Somurg or no; she hauled back her fist and drove it straight at his amused face, only to smack home in the center of his palm.

He closed his fist around her, pinned her.  He was still smiling.  “Do not mistake me.  Although I require no reason to demand your flesh, I do so only because there exists a great need.  There will be forces at work around and within you and you must learn to control them now or you will be consumed by the River.”

“What river?  What are you talking about?  Just tell me what you want with me!” she burst out.  “Tell me what you’re doing here!”

His expression darkened thunderously as he looked out past her at the sweeping curve of the tree-drawn horizon.  When he looked back, it was to consider her hand trapped within his, and then to release her.  “I am here to couple with you.”

She stumbled back, slipped in the melting snow, and fell on her butt on Murgull’s grave.  This left her on the ground, looking up at his immense erection as the sun burned behind him, turning him to a faceless shadow.  “No!”

“It is the only way I have to share my power.  And, although you will not believe me, it is also the only means you have of accepting it.”  He hunkered down before her, holding on to Somurg, who was making happy sounds and twining his hands in the Great Spirit’s fur.  “Olivia Blake, I chose you out of all humanity. You are not the first ever to falsely invoke my name, but you are the first ever to do so solely to comfort another.  You gave yourself to my son despite your pain, to ease his own.  You used my name only to spare him the wrath of your mate and, I think, to spare the life of his mate, who had done such harm to you both.  You battled Mojo Woman to save those in her thrall.  You asked for game to feed your tribe.  You asked healing for another, that she might fulfill her purpose and provide young for her mate.  In all ways, you have invoked me selflessly.  Such a heart is rare indeed, and so you are chosen to help me.”

“You can’t possibly need my help,” she objected.  “You’re a god!”

He looked at her with an expression of distracted frustration, then reached out and touched one claw to the tip of her forehead.

Light exploded behind her eyes, and she experienced the queer sensation of having something alien move through her mind, picking through her thoughts and memories.

The Great Spirit withdrew his hand, smiling.  “I am an archetype, an idealized concept of divinity, formed by the combined credulity of my devoted children,” he announced.  He showed his sharp teeth, looking pleased with himself.  “Yes, I am a god, but my powers are restricted by their expectations.  I possess failings in reflection of mortality.  I hurt, I hunger, I lust, I rage. And at times, I require help.”

“My help,” she said angrily.

“Yours and that of my son, Kodjunn, whose body I must at times possess in order to accompany you on your journey.”

“You have your own body,” she said.  “Leave Kodjunn alone!”

“I have no choice,” he told her.  “Mine is not the power of flight.  If I were to bear you instantly to the place where the River awaits our coming, you would die in the void between the worlds.  No.  One of my own must carry you, and I must inhabit that host.”

“Then I’ll go on this journey alone,” she said, pleading with him.  “We’ll go on foot, and Kodjunn can stay behind.”

“It disturbs you that I would use him in this manner,” he realized, gazing at her with mild interest.  “Very well.  I am moved to humor you, yet if I exclude Kodjunn from my plans, another must take his place.  Shall I allow you to select a male whose autonomy is less important to you?”

“Why?” she cried.  “Why can’t I go alone?”

“Olivia,” he said.  “You cannot make this journey unaccompanied, because you must be protected.  Bahgree will surely attempt to destroy you.”

She couldn’t come up with an argument for that.  Not without a sinking sense of desperation, she seized on another.  “How long will I be gone?”

The Great Spirit merely shook his head, holding her eyes.

She stared at him, feeling the strength slide out of her body.  “What?” she said in a little voice.  “But, my son!”

The Great Spirit looked into Somurg’s eyes and smiled lovingly.  “He will be the leader of his people in his time,” he said.  “But only if you go on this journey.  If you do not, our son will die.”

“Are you threatening him?” she gasped.

His eyes blazed; he reared back, holding Somurg possessively to his massive chest.  He stopped being her opponent in conversation and became a god again.  “I would not harm my son!” he thundered, and beneath their feet the mountain trembled minutely.  “That you could think such evil of me!”

“You’re standing right there telling me you’re going to rape me and possess Kodjunn, what am I supposed to think when you tell me my son will die if I don’t obey you?” she shot back, her hands clenched again into fists.

He looked first enraged, then thoughtful, and finally, the fire of divinity died around him.  “You spoke your insult in ignorance and so I forgive it,” he said, making an obvious effort to sound forgiving.  “Our son is already dying.”

The memory of the sigru’s walls burned suddenly behind her eyes—images of death-grey infants, and Sudjummar’s troubled voice saying, ‘And they were well…at first.’  Olivia shook her head slowly, numbed by dread.  “Wh-What do you mean?”

“When I joined with Urga to create the race of gullan, Urga gave to me all power over her offspring.  I cannot heal them of the evils they have brought upon their own bodies, but I can possess them, empower them, even speak to them in their dreams.  They are mine, you see?  My children.  They belong to this world because they come from my divine seed.”

Olivia waited out this masculine boast in grim-lipped silence.

“When I lay with Bahgree, she made humans in her own image.  They came of my seed also and so belong to this world, though she gave me no power over them or any of her children.  Then Urga came and ripped her divinity away, cursing her and casting her aside.  Bahgree has no body now that I may lie with, no body with which to generate new offspring, and no power to give me over the get of her human get.”

“Get to the point!”

The Great Spirit tipped his horns at her.  “The point, mortal, is this.  The offspring that are made between humans and gullan have no place in this world.  They are not made by any god’s intent or blessing.  They are doomed to die.”

Olivia’s eyes went to Somurg, but he was sleeping in the Great Spirit’s arm, healthy, happy, and uncharacteristically quiet.  “I don’t understand,” she said, but she could still see paint on the sigru’s wall.  They had all died, all those fine healthy children.

“Gullan do not breed as humans do.  Perhaps you have suspected this.  Having birthed once, they do not spark again for many years.  The lives of my children are long, but violent.  Death comes to them on many wings.  Extinction,” he finished darkly, “is no new threat; to take humans for mates, no new solution.”

The Great Spirit looked down again at Somurg, who was sucking contentedly at the tip of the god’s claw.  His expression was hard with pain.  “Many times I have seen my children find willing mates among the humans, and there have been many young conceived, handsome in all form and feature.  Perfect young,” he said.  “Of course they are.  They must be.  This world does not know how else to make them.  They do not belong to it and so cannot be corrupted by any stain of either parent.  For so long as they drink the milk of their mothers, they live in their perfection, but when they grow to depend upon the world to sustain them, they will be rejected by it.  They will die.  It is not quick,” he said, staring into Somurg’s eyes.  “It is not painless.”

“It…”  Olivia’s voice failed her.  Mutely, she could only shake her head.

“They will weaken, mortal,” the Great Spirit said, still looking at the baby.  “In another year, two at most.  They will take their last swallow of mother’s milk and they will all begin to die.”

“How can we stop it?  How can I stop it?” she corrected herself.  “What do you want me to do?”

“I can give my blessing to the gullan blood that flows through the veins of these children, but there is human blood also.”

“So you need…what?  Bahgree’s blessing?  How am I supposed to give you that?”

“Bahgree has no power any longer to give such blessings, but that blessing must be given all the same, if our children are to survive.  The powers of the River Woman must be returned to a human body.”  He touched the tip of one claw to the hollow of her throat.  “I mean for that body to be yours.”

She stared at him.

“When you have become Bahgree’s incarnation, you will give your blessing to the human blood in the half-bred offspring and give command of their lives to me.  I will weave them into the fibers of this world, as I have done with all living things.  Then the world will embrace them and they will live.”

“There’s no other way?”

He shook his head, looking off into the distance.  “I never believed this would become necessary, that Bahgree’s children would have so multiplied while my own diminished.  But now it has become clear that unless our two kinds mingle, my children will perish entirely from this world.”

“Can’t you just give Bahgree’s powers back to Bahgree?”

He shook his head, frowning impressively.  “She has gone mad.   She will make me many promises if I will restore her, but I do not trust her to keep them.”

“She took over Mojo Woman.”

“She was invited.”

“And you cast her out!” she countered, a little desperately.  “Why do you need me at all?  Why not give her the power, get her to do it, and then just drive her back into nothing?”

“There is no such thing,” he said patiently, “as nothing.”  He looked down at Somurg, brushed the tiny face with the tip of his claw.  “And Bahgree is less of nothing than most.”

“But you defeated her!” Olivia repeated, almost wailing it.  “You pulled her out of Mojo Woman easily!”

“I removed the River from the human she invaded, yes.  But only because it was an invasion.  The one you call Mojo Woman must have invoked the River Woman’s name much as you did mine.  Be grateful for Bahgree’s madness.  If she had not been so impatient, if she had seduced the human instead and found a willing host to carry her instead of a fool to be overcome and devoured, things might have gone very differently.”

“Could she have destroyed you?” Olivia asked, unsure what answer she should be hoping for.

The Great Spirit took his claw from Somurg’s sleepily protesting mouth and grasped Olivia’s shoulder.  His grip was stone, he could easily crush her bones if he chose to, and the heat of him was like a furnace, painful to bear.  “Bahgree has no desire to destroy me.  She seeks instead to supplant me, to come back into her divinity and hold sway over all the life of this world!  Whatsoever mortal form accepts her power, that form she will consume.  Wherever the River flows, she will rule, until all living things are bent to her mad will.”

“You want me to be the one that takes Bahgree’s essence.”  She fought back a swell of despair.  “And even if I do this, you won’t let me go home.”

“The cost of immortality is pain.  If you were to return in your divine form, the force of your presence would ultimately destroy those around you.”

“That’s not fair!”

He did not bother to answer that.  “And so I will have you, Olivia Blake, and empower you with my divine seed.  You will learn how to contain and command such energies, and we will go together with my son to the Place of Binding, there to fill yourself with the essence of the River. You will consume Bahgree, as she would consume you, and you will remove her evil utterly from this world and save the children of our two peoples.” He studied her, then quietly added, “And then I will take you up as my mate.”

“Urga is your mate!”

He shook his head twice, slowly, never removing his eyes from hers.  “Urga’s usefulness to me is ended.  Her efforts are not enough to keep life and health among her children.  I will put her aside and take you as my mate,” he said again.  “Our union will restore what the River has caused to be crippled.”

“Damn you!” Olivia cried, balling her hands into fists.  “I won’t do it!”

The Great Spirit considered her.  “I had hoped to convince you with words,” he said.  “I could easily inflict hurts upon your flesh, but for this, I must have your willing oath.  So be it.  I will have it by any means I am able.”  He lifted his hand and made a gesture as if pulling something from the empty air.

Threads of substance thin as smoke spun out from the clay of Murgull’s grave and bound together in a writhing, clawing, horribly familiar form.  It was tattered, naked, bald, and brutally laid open.  It was Murgull.

Olivia screamed, flinging out her arms as if to embrace the mindlessly writhing soul and pull it from its unseen tormenters.  The Great Spirit halted her with one huge hand on her shoulder.

“For each life she cut short out of hatred, she will suffer the agonies of that slow death, until the years she stole are paid out in full.  And when she has completed that retribution, she will take on the fresh agonies of another.  And another.  Until every soul she doomed to death is repaid on her.”

“You monster!” she screamed.  Murgull’s single eye rolled towards her, but the spirit made no sound—her throat had been opened and her jaw torn away.

“It was not my hand that brought down the mountain.  No, Olivia, this is justice.  This is fairness.  But this I will relieve of her, if you give yourself to me.”

“I’ll go, I’ll go!” Olivia sobbed.  “Stop making her suffer!”

“Your oath, Olivia Blake.”

“I swear!” she shouted.  “I’ll go with you and I’ll take Bahgree!  What else do you want me to say?”

“Hm.  That much will suffice for now.”

There was a moment when the world seemed to shift, and Murgull’s spirit was released from torment.  The humped and misshapen thing stretched and grew straight.  Two wings flung out and flesh poured between the joints and made them whole.  Two eyes opened in a flawless, young-seeming face.  Murgull opened her mouth to speak, but faded away and was gone.

“Where is she?” Olivia cried.  “Where did she go?”

“To the world beyond,” the Great Spirit answered.  “The mysteries of that place are not for my knowing.”  He aimed a claw at her warningly.  “But you have given your word, Olivia, and the fate that Murgull did endure will be visited upon your own soul if you break your vow.”

“I won’t break it,” she said, still weeping.  “You know I won’t!”

“Do I?” he asked, and he was smiling again, just as if he hadn’t dangled the tattered, writhing soul of one of his ‘children’ over her head for her to jump at.  “You are a brave woman, but you are a daughter of the River, and the River is deceit.”

“How will you convince Kodjunn?” Olivia asked, rubbing the tears out of her eyes.  “Or will you just leap into his body and not bother asking?”

“He required no convincing.”

“You knew he would agree,” Olivia accused.  “You’ve been making him dream about me!  You let him think there was something between us!”

“Yes.”  He looked down again at Somurg, then tucked the folds of the blanket in around the little face.  “But if you are fair, Olivia, the lie did not begin with me.  Kodjunn desired you even before you led him to believe it was my will that he should couple with you.  And you,” he said, pinning her in place with the golden light of his eyes, “suffered no pangs of guilt when he was inside you.”

She slapped him.

He tipped his head to one side and regarded her, unaffected.  “It amazes me, Olivia, that one so bold as to strike a god hesitates to fuck one.  Tell me, is it my touch that you fear, or that you might take pleasure from it?”

She hauled back her hand again, and this time it was a fist.

“Strike me, then,” he invited, looking amused.  “You do me no harm, and I will have you anyway.”

Olivia lowered her arm, shaking with rage.

The Great Spirit looked down at the baby in his arms and smiled.  “Sleep, my son,” he murmured, and Somurg obediently uttered his baby snore.  The Great Spirit placed the baby in the snow and did something with his hand that caused a warm glow to cover the swaddled infant.

He straightened and held out his hand to Olivia.

She stared at it, them at him.

“You have agreed,” he said.

“I agreed to take Bahgree, I didn’t agree to you!”

“If you do not know me through such unions as this, the infusion of Bahgree’s immortal power will destroy you,” he said patiently.  “I have explained this.”

She shook her head, trembling.

“Olivia,” he said, very calmly, “I required only your willing oath to serve me.  All else, I may seize at my whim.”

Her eyes burned with angry tears.  She started to reach for his hand, and then looked down at her body.  “Should I get undressed?” she asked, feeling stupid and very small.

“If it pleases you to do so.  I require only your sex to be uncovered.”

Olivia began to cry.

She heard a very male sigh of annoyance and then his hands closed around her belt, stripping her of her leathers as if he were peeling the skin off an orange.  They caught on the thick tops of her boots, so he left them there, tangled around her ankles, and plucked her up by the waist.

She clawed at his arms once, involuntarily, her weeping rising out in a strengthless wail as he placed her over the head of his huge erection and shoved at her.  The pain was immediate, silver-bright, splitting her so that she thought her pelvis must surely be broken, and yet when she looked wildly down, she was whole and he had wedged himself inside perhaps an inch and no more.

“Hm,” he said.  “This will require some effort.”

“No no!  No more!  Please, stop!” she babbled, but he simply adjusted his grip on her and shoved again, actually twisting her hips as he pushed her down to sheath him, just as a man might twist a cork he is attempting to put back in a bottle.  Olivia shrieked, kicking and slapping in the mindless grip of pain, and the Great Spirit ignored her and continued wrestling her down around him until she was fully seated.  He came at once in a hot gush and smiled, pleased with himself.

“Let me go now,” she moaned, limp and helpless in her impalement.

“Go?”  He seemed sincerely surprised, sincerely amused.  “Human, we have just begun.  You may hold onto my horns if you wish.”  He ejaculated twice more in rapid succession, then got a better grip on her hips and began to slide her swiftly up and down on his monstrous cock.

Olivia pinwheeled her arms in a desperate bid to remain upright, then heaved herself forward to grab the lower of his horns and hold herself as still as she could while he used her in a fashion that was almost entirely masturbatory.  She hung on him helplessly, gulping and gasping in an effort to quell her sobs until she was quiet, timing her breaths to match his quick, curt movements.  She closed her eyes and held on, aware only of the rough ridges of bone beneath her palms, the thick brand splitting her up the middle, the regular “uh-uh-uh” of the breath beaten out of her body, and the irregular jet of cum he put inside her.

The shock of his callous use ebbed away to a dull, distant misery.  He was not breathing; he made no sound at all.  He neither increased nor slowed his rhythm in any way, but moved her on him as relentless and efficient as a machine.  The friction numbed her; she listened in darkness to the slow crawl of time.  She tried to rest her head on her arm, but she was bouncing steadily and hard.  She opened her eyes and saw the sun sinking red over the trees.  How long had he been at this?  She tried to shift in his grip and steal a glance at her watch.

He stopped, half-imbedded in her body, and eyed her with suspicion.  “What is it?”

Olivia squirmed vainly for relief around the massive organ.  “This is… uncomfortable.”

He considered that, looking thoughtfully into her contorted tear-stained face.  Then he lifted her off him and set her on her feet.

Olivia’s hand went at once to massage the ache out of her bruised sex, only to find her vaginal opening tender but dry.  She probed herself, wincing, knowing the god had spent torrents inside her but found nothing. “Where did it go?” she asked numbly, still cupping her wounded sex as if to protect it.

“You are translating its essence.”  He indicated the snow-covered ground.  “Lie down for me, if you are weary.”

She stared at the muddy snow, then back at him incredulously.

He read her face, growled impatiently, and stretched out his hand.  The snow melted at once down to bare, dry earth.  After a brief, clinical study of her expression, he motioned again and a thick bed of grass sprang up, green and deep.  “Lie down,” he commanded again.

Olivia lowered herself unhappily, pulling off her boots and tangled breeches, then drawing her knees up protectively to her chest.  “Is this…” She felt strangely rude to be asking.  “Is this going to take long?”

“Yes.”  He didn’t seem to find it a curious question at all.  “You may sleep if you wish.”  He knelt, removed her hand from its shielding position, spread her labia impersonally and fit the glans of his thick cock against her.  He pushed, pumped a few floods of cum in hot succession, and heaved himself down on her until their hips met.  Settled snug, he braced his weight against the ground and proceeded to thrust at her.

Olivia crossed her arms over her breasts, turning away from the sight of his vast chest filling her field of vision.  Her fingernails dug half-moons into the meat of her upper arms.  She jerked with the force of his movements, pressing as far back into the new grass as she could.  She closed her eyes, concentrated on breathing, and wished the earth would open up and swallow her.

“You are not sleeping,” he observed.

“How am I supposed to sleep?” she moaned, and started again to cry.

For answer, he tapped one claw hard against her smooth brow and stars exploded behind her eyes.  The last thing she knew as she fell away in blackness was the feel of him tilting her hips to thrust at her more effectively.

7

Olivia opened her eyes to see his black hand recede from her.  The great gold eyes of the god peered down at her, saw her blink, and narrowed in something that might be called satisfaction.  The Great Spirit pushed back, tearing a groan from her as his undiminished girth pulled free of her.

“Enough for now,” he said.  His hand closed around her arm, drew her up with unexpected consideration and held her until she found her balance.

Olivia dressed clumsily, reduced to childish fumblings by the overwhelming ache of her badly-used body.  The Great Spirit watched her for a moment, then bent, holding her against his shoulder, and easily pulled her pants up and over her hips, gently chasing her fingers out of the way to fasten her belt.

“Are we done?” she whispered.

“For now,” he said again.  “I have made the essential corrections to your mortal form to allow you to carry the spark of my power, but you alone must learn how to use it.  I warn you, these will not be easy lessons.  For now, my seed germinates inside you, but when you have succeeded in translating its essence, it will become your own power and it will demand release.  I leave that to you,” he added vaguely, and raked his eyes across a sky made black with moonless night.  “And now, your mate comes.  I will leave you, and you—”  He turned back to her and tapped his claw meaningfully on the hollow of her throat. “You must summon me again, as soon as you are able, to strengthen what we have begun.”

“I’m hurt!” she wailed.

“You’ll heal.”  He considered her with a strange blend of unemotional interest and powerful lust.  “Remember your oath, Olivia.  Do not force me to seek you out.”

She shook her head hurriedly, rubbing at her sex beneath the thin leather of her clothes and crying.  “I’ll do it,” she whispered.  Then, raggedly, “Is it going to hurt like this every time?”

“Probably.”  He moved past her to hunker besides Somurg, smiling at the sleeping infant with real warmth.  “So fine a son I have not seen in many years.”  He looked back at her over one shoulder.  “Do not allow him to die.”

The Great Spirit blazed once with light, blinding her, and when it faded, he was gone.

Olivia sank down on the flattened bed of grass, put her head in her hands and sobbed.  Long past the moment when she ran out of tears, long past the moment when her voice broke into cracked rasps of empty sound, long past her awareness of time or place.  She was still weeping when Vorgullum landed before her.

“Olivia?”

She raised her throbbing head, looked at him miserably, and dropped again in tears.

Vorgullum paced towards her hesitantly, touched the crown of her dark hair.  He seemed to be searching for something to say, but eventually moved past her to take up the swaddled whelp.

Somurg woke up long enough to spit up on Vorgullum’s chest irritably and go back to sleep.  As miserable as she was, Olivia found that funny.  She giggled a little, cried some more, and finally reached past the grass and gathered a handful of snow to rub on her hot face.  It helped, a little.

“You are still grieving,” Vorgullum was saying, looking concerned and slightly sheepish.  “If you are not ready, I will leave you a while longer.”

“I want to go home,” she said, speaking in English without thinking.

He hesitated, obviously trying to translate, then carefully asked, “Does that…are you angry with me?”

“No.  I’m sorry.  It was to ask if we could leave now.”

He came towards her immediately and lifted her with one arm as easily as if she were Somurg.  He nestled them both against his warm chest and she listened to the beating of his heart.  “You met with a power in this place.”

She pressed her face into the hollow of his throat, breathed in the rich, earthy scent of him.  “I did what I came to do,” she said at last.  “And now I want to go home.”  She sensed that he wished very much to question her, but knew him well enough by now to know that he wouldn’t.

And eventually he gathered them both close and jumped from the nearest ridge, his wings churning at the air until he caught flight.  Vorgullum’s silence as he carried them over the icy peaks was a brutal weight on her; and after hours in the burning grasp of the Great Spirit, it was more than she could bear.  She began to weep softly against his chest.

He banked abruptly, landed on the aerie and set her on her feet, folding his wings around them and searching her eyes with real hurt.  “This is more than grief for your teacher,” he said.  “What is tearing at you, my mate?  Will you not share your pain with me?”

Olivia worked her mouth mutely, without the words even to begin to tell him.  At last, in a kind of desperate anguish, she said, “Do you remember what Kodjunn said, the day at the gathering when—”

Vorgullum’s face tightened.  “He spoke of a path for you,” he said quietly.  “A path that leads away from the mountain, away from me.”  He looked out over the tangle of wood and stone and sky.  “So soon,” he murmured.

“I think so,” she said, and her voice cracked a little.  “I don’t know when exactly, but I think it’s going to be soon.  I’m sorry.”

“This is not your apology to make, my mate,” he told her, and while his voice was soft and comforting, his face as he searched the sky was hard.

“I want to come home.  Can I come to your lair tonight?” she asked, almost pleading.

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.  “Now, if you desire.”

“Yes.  Now.”  She took a deep, shuddering breath and released it with an unhappy sigh.  “Right now.”

“Hold on to me, my Olivia.  Hold our son.”  He carried them gently down the cavern wall until the mountain surrounded them.  When they reached the bottom, he led her, not to the tunnels, but to the commons.  There, he took Somurg and handed the baby to Kurlun, who looked surprised but not displeased.  Still without speaking, Vorgullum gathered Olivia into his arms like a child and bore her gently down the tunnels to his chambers.

The pit was soft with down and furs and the heat of the fire burning cleanly in the hearth.  His body was warm and hard with muscle, gentle as he gathered her close against him.  He tucked his chin atop her hair and hummed to her, holding her.  She clenched her hands in his pelt, so overwhelmed by grief that her chest ached, as if she were physically choking on it, drowning in it.  “Vorgullum?”

He stroked her hair, her back.

“Vorgullum, when you leave…when you go to find more humans…”

“Hush,” he said.

Doggedly, she pressed on.  “You have to take one for yourself.”

He was silent, but his hand kept moving, soft as suede.

“I’m not coming back.”

Nothing.

“Vorgullum?”

“I hear you, my Olivia,” he said.  His voice was low and even.  “But I will not think on this tonight.  I will not speak of it.  I will do nothing until the hour is upon me.  Until then, you are my mate.”

She pressed herself against him and cried some more, and these were the magic tears that finally unlocked her muscles and let her sleep.  He stroked her throughout, as steady as the tide washing in and out, but it was a long time before he spoke again and he surely only did so because he thought she was asleep.

“Damn you,” he said, his breath barely stirring her hair.  His hands were gentle, his arms secure.  “I curse you, Great Spirit.  Vorgullum curses you.”

8

It germinates inside you, he’d said, and it will demand release.

Olivia woke alone in the pit and lay there for a while feeling sorry for herself.  Her breasts ached and she supposed that was a reminder that she had a son and that son would be demanding something on tap right about now.  Climbing into her clothes, she also remembered the herbs which would need immediate attention, and that further reminded her of Carla, with whom she intended to have some chat with a barrenroot on hand.

“What a rotten day,” she grumbled, with absolutely no idea of just how bad her day was about to get.  She crossed to the entry room, slipping the well-used grips of her claws over her hands.  She put her foot down the chute and promptly kicked Bodual in the head.  Retreating, she snagged the hem of her pants on his short horns and when he jerked back, managed to rip the seam clear up to her hip.  It split to expose a smooth expanse of hip that she obligingly flashed at him just as he poked his head worriedly up the chute to see if she was all right.

“What are you, Wurlgunn’s evil twin?” she asked sourly, scrambling to cover her thigh.

“Evil what?”  He rocked back, finally gleaning onto the reference to Wurlgunn.  “How fair is that?” he demanded, laughing.  “You kicked me, remember?”

“What do you want?”  She rolled onto her hip, tried to see how bad the damage to her pants was, discovered it was terminal, and threw up her hands in defeat.

“I came to ask you if you would come to see Kodjunn’s beast,” he said affably.  “She’s been asking for you since yesterday.”

“Why?  Is she in pain?”  She noticed she was rubbing at her stomach; well, not rubbing, really, more like caressing, very slowly, in circles.  She frowned at her hand, forced it to her side.

“I wouldn’t know.  I never talk to her if I can help it and she sure doesn’t go out of her way to be sociable around me.”  His eyes dropped to her hand.  “Did I hurt your leg?”

She looked down, discovered she was now caressing her thigh, and crossed her arms over her chest.  Her nipples dug at her arms, radiating the most delicious shivers at the slightest friction of fabric.  She shifted her arms, caught herself, and said, “No, my leg’s fine.  How are yours?”

What a stupid thing to say.

“Fine.  It was my head you kicked.”  But his eyes lingered on the pale stripe of skin revealed to him where her pants had torn.  “Are you…Are you going to see the beast now?”

She was staring at his chest, did not immediately process the question.  He was smaller than Vorgullum; lean, but still athletic.  She wondered what that body would feel like moving against hers, wondered if she could bear his weight after he dropped atop her, spent.  She wondered—

She wondered what the hell was wrong with her.

He’d asked her about Cheyenne.  “Um, yes,” she said vaguely.  “Will you go with me?”

“Absolutely.  I won’t let you out of my arms.  Sight,” he corrected immediately and laughed a little nervously.

“Can you carry me down?”  Her claws were right there on her hip.

He didn’t notice them either.  “Sure.”  He gripped the lip of the chute, swung his legs down and hung there, waiting for her.

Olivia sat down between his outspread arms, slid forward and down, her hips brushing against the full length of his torso as she lowered herself to rest comfortably against him.  His chest, she thought, felt divine.  She imagined it bearing down on her as she undulated—

Good night! she thought, appalled.

“Hold on tight,” he murmured, just as if the chute dropped fifty feet instead of only ten.  He flattened his wings and slowly climbed down, pushing her flat against the wall, pushing himself hard against her.

He had plenty of room back there, she saw.  And she decided she could definitely take his weight after he was done and lay over her, with the musky scent of sex hanging delightfully in the air…

They were on the ground already and he wasn’t making any effort to back up.  She could feel a stiffening heat pressing against her belly.  That was interesting.  She shifted her hips experimentally.  Oh that was very nice.

He evidently thought so, too.

She wondered if she could peel their clothes back without having to move apart.  She wondered if he’d have to take his loincloth all the way off.  That would take far too much time.  He felt wonderful.  She began to move her hips in tiny circles, just to feel him rubbing all over her.

What the hell am I doing? she thought suddenly, and stopped.  “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he replied thickly.  “My fault.”

They stood there, neither one moving.

“Cheyenne,” she said.

“What?  Oh.  Right.”  He pried himself off her and backed up, slightly hunched over, as if something hurt.

Olivia took a step forward, resisted the urge to run her palm over the tight bulge in his loincloth, and kept going.  He followed her into the main tunnel.

“Are all of these lairs occupied?” she asked.

“Not all of them, no.  That one, for instance.  That one’s still empty.”

And very far away.  She glanced back at him.  He was staring straight ahead down the tunnel.  His eyes looked glazed.

“Totally empty,” she mused.

“Yes.”

She seized his hand and ran for it.

He grabbed her up under one arm and carried her there.  Up the chute, grinding hot against each other the whole way.  Tossing her over the stone in the entry and she rolling, bucking and scrambling to rip off her clothes while he bounded free of the chimney and yanked at his belt.  Cotton and leather flying through the air, and then the wonderful rapturous fantastic crush of his body on her bare breasts and his hot hardness pressed home and she screamed against his chest as he penetrated and she came with an explosion like thunder, all heat and sound and light and a bolt of something blazing bright and ruthless snapped out of her and he was trapped tight.

“Ungh!” he said, and that was all he said, although his mouth was still working.  His eyes snapped open, staring but not seeing, the eyes of a man in the first endless instant after death.  He shook once, violently, and then he began to thrust hard and fast, his body heaving urgently and his face slack and dead.  She felt him cum, as the Great Spirit had done, pouring something of himself inside her without diminishing his desperate lust in the slightest.  It was hot, whatever it was; it was hot and alive and seemed to stab all the way into her womb where she just…took it in, and as soon as she did, she was cumming too, cumming too ferociously to see or breathe or even feel him.

It felt good.  Not the way that sex feels good, not even the way that orgasm felt good, but the way, oh, the way a vampire’s first bite into a human throat must feel, or that first explosive burst when a volcano blows and all its heat goes flying, flying, screaming upwards and outwards forever.  It felt good and something inside her, the vampire, the volcano, drove itself forward out of Olivia’s very soul and bit deep, deep into Bodual’s.

They thrashed furiously on the stone floor, throwing off sweat and musk and madness, their two bodies fused into a single live wire of kinetic carnality.  She was not aware of him except as a dim shadow and searing heat, the source of this endless outpouring of whatever raw force she was stealing and transforming into climax, she only knew that it felt so good and she wanted him to keep giving it to her.  It was not until he began to groan that she realized he could not stop until she released him, no matter how often or savagely he climaxed.

And her first thought, when she did realize, was a selfish, hungry will to drive him on regardless, to take it all, every drop, to suck on the straw until his empty soul rattled—

Then horror crashed into her and she tried to push him off, but his gullan body worked on in a frenzy, immoveable.

No.  She wasn’t holding him with her hands.  On instinct alone, Olivia withdrew inside herself to that dangerous place of sexual fission and tried to wrench them apart.

Bodual howled against her shoulder, scathing pleasure scarring across the hot core of him that she was somehow draining.  He pitched against her hard enough that she heard her hips creak in protest, and still he could not stop.

Olivia realized she could see him, even with her eyes closed.  She could see the damage she was doing to him, see his heart hammering in a blur of white within a soul gone red with pain, and knew that more of this really would kill him, and still she had no idea how to end it.

In desperation, she recoiled until she felt her mind’s eye detach from her physical senses and open on a much greater world.  With this new clarity, she saw only the brilliant glow of her spirit below her, the fading light of his, and the taut bond connecting them.  From here, it was a simple thing to reach out with her mind, unhook him and sent the shreds of his self snapping back to him like a broken rubber band.

Bodual roared in her ear and dropped over her, and yes, she could bear it easily and yes, it did feel fine.

Olivia settled back down out of that high place into her flesh.  Her eyes were closed, but she could still see him, see energies like golden light ebbing out of his body like sweat and settling inside her.  His strength.  His life, maybe.

Great Spirit, thought Olivia, horrified.  What have I done?

“Olivia,” he moaned, half-unconscious.

She crooned to him softly, worriedly, and he opened his eyes again.

“What’s happening?” he asked groggily.

She started to ask what he meant and then realized she could smell it, too.  The scent of their passion was easing out of the air, being absorbed into her body.  His sweat, the oils of sexual heat, even the torrents of his semen, all fading into nothingness.  Taken.  Translated.

“Nothing.  Forget it,” she heard herself say, but it was a different voice, one that spoke directly to his mind.  She could almost see his thoughts realign themselves around her command, could feel the exact moment that they rooted, and then he dropped heavily onto his face beside her, so heavily that she thought he was dead right up until he began to snore.

What have I done? she asked herself again, almost panicked.  What am I still doing?

She didn’t want to know the answer.  Scrambling to fasten herself back into her clothes, Olivia left Bodual to his unnatural sleep and fled.

9

“Jesus, where were you?” Cheyenne asked crossly.  “I sent that idiot off ages ago.”

Olivia looked at her watch in alarm.  More than two hours had passed since Bodual had come to her cave.  Two hours spent writhing wildly in the entry room of an empty cave, and she could scarcely remember any of it.

Cheyenne had a preternatural ability to sense guilt.  She narrowed her eyes and smiled her hard, vicious smile.  “Getting some on the side, huh?”

“Give it a rest, for once.”  Olivia unslung her pack and went to wash her hands.  “What’s the matter?”

“Well, look, it’s like this.”  Cheyenne drummed her fingers restlessly on the side of the bench where she was seated.  “I know how you said I was weak and everything, but I don’t feel weak.”  She glared defiantly up at Olivia.  “I want to get up.  I’ll stick to the women’s tunnels if that makes everyone happy, I’ll even do a few chores, but I am getting up.  And as long as I’m asking for things, I want that wrinkled old bat to cart her ugly ass out of my room.”

“This isn’t your room,” Yawa said irritably from where she sat, scraping goat-hides.  “It is my room, and you are damned lucky I allow you to share it.”

Olivia looked at Cheyenne.  “She’s right.  You don’t get your own room, Cheyenne.  That’s the reality of living in the women’s tunnels.”

“Oh, it speaks,” snorted the redhead with dripping contempt.  “How many rooms of your own do you have?  Three?  Four?  Come on, count them up!  And what did you ever do for it but fuck the Big Bat?”  She started to stand.

Olivia surprised them both by putting her hand on Cheyenne’s shoulder and pushing her back down.  “Just in case you didn’t hear me the first five times I said so, you are bed-bound, lady.”

“Eat me raw, hon,” said Cheyenne, and gave her a shove.

It wasn’t a hard shove.  Certainly she’d been shoved around worse and managed to keep her feet, but the business with Bodual was still high in her mind and she wasn’t expecting it.  So she was shoved, and she didn’t scramble back and find her balance and maybe lose her temper and give Cheyenne the smack she so richly deserved.

She fell.

She went down hard, seeing with shocked clarity Cheyenne’s startled expression sweeping away from her, and then her head hit the raised lip of Yawa’s pit with a sound like an egg exploding right inside her skull.  She tasted peanut butter, very suddenly, very strong.  Her vision swam yellow, then grey, and then gradually bled true color back into the room.  She sat up, reached at her hair groggily and stared at the blood on her fingers.

She was dimly aware of commotion across the room.  After a few minutes she thought it might be important enough to bother looking at.

Yawa was wrestling Cheyenne violently to the ground.

“What goes on here?” bellowed Horumn, barreling through the doorway.  The Eldest took one look at Olivia, her unfocused gaze and her bloody hand, then turned and roared for Tina.

This is going to get rapidly out of hand, thought Olivia.  She tried to stand up, toppled over on her face, and tasted oranges.  Bizarre.

“Don’t stand, be still,” Horumn growled, and pressed her hand firmly against her shoulders when Olivia tried to stand anyway. She had never seen Horumn look like this before, and it took an inordinately long time to recognize the expression that so completely filled her field of vision:  It was terror.

Tina showed up with Crugunn and Tobi, quickly took Olivia’s face in her hands and started shining lights at her.

Cheyenne was screaming and cursing. Yawa was snarling right back at her, and considerably better as far as obscene vocabulary was concerned.  Horumn was trying to shout over the whole noise, and Tina’s mouth was moving but there didn’t seem to be any sound there at all.

Then the clamor subsided, until only Cheyenne’s shrill expletives could be heard.

“What goes on here?”

That was Vorgullum.  Olivia tried to turn towards him; her vision swam yellow again.  She’d never heard of that before.  Yellow.  Huh.

“There is blood on this floor.”  The low rasp of claws on stone.  Sniffing.  “This is the blood of my Olivia.”

A very long silence.  Even Cheyenne was still.

“Now, beast, you die.”  He went for her.

“Babies,” Olivia managed to gasp, and her vision went slightly blue.  This would be fascinating if it weren’t so frightening.

“There will be other young.”

“Please.”

He stood tensely at arm’s reach of Cheyenne.  His whole body was expanding with each breath he ripped from the air.  His hands were curled into deadly claws, capable of cutting through rock like warm butter; Cheyenne would be opened clear to her spine.

Time crawled by.  Tina’s voice was a soothing whisper as she probed at Olivia’s head.  There was no other sound.  No one even seemed to be breathing.

“Done,” he said at last, a growl of liquid rage.  “Know this, beast:  You live at the whim of my loved mate.  But you will never rise from that pit to work your evil again in my mountain.  Turn her.”

Cheyenne didn’t have time to struggle before Yawa had her on her stomach.  Vorgullum caught her kicking feet and pinned them both in one of his huge hands.  His claws slashed across the backs of her knees in a gush of gore and the sound of scraping bone.  He released her as she shrieked and bucked in agony, but her legs only swayed sluggishly in the spreading pool of blood.

“Bind her,” he commanded, and turned his back.

Tina was cutting swift eyes at the writhing, screaming woman in the pit, but she kept her arms around Olivia as Vorgullum crossed and hunkered down beside her.

“How badly is she hurt?”

Tina didn’t immediately answer.  That was never a good sign coming from a doctor.  Neither was looking at the world through hazy shades of yellow, come to think of it.

“Vorgullum, her skull is broken.”

His voice was deceptively calm.  “Are you certain?”

A longer pause this time, and when she spoke, it was in a frightened whisper.  “Vorgullum…I can’t fix this.  She’s going to die.”

Oh drat, thought Olivia, and knew no more.

10

“Waken, daughter of Bahgree.”

Olivia shut her eyes even tighter and tried to roll over.  Too early to wake up.  Too heavy.  Too hurt.

“Waken.”

Olivia groaned softly and cracked her eyes open.  The room was full of stars.  No, the room was full of Urga.  Urga was full of stars.

The goddess of the moon stretched out the lump of her hand impassively.  “Come to me, come out of that husk you wear.  My mate and master commands me to make you whole again, and you cannot endure my power and live.”  Nothing in Urga’s voice or face suggested she would be much dismayed by Olivia’s death.  “Come to me, else you die.”

That was finally starting to sink in.  Olivia fumbled out her hand and ran it clumsily through the air until it slapped down on Urga’s arm.  That awful, meaty appendage at the end of her wrist closed over Olivia’s hand.  There was a painless, tugging sensation and then she was standing.

She looked back over her shoulder in confusion and saw a woman lying in a sleeping pit, tangles of hair protruding from the bandaged mass of her head, and blood underneath that, blood that had dried across the sleeping bag she lay on like a dark halo.  The woman’s hand flopped limply out of the air and onto her stomach, where one finger continued to jitter and twitch.  Her face was pinched and shockingly pale except where it had been streaked with blood.  She looked like she was sleeping, and having the mother of all bad dreams.

Who is that? she asked.

Urga looked faintly amused.  “It is the sack of mortal flesh you wear.”  She reached out her other hand and felt the air just above the sleeping woman’s face.  “Cooling now with coming death.  It would not take much, I think, to still the heart that vainly beats within this mortal breast.”

Olivia looked around, still locked in Urga’s clammy grip.  There were shadows moving about in the room, but she couldn’t seem to make them out.  It was as if a great light were shining down on just this place, casting all the rest of the room into blackness.  She supposed Vorgullum was there, somewhere.  And Tina, maybe.  And maybe Amy.

“Will you beg for your life, daughter of Bahgree?”

No, she said, but with distraction, still trying to pierce the veil and identify her visitors.

A long, considering silence.  “Why will you not?”

What would be the point?  You’ll save me or you won’t.

“And if choose to allow your husk to die?”

Then I die.  And Somurg dies, and all the babies will die.  Ultimately, that means the death of this tribe.  The thought made her sad, in a vague way.

Urga stared at her, her moonlight wings fanning the dead air.  “And if I restore your life to you?”

I’ll be grateful.  And I’ll do what I have to do to try and save my son.

“Will you indeed be grateful?”  Cold appraisal.  “Will you be grateful, even as my mate of these many ages comes to you?  Will you be grateful as you call him to lie with you?”

One of the shadows crawled into the pit beside the sleeping woman.  Olivia still couldn’t make out any features, couldn’t even tell if it were human or gulla.

Urga?

“Yes?”  Expectant, triumphant, prepared to hear a plea.

Thank you for helping Beth.

Silence.

And thank you for coming to be with me when I was in labor.  Thank you for helping me deliver my son.

Silence.

That’s all.  I’m ready to die now.

Urga looked down at the woman in the pit.

The shadow was embracing the sleeping woman.  Had to be Vorgullum then.

Urga pressed her hand against the woman’s serene brow.  She seemed almost to hesitate.  Then her hand disappeared beneath the skin.

The woman’s body lit up slowly from within; she burned with the cold blue light of the moon.  None of the shadows seemed to notice.

Urga’s hand withdrew.  “Return, then.”  Her voice was strangely subdued.  “Return, daughter of the River.  Live, for now.  Return.”

Olivia wanted to say something, but the pull of her body was too strong.  She closed her eyes, felt herself bending backwards, falling.

11

“Thank you,” she muttered.  “I’m sorry about this.  I’m sorry about everything.  I’m sorry about…about…”   Someone was holding her.  She opened her eyes, puzzled.

Vorgullum was lying beside her, his arm tight around her waist, his head buried in the join of her neck and shoulder.

Olivia sat up.

There was an immediate bay of surprise, human and gullan alike.  Olivia clamped her hands over her ears, wincing.  The sound was bright, cut into her like knives.

Tina pulled her hands away and shone a flashlight into her eyes, causing her to squirm back, mewling.  “Hold still.  What hurts?”

“Nothing hurts.  Hang on.”  Olivia rubbed her face, braced her hands on the small of her back and stretched, then reached around and felt gingerly at the back of her head.  “I took a hell of whack, didn’t I?”

“You broke your head-bone, girl!”  Tina looked as if she couldn’t decide whether she should be amazed or exasperated.  “Bend down.  Goddammit, get back, Vorgullum!”

Olivia obediently put her head between her knees and offered Tina the back of her head.

“Jesus Christ, it’s gone,” Tina breathed.

“Merciful Spirit, I thank you,” Vorgullum murmured and rolled onto his stomach as if not daring to move.

Olivia straightened in time to see an expression of near-religious awe melting over Tina’s face.  “I didn’t do it,” she said.  “Urga healed me.”

Tina immediately frowned and bent her over again.  “No,” she muttered, “No, it’s really gone.”  She allowed Olivia to sit up again.  “Eyes look good, color’s good.”  She plucked Olivia’s wrist up and looked at her watch.  “Pulse is strong.”

“Urga healed me,” Olivia said again.

“Um, yeah.  It…You know what, fine.  Makes as good an answer as anything else.”  Tina glanced at Vorgullum, still pressing his face into the bedding, and reached over to take his pulse.

“Is Cheyenne okay?”

Tina checked herself before she actually dropped her jaw and gaped, but it was a near thing.  “Is Cheyenne okay?  Jesus wept, girl!”

“Now I know she is well,” Vorgullum muttered, his wrist limp in Tina’s grip.

“Cheyenne is…well, she’s not okay, but she’ll do.  She’ll probably lose the use of her legs from the knees down, but at this point, nobody cares.  Except you.  She lost some blood, but not so much that she can’t recover, and not enough to hurt the babies any.  Rumm and Thurga are taking turns changing bandages and force-feeding her orange juice and in the meantime I’ve been giving her some of Murgull’s all-purpose baby aspirin stuff.”

“Where’s Somurg?”

“Still with Amy and Kurlun.  I’d better go see them; they were both scared green when Vorgullum carried you in here.  There’s about twenty gullan camped outside your chimney.  Are you going to throw up?”

“No, why?”  Olivia tracked Tina’s eyes and saw she was rubbing her stomach.  Oh you’ve got to be kidding, she thought helplessly.  “No, I’m just…Can you tell people that I’m sleeping or something?  I don’t want to deal with them right now.  Okay?”

“Sure.”  Tina actually seemed reassured by this, as if a desire for privacy were some indicator of mental health.  She gathered up her pack and slung it over one shoulder.  “And you,” she said, pointing firmly at Vorgullum.  “You make sure she gets plenty of bed rest.”  She turned and marched from the room.  Distantly, Olivia heard her trying to disperse a crowd.

“My Olivia, I thought that I would lose you…. Are you sick?”

“No,” she said, feeling the hot boil of that new power surging towards him.  “But I think I’m going to hurt you now.”

It drove out at him and he was hers.

12

Olivia left Vorgullum sleeping heavily, scarcely conscious after the violent bout of that act which could not be called lovemaking by any stretch of the imagination.  But after the necessary work of washing the blood out of her hair had been completed, she didn’t really know what to do with herself.  She was afraid to go walking in the tunnels at random, afraid to encounter any other male that might become ensnared in the unpredictable energies the Great Spirit had set inside her.  Whatever it was, and she feared to know exactly what, she didn’t appear to be having any trouble translating it.

Restless and giving in by slow degrees to the little fingers of panic inside her, Olivia went to fetch Somurg, in the hopes that having the infant at her breast might chase the raging power into some other corner.  After all, who ever heard of a breast-feeding sex maniac?

Olivia called to Amy from the chimney and received a languid answer in the feminine.  She emerged from the chute edgily, casting wary eyes around for Kurlun.  “Is your mate here?” she asked, tensed to flee.

“Nope, gone hunting before the big…gone hunting.  C’mon in.”

Olivia came gratefully up and trotted into the sleeping room.  Although much smaller than the leader’s lair, Kurlun’s chambers were almost opulent.  The entry room was furnished with benches and warm furs and there were a half dozen wooden statuettes, each between three and four feet tall, placed around the room.  In the sleeping room, the hearth was flanked with columns of painted stone and blankets had been hung up with pitons all along the far wall.  There were camping coolers neatly lining the room, and a lidless wooden box beside the bed lined with soft folds of pink fabric.  There was a five-foot tall wooden carving, half-finished, of a gulla and a human twined together in sexual abandon, apparently in mid-flight, and several ledges of stone holding smaller, somewhat less graphic carvings.  The ledges also held a variety of human objects, including Smugg’s baby toys and Amy’s colored rocks, and there was a good row of magazines and worn books, propped up at both ends by matching electric can openers—one yellow, one pink.  Pink.

“Wow,” Olivia said at last, shaking her head.  “Nice place, Amy.”

“I’ll pass that on.  Honestly, sometimes I think Kurlun is the result of too many beers between Bigfoot and Martha Stewart.”  Amy was sitting in a nest of goose-down comforters and velvet drapes, propped up with a pile of Asian pillows in cream and gold and scarlet, a baby at each breast, eyes closed contentedly as they nursed.  Sleepily, she said, “And how ‘bout you, huh?  Back from the dead.  What do you do for an encore?”

“Walk on water.”  It was meant as a joke; the image of herself rising like Bahgree from the river crushed the humor in it.

Amy opened her eyes and looked at her.  “What happened, really?”

“Cheyenne gave me a toss on the cobblestones, I knocked my noggin a good one, bled a lot, Tina told Vorgullum I was dying, etcetera, etcetera.  I sit up, instant miracle.”

“Yeah, right.  Now what really happened?”  Amy quirked her mouth in a smile.  “Tina is not the panicking kind.”

“What do you call it when a slight concussion gets turned into a fractured skull?”  She felt a little guilty saying this when Tina wasn’t even in the room to defend herself.  “Besides, it’s been a while since Tina actually practiced real medicine.  Easy to forget what a fractured skull looks like in that time.”

“I should think a fractured skull is one of those things you never forget the looks of.  But okay, have it your way.  Here, grab Sir Lunchalot.  I gotta burp Fang.”

Olivia reached for her son only to have Somurg yowl at her.  She said soothing things in his pointed ear and he punched her furiously in the jaw, stuffed both hands in his mouth and started gumming them noisily.

“Friendly, ain’t he?” Amy asked wryly.  “My God, he fusses a lot.  I must have been up in the night six times.”

“Only six?  He went easy on you.”

Amy smirked.  “Smugg wakes up every day at precisely noon for her morning constitutional and then goes right back to sleep.  Ha ha all over you, babe.”  She coaxed a dainty burp from the aforementioned and leaned back to cuddle her.

“I didn’t get more than a few hours of sleep the first week after Somurg was born,” Olivia said.  “But I think he’s finally beginning to adjust.”

“That’s what he calls adjusting, huh?  Aw, he’s not so bad, I guess.  I would have enjoyed it more if everyone wasn’t so worried about you getting killed by Cheyenne.”

“I wasn’t killed.”

“This right on top of your mysterious trip to Murgull’s grave,” Amy continued.  “Which you have not said one word to anyone about.  I was so concerned, I couldn’t even have sex.”

“For the whole night?”

“Funny.  Kurlun said the same thing, only he was serious.”

“He’s such a sweet guy,” Olivia remarked, looking back at the can openers.

“Kurlun?  He’s wonderful.  He’s so astounded by everything Smugg does, it’s hilarious.  She spits up on him and he’s thrilled.  And did you see his baby basin?”

Olivia glanced back at the lidless wooden box and smiled.  “It’s very nice,” she said.  “I suppose he made it himself.”

Amy leaned back and grinned wickedly.  “He was worried about rolling off me and crushing her.”

“How did you ever survive a whole eight hours of labor?”

“Prayer and pure thoughts,” Amy said piously.  “It’s not all his fault, either.  It turns out that I’m sexually excited by the smell of baby burps.”

Olivia thought of Bodual and couldn’t quite bring herself to laugh.  How long could she really go on avoiding all the male gullan in the mountain, anyway?   And what was she taking out of them?  Was she even absorbing the power correctly?  There had to be more to it than simply sucking out all their strength and will.

A cold thought struck her then: Maybe there wasn’t any more than that.  After all, Bahgree hadn’t been much more than a succubus herself.  Maybe that was all Olivia had to be too, in order to assimilate her powers.

“What’s the matter?” Amy asked.

Olivia blinked and stared at her.  “Nothing,” she said after a short pause.

“It’s Vorgullum, isn’t it?”

“Vorgullum?”  Olivia thought of the gulla lying comatose in her sleeping pit and felt baffled.  “What about him?”

Now Amy looked distinctly uncomfortable.  “Okay, it isn’t Vorgullum.  Um, I don’t suppose you can forget I said that?”

“No, what’s wrong?”

“Today’s the red-letter day,” Amy said reluctantly.  “Vorgullum came around this morning.  He actually woke Kurlun up, and you must know what it takes for one of them to do that.”

“They’re leaving tonight?  For…For the…”

“For the girls,” Amy said, and her mouth twisted, as if tasting something bitter.  She looked down at Smugg, patted her absently, and then shook her head.  “That was the plan, anyway.  But things have probably changed.  I’m sure Vorgullum will want to hang around and make sure you’re okay before they go, but if he does wait…it won’t be for very long.  He seems to think he’s run out of time.”

“I guess he has,” Olivia murmured.

“He still hasn’t…told you?”

“He had a few other things on his mind.”

“Me and my big mouth.  I’m sorry, Olivia.”

Olivia demurred to keep Amy from looking quite so miserable.  “It’s okay,” she said at last.  “I had a few other things on my mind, too.  I can cope with it.  In fact,” she sighed, “I guess I’d better get brewing on Murgull’s Magic Birth Control Potion.”

“I guess you’d better,” Amy agreed.  She reached out a comforting touch of her hand for goodbye, then lay back down in her pillow-strewn pit with Smugg in the crook of one arm, looking troubled as Olivia left.

She wanted to go by the commons first, just to let everyone know she was all right, but the fear that she might lose control right there in front of everyone was too great.  She kept to the tunnels instead, ducking into any handy side-passage if she heard someone coming, and made her way slowly to the women’s tunnels.  With every step, she made an effort to lock out any emotion, trying not to think as she did that even Mr. Spock got horny once in a while.

Finally in sight of the stretched hide that separated the women’s tunnels from the rest of the mountain, Olivia gathered herself and ran for it.

So naturally, Wurlgunn picked that precise moment to step out of the side passage to the hot baths and smack into her.  She tried to jump back, shrilling out a little cry of alarm, certain that she was about to fly into a sexual frenzy.  He immediately flung out his arms to catch her, misjudged the distance between them, and inadvertently punched her in the stomach.

She fell on her rump, jarring both her and the baby.  Wurlgunn uttered a high-pitched howl and set about trying to lift her off the ground and soothe Somurg at the same time.

“Did you hit your head?” he was asking, panicked.

“I don’t keep my head in my butt,” she shot back, and started laughing when he promptly dropped her again.  So much for her defenses, and yet she felt absolutely no urge to throw herself at him.  “You clumsy goat,” she groaned, getting her feet under her at last despite his eager help.

“I’m sorry, Olivia.  I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“How’s Beth?” Olivia asked absently, trying to coax Somurg back to silence.

“She’s sick,” he replied, downcast.  “All day long, most days.  I don’t know what the matter is.”

“She’s pregnant,” Olivia said, still distracted.  “Tell her to come by and I’ll give her some bellyroot.  It really helps.”

There was a long silence.  “She is?” Wurlgunn asked, startled.

“Yes, of course she is.”  Olivia realized he was staring at her and looked up.  “How could you not know?” she asked, surprised.  “Didn’t you notice that she hadn’t gone into season?”

“Beth has never been all that consistent,” he remarked, still looking slightly dazed.  He began to move off, growing a goofy smile, thumped full-length into the nearest wall.  “She’s pregnant,” he said happily.

Shaking her head, reminding herself to see to Beth later, Olivia continued to her workroom, patting Somurg gently as she went.  Perhaps sensing that she was herself more relaxed, Somurg gradually calmed down, and Olivia was able to unpack her gathered herbs before he began to snuffily demand sustenance.  Once she had all the herbs sorted out, Olivia found a bench and sat to nurse Somurg.  She had been sitting there for some time before she realized someone was watching her.

She looked up into Kodjunn’s pensive face.  “What are you doing, lurking in the shadows?”

“I wasn’t lurking, I was only watching,” he returned mildly.   “Admiring the perfect picture of motherhood before me and thinking fond thoughts of my own children.  Shall they be sons?  Daughters?  Shall I have one of each?”

“So you’ve been to see Cheyenne.  I didn’t think they allowed males in this part of the cave for any reason.”

“The sigruum is a special case.  Are you hurt?  Horumn told me you were dying.”

“Urga healed me.”

He nodded, accepting this without question.  “Vorgullum crippled Cheyenne.  I’m surprised he didn’t kill her.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“Provided she refrains from further stupidity.  When I believed that you would not survive, I wanted to kill her myself.”  He came all the way into the room and crouched down to tickle Somurg’s brow.  “And she knew it, I think.  When I left, she was saying that she would stay on her back with an assistant present for the duration of her pregnancy.  Which is a better promise than she made for the conception,” he added.

“She says that like she’s got a choice.”

“No, she says that like she wants my help.  I’ve seen this Cheyenne before, the night she tried to escape from Hollow Mountain, when she lay there with her broken leg promising me she would let me couple with her in her times of season.”  His hand moved away from her laughing son to comb through her damp hair.  It began as a curious touch, questing for injury, but ended as nothing but a caress.  “She claims it was an accident.  She claims she didn’t mean to strike at you, and certainly did not mean for you to fall and hit your head.”

“I don’t think she did.”  When he rolled his eyes, she said irritably, “Well, I don’t.”

“In any event, she says now that she will give me the babies when they are born, if only we will allow her to live.  My babies,” he corrected, and laughed a little.  “I can’t seem to say that enough.  My babies.”

“You’re going to make a good father,” Olivia said, trying to coax a burp out of her son.

“Babies don’t frighten me,” Kodjunn said, handing her a towel to clean up the inevitable baby-puke that she never seemed to remember.  “Bears, yes.  Spiders, sometimes.  But deep in my heart, I know that if I had to, even I could fend off a baby.”

Olivia started to laugh, and he laughed with her.  After a moment, Somurg joined in, one hand tethered in Kodjunn’s thick hair while the other waved at Olivia.

“Ah, here you are!”

They both stopped laughing and turned as one to see Vorgullum stride into the workroom.  He was limping slightly, and held his hunting spear as a kind of cane, leaning on it when he stopped before them.

“Leave us, sigruum.  I must speak with my mate.  The…The hunters are gathering.  Go.”

Kodjunn touched Olivia’s shoulder once in wordless sympathy; she supposed he already knew what Vorgullum meant to say.  Then they were alone, and Vorgullum simply stood there and looked at her.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Olivia,” he said, his voice low and reluctant.  “Olivia, there is something I must tell you.  It is time.  We are leaving.”

Olivia felt her smile fading.  “Tonight?”

He frowned at the wall, as though he could see through it to the place where Cheyenne lay.  “I could be persuaded to delay if you are not well.”

“But I am well.  You ought to know that by now,” she added with a faint smile.  “Or do you require further demonstration?”

He nodded slowly, but it was not an answer to her teasing question, only a silent affirmation that he had heard exactly what he’d expected to hear.  “I have set apart those men who will be receiving mates and they have been ready to receive them for several months.  I told them I would give the order when we were settled here and our stores begun to fill.  Then I told them I would give the order when my son was born and I could see that he was well.  Then I told them you must be recovered from delivery, then that you must fulfill your promise to your teacher.  And so it goes, and there will always be one thing more that I could wait for…but now you have told me that soon you will be leaving.”

“But I don’t know when!  It could be moons away!  It could be—”

“It could be,” he agreed.  “But however many days or moons it may be, I can’t spend them doing nothing but waiting to lose you.  So.”

“So you gave the order,” she said, looking at Somurg.  Her son grinned his rare, toothless grin, unaware that his mother had ever stood drugged in a parking lot staring into the face of a monster, oblivious to the hell his father was planning for forty more women just like her.  “You could stay,” she said softly.  “You don’t have to do this.”

“I do,” he said, and sighed.  “And I will.  Olivia, my mate, if you are not well, I will stay with you until you are.”  He looked at her.  “I will let you tell me when to leave.”

She stared at him in perfect horror.  “No,” she managed.  “No, my God, don’t make me a part of that!”

He nodded once and looked away.  “Then it is tonight.”

“But—”

“Olivia…there is something more.”  Vorgullum rubbed at the base of his horns, his face tight with strain.  “What I must say to you will be difficult to hear.  I think you will despise me for it.  Olivia, you will not be alone in my absence.”

No.  No, not this.

“I know this is difficult,” Vorgullum continued.  “Sometimes, when I look at you, I wish that you had never come here, so that you would never have known the fear of those first days.  I wish Murgull—”  Here he made that hooking motion with his left hand.  “—had never picked you to follow in her terrible path.  I wish the Great Spirit had never put his hand on you, and above all other wishes, I wish that I could cut my claws across him for laying such a burden across your shoulders when your life, ha, has been difficult enough.”

And she noted that he did not make the warding sign that should have caught his blasphemous words before they were lifted to the Great Spirit’s ears.

“But of what matter are my wishes?  Nothing I have ever wished for…”  Vorgullum took a deep breath and collected his thoughts.  Hesitantly, he said, “I know that you hate to be reminded of the Great Spirit, even though you cannot deny that his hand has been upon you all this while and has done much good.  Still I see the unhappiness that touch brings you and I know that he means to take you from me.  If he were a male in flesh and bone, I could challenge him, battle him, kill him if I could and banish him if I could not.  But he is the Great Spirit,” he said, agonized.  “What can I do against that?”

“It’s not your fault,” she tried to say, but he silenced her and went on.

“I am not interested in laying blame.  I concern myself only with you.  The day is coming when you will leave me, maybe forever.  That day will be misery enough.  And now I must leave you, without knowing if you will be here to greet me when I return.  I feel…I feel that I have nothing to hold onto, only my tribe.  I am leaving tonight, because that is all that I can think to do.  If I stay, if I have to lie in my pit beside you and think about the Great Spirit’s hand upon you, I will do something foolish…and futile.  And so I’m leaving, and because I am leaving, there is something else I must do.  I must protect you, provide for you in the only way I know how.  Give me my son.”

Olivia hesitated, but stood and put Somurg in his outstretched arm.  He turned and walked away, leaning on his spear, and she had little choice but to follow him.

“I have told myself again and again that we are in no danger.  That humans, despite all that we have stolen from them and done to them, have never known of us or lurked in wait for us.  Still, I can’t shake this feeling, like a cloud hanging over us.  I know that I might not return; the tribe knows, and they will look to you for leadership while I am gone.”

“I’ll be okay,” she said again, trying to sound very strong and sincere.

He stopped in the doorway of the new commons, where most if not all of the tribe were gathered.  In the center of the room, Damark held Smugg while Amy sent Kurlun off with a kiss.  Liz’s Gormuck and Anita’s Murk were standing close together and watching with obvious unease as their humans just as uneasily selected their new mates, but the rest were huddled around Horumn, apparently intent upon waiting out their mates’ return in the women’s tunnels.

“I could go to the women’s tunnels,” Olivia heard herself say.  “I spend most of my time there anyway.”

“It is your right,” he said heavily.  “But I ask you to reconsider.  I am leaving only a handful of hunters and they will have to work hard to keep our stores filled.  There will be much fear and much uncertainty, and the tribe will need a leader to assuage it.  That leader will be the male who shares your pit, and everyone here knows that. If you hide from them in the women’s tunnels, certain males may become aggressive.”

She looked at him sharply.

“You are in no danger,” he said, and touched her cheek with the back of his hand.  “But I’m afraid to come home and find a tribesman dead.  Please, Olivia.”

“I understand.”  Olivia managed a smile.  “I don’t like it, but I do understand.”

“Good.”

A gullan shape detached from the shadows and limped up to them.  It was Sudjummar, looking grim.

“Here is my brother,” Vorgullum said.  “He is a good man.”

Olivia couldn’t help herself.  She gaped.  Even Somurg goggled.

Sudjummar averted his eyes, stretching one wing uncomfortably.  The dried limb made a crackling sound like cellophane.  “I know you,” he said.  “You want to be independent, like you were when Vorgullum was moving the tribe.  But things are changed, Olivia.  And Vorgullum won’t be here.”

He spread his hands, looking crippled and helpless, then suddenly snapped them into fists and flexed his powerful frame.  In that moment, he looked perfectly capable of cracking a gullan skull like a hollow eggshell.  “I am able to defend you if I must and every male here knows that.”

Vorgullum was waiting, silent.

Sudjummar stretched out his arm and Olivia took it, allowing him to draw her in close.  It was almost a ritualized movement, one that the entire tribe could see.  Now that she had been passed out of Vorgullum’s shadow and into Sudjummar’s, an armored field had gone up around her, proclaiming her off-limits.  When Vorgullum set Somurg firmly in the metal maker’s hands, the moment was complete.

Olivia looked back at Vorgullum, to make a final farewell, and fell silent.  He had taken several steps back, and was looking at Sudjummar strangely—reluctance, guilt, relief, and pain were all mixed together in that steady gaze.  At last, after a few false starts, he managed to speak.  “Thank you for this, brother.  Stand tall.”

Sudjummar nodded once, somewhat stiffly, and squeezed Olivia’s shoulder.  “It was a long time ago,” he said, just as softly.  “Make your journey.  Return swiftly and return whole.  I will keep your mate and son safely until you grow tall again.”

Bewildered, Olivia looked back at Vorgullum, but he only turned away.  He didn’t kiss her goodbye this time.  He didn’t even touch his brow to hers.  She was someone else’s mate now.  He called to his travel party, and they filed out of the commons, leaving the tribe much depleted.  Only the humans called goodbyes, and only a few of them at that.

Then they were gone and it was quiet.

Sudjummar immediately released her.  “You have things to do, I think,” he said.  “I will have your things brought to the forge.  Olivia, I…”  He looked for a moment as though he meant to say something more, then shook his horns, turned, and limped away.

CHAPTER THREE

CHANGES

1

Olivia spent that first long day in the women’s tunnels, but found no peace there.  All the gullan seemed to think that being assigned a new mate was something to be tremendously excited about and listening to their chatter about what it meant that Anita chose Truunal or how many males had been furious that Sarah B. refused Burgelbun’s chosen replacement to live in the tunnels or (and this was worst of all) the shocking shame of Olivia being given to a cripple, even if he was the metal-maker.  She paced unhappily through the tunnels until she found the lair that Sarah B. was sharing with three other women, but Sarah was in no mood to talk—about Burgelbun, about her pregnancy, about anything—and after several minutes of one-sided conversation, Olivia left her alone.  With nowhere else to go, Olivia gave up and went home.

She was halfway to the tovorak’s lair before she remembered that she was staying with Sudjummar and she had no idea where the forge even was.   While she was standing in the mainway, feeling at once stupid and sorry for herself, she heard footsteps.  She moved aside, but rather than pass by, whoever it was stopped and put a hand on her arm.

She jumped and whirled about, waking Somurg from a light doze and sending him into fits of indignation.  The gulla behind her flinched back, either at her sudden movement or the baby’s wails, so that the faint candlelight that lit the mainway fell fully on his face; she recognized Victoria’s former mate at once, but being startled put more anger than he deserved into her voice when she said, “Thugg!  You frightened me!”

“It wasn’t my intention,” he apologized, giving her and the crying baby some space.  “I saw you here alone and thought I would walk you to your lair.”

Olivia answered distractedly, attempting to soothe her son.  “That’s kind of you, but I’m not certain just yet where I’ll be sleeping.”

“I see,” Thugg said, sounding peculiarly pleased.

At the same time, a thin kernel of bright power sparked to life within Olivia, almost like a warning.

Oh jeez, Olivia thought, struggling to control it even as she felt it growing stronger.  “I didn’t mean that quite the way it sounded.  I only meant that I might be needed in the women’s tunnels.”

He smiled faintly, regarding her with a hunter’s eye.   “There is no need for that,” he said, letting the barest hint of a thrumm enter his voice.

Her control was slipping.  “No need for a healer to see to the pregnant women of this tribe?”

“That isn’t why you want to stay in the women’s tunnels.”  It wasn’t a question.  “You want to avoid the metal-maker’s pit.”

It now took all her attention to hold the Great Spirit’s damned spark in check.  She couldn’t answer him, and he took her strained silence and flushed face for agreement.  Or arousal.

“Then consider me,” Thugg said, fanning his wings out as far as he was able in the tunnel, as though to win her over by showing his bodily perfection over Sudjummar. “I am strong and sound, one of Vorgullum’s trusted hunters and providers.  Let me provide for you, Olivia.”

“How…How can you say this to me?” she managed, squeezing her thighs together helplessly. “How dare you?  My mate hasn’t been gone even one day!  You couldn’t give me a lousy day before chasing after me?!”

That stopped him.  He even backed up a little, but continued to run his eyes over her body with undisguised intent and that power within Olivia was now boiling at the very edge of her ability to control.  “If I gave you the day, would you consider my offer tomorrow?”

“If you want to rut this badly, go to the Eldest!” she snapped, trying to make him angry now, trying to say anything that would cool these terrible fires.  “Although if Chugg is busy, you might have to settle for Victoria, or did you think I’d forgotten what you did to the last women who shared your pit?”

It did cool, but not by much.  The glint of anger in his eye did not diminish the lust shining there at all.

“You mean Umma,” he said, speaking the gullan name given to Victoria.  “I did what I had to do to give healthy young to my tribe, but I always provided for her.  I provide for her still, when she has no men willing to couple with her shadow.”  He came a step closer, glaring.  “And I was a good mate to her, before I put her aside.  I could be a good mate again.”

“I’m not interested, Thugg.”

His head cocked.  “You shouldn’t have to settle for a cripple when you can have a whole man.”

“I’m not settling for Sudjummar!”

“You don’t want to be with him.  I can make you want to be with me.”  He brushed the back of his hand across her cheek, just like Vorgullum.  “I miss having a woman in my lair.”

She jerked away from him, heart and loins and power pulsing together to the same insistent beat.  “There are lots of them in the women’s tunnels for you to win over, but I have a mate while Vorgullum’s away.”

“I don’t want Sarahjay or Beth.  I want you.”  He advanced again and this time brushed at her hip.  “I’ve wanted you for a long time.”

“What goes on here?” Doru asked mildly.

Olivia spun towards him with obvious relief, but the chief hunter was leaning against the wall and looking meditatively past her at Thugg.

Thugg rapidly put space between them.  “I thought I might offer to carry Olivia’s belongings to the forge.”

“Really.  The echoes in this new mountain are really something, because that isn’t what it sounded like to me.”  Doru pushed himself off the wall and closed the distance between them in two swift steps.  “It sounded to me,” he said calmly, “like a female who is trying very hard to explain the word no.  Now…perhaps you need me to define it for you?”

And before Thugg could say or do a thing, before Olivia could even blink, Doru had swung his massive arm and slapped Thugg hard across the face.  The force of this unexpected blow lifted the other gulla right up off his feet and sent him slamming into the rock wall of the tunnel.  Thugg staggered, found his balance, gripped his snout, and looked up at Doru with huge, white-ringed eyes.

“No,” said Doru, very softly.

Thugg inched back a few steps, still hunched over with a hand to his face.  “I hear you.  I’m leaving.”

“You do that.”  Doru remained where he was, filling the tunnel with the sheer size of him, glaring down at the older gulla who squeezed hurriedly past him and was gone.  “Dickhead,” he muttered.

Olivia’s breath whooshed out of her in a flood of relief; the power was fading with Thugg’s inglorious retreat.  Although it did not die entirely, it could be managed.  She looked down at Somurg’s pinched and sleeping face, then rocked him foolishly, at the knife’s edge of sudden tears.  For a moment there, she’d forgotten he was even in her arms.  If the power had gotten away from her…She could actually see him dropping from her hands to the stone floor of the tunnels as she leapt at Thugg, lost in the grip of the Great Spirit’s spark.

Doru’s huge hand patted at her shoulder.  “Easy, Olivia.  He’s gone.”

“I know,” she said, and tried to sound like she meant it.  “I’m fine.”

“And now,” Doru said dryly, “I will take your belongings to the forge.”

He fell into step beside her as she headed for Vorgullum’s chambers.  It was a long walk, made longer by stifling silence.

“He wouldn’t have harmed you,” he said at last.

“I know.”  She thought she knew.

“I hope you weren’t too unnerved, because you’re likely to go through it more than once.  At least until the most aggressive ones get it through their goat-heads that you’re really serious about staying with the metal-maker.”

“I was expecting it, just not so soon.”

He nodded thoughtfully, going ahead of her until he stood before the chimney to Vorgullum’s cave.  “A word of advice, if I may.  Pay attention to the ones that come for you the fastest.  They’ll be the ones that make the most trouble for Sudjummar.  If there is a challenge, and barring a miracle there will be, it will come from one of them.  Wait here.”  He climbed up out of sight.

Olivia stood in the short tunnel, jogging Somurg nervously while Doru presumably packed her things.  Without warning, the power flared.

“Olivia, I greet you,” said a male voice.

She turned fast, clutching her son like a shield.  There was a gulla roughly Kurlun’s age standing at the mouth of the alcove, fanning his wings out to block the tunnel and any chance of escape.  “Um, hi.  Who are you?”

“Vorung.”  He did not sound disappointed that she didn’t know him.  “Gathering your things?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Will it take long?”

She blinked.  “Maybe.”

“I see.  Well, if you’re not busy tomorrow, perhaps you would like to come to my pit?”

She was little bowled back by the complete lack of subtlety.  “I…I’m staying with Sudjummar.”

“I do not propose to remove you from him.”  He shrugged one shoulder.  “You appeared content enough to accept him when Vorgullum gave you to his care.  Whether you did so out of loyalty to the tovorak or not, I respect your choice.  I desire only the pleasure of your body.”

“My mate has only just left me!” she said again, fighting a second battle for self-control.  “I haven’t even spent a whole day with Sudjummar!”

“Spend as many days as you like,” he replied.  “The metal-maker is a good man, but perhaps a poor companion in the pit.  I am not.”

Both of them glanced around as Doru began to descend through the chute.  Vorung’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“I leave you to consider my offer,” he said and moved away.

“Who was that?” Doru asked, adjusting the packs he carried over one arm.  She told him.  He snorted.  “Vorung.  No kidding.  He had this same chat with Sarahjay and Anita earlier.  I suppose he thinks he’s improving his chances.  Speaking as an impartial observer, Olivia, you can do better.”

They walked in silence through the tunnels to the forge.

“Have you seen my…have you seen Tobi?” he asked eventually.

“She drops in on Tina once in a while, but we haven’t really spoken.”

“Ah.  It’s the same with us.  I see her nearly every night—one of my best hunters, in fact—but we don’t talk much.  She seems happy, doesn’t she?”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

“So am I.”

She could hear the ringing of Sudjummar’s hammer striking on metal long before she arrived at the forge.  Keeping pace with Doru, she had no time to brace herself; she walked in and there he was, his back to the door, one hand holding the work in place while the other rose and fell with the hammer, beating it into form.  The muscles in his back clenched and coiled, his crippled wings fanned steadily, and steam poured endlessly around his powerful body.

Funny.  She’d expected to feel dread at this moment, planned for it, wanted it.  But her first thought when she saw him was what a good looking man he really was.  It disturbed her.

“Ho there, metal-maker.  I bring your mate.”  Doru set his armload of packs on the ground and stretched.  “And you ought to know that both Thugg and Vorung are interested in making your acquaintance.”

“Let them come.”  Sudjummar lay the hammer down and held up the crude metal for inspection.  It was a spear-head, or it was going to be, as soon as it was hardened and an edge put on it.

“Is it customary for them to move so fast?” she asked, feeling a little out of her element.

Both males exchanged amused glances.  Sudjummar said, “Not customary, but not unexpected.  You aren’t just any female, after all.  Bad enough that half the tribe thinks of you as Olivia Urgarna, but the other half thinks of you as Olivia Issugul.”  Olivia in Ecstasy.

“And of course, there are those few ambitious males that think of you as Olivia Who-Will-Make-Me-Tall-If-I-Have-Her,” Doru added.  “Vorgullum does not intend to return for some time.  There may be some resistance to the idea of a tovorak who can’t hunt.”

Sudjummar snorted.  “Some.  You’re hilarious, Doru.”

“It’s called tact.  I didn’t think you’d recognize it.”

“So let them come,” Sudjummar repeated.  “It should be a good lesson for those who believe crippled means vulnerable.”  He dropped the spear-head into a vat of water and was briefly curtained by steam.  When the air cleared, he set the unfinished metal back on his anvil and dried his pelt with a handy towel.  “In the meantime, understand if I start ordering you around, chief hunter.”

“Do it.  Every chance you get.  I plan to be absolutely obnoxious with obedience.”  Doru glanced at Olivia, a frown darkening his eyes.  He turned to go, but paused and rested his heavy hand on Olivia’s shoulder.  “I hope for your sake you’re every bit as brave as Vorgullum thinks you are,” he said.  “You’re about to see a very ugly part of our lives.”  He squeezed gently, then departed.

Sudjummar and Olivia were left to stare at each other.

“Let me show you to the sleeping room,” he said unnecessarily, backing away from her.  “I have a place for your son to sleep, and I got some wrappings and things from the Eldest.  I didn’t know what toys he likes, and frankly, it’s been so long since I have seen a baby-toy that I wouldn’t know what to give him, so I borrowed some from Amy.  The pit is big enough for both of us, I think, and I made certain there was enough bedding for us to share.  Vorgullum told me you liked books, so I got some from the sigruum before he…”  He stopped, blinked twice, and looked down at his feet.  “I’m chattering, aren’t I?”

“A little,” she said with a smile.

“I wasn’t certain you’d come.  I thought you might spend the day in Vorgullum’s lair, or in the women’s tunnels.  I was embarrassed to come for you.  If you really don’t want to—”  He stopped again, then sighed and turned away.

She followed him to the back of the forge, and up the narrow entry chute to his private chambers.  They were expansive, almost as large and many-roomed as her own, and his pit, if possible, was even bigger, and piled high with soft bedding.  Next to the pit, he had placed a plastic cooler, padded with blankets, for Somurg.

“Vorgullum says you like that kind,” Sudjummar explained, motioning at the sleeping bags.

“Yes.  Thank you.”  Olivia lowered herself to sit on a thick bear’s pelt so that she could nurse a cranky Somurg.  There was something very different about Sudjummar’s chambers that tugged at her mind, and after several minutes, she had it.  There was not a single stone bench to be seen.  Not in this room, and not in any of the rooms she had passed through.  The only chairs were blockish outcroppings carved from the rock.

“Will you be all right if I leave you alone?” he asked, backing towards the door.  “I should bathe.”

“Go ahead.  This will take a while,” she added, gesturing at her furiously sucking son.

He hesitated in the doorway, then backed all the way out and was gone.

She had to wake Somurg several times to continue nursing, but at length he would not be roused, and so she brought him around just long enough to coax a burp out of him and then set him in the cooler.  She gave him one of Amy’s borrowed toys, a set of plastic keys, and he whacked them angrily against the wall of his cradle and then threw them at his feet and went to sleep.

Olivia fetched up the packs Doru had brought and was amused to see that apparently he’d decided all she needed to be happy in her new pit was an extra sleeping bag, some of Somurg’s wrappings and her Rubik’s Cube, which she had finally solved and didn’t dare jumble up again.

She was putting the Rubik’s Cube on a natural shelf of jutting rock when she felt the power rising again.  Lord, who is it now? she thought apprehensively, but turned to see Sudjummar watching her from the doorway.  “That was a long bath,” she remarked.

“Had a lot to go over,” he replied, hitching at his loincloth suggestively, and looked only slightly more relaxed when she laughed.  “Do you want something to eat?”

“Not particularly.”

That caused him to tense up again.

Olivia paused in the act of unpacking Somurg’s spare wrappings and considered him.  “Why are you so nervous, Sudjummar?”

“I know that you don’t want to be here.”  He took a deep breath, looked away from her, and said, “And I want you.”

The power pulsed hotter in silent confirmation.  Crushing it took considerably more effort than she’d needed with either Thugg or Vorung, and all at once, she wondered why she was fighting.  “Vorgullum expected me to couple with the mate he chose for me while he is gone.”

Sudjummar nodded slowly.  “And it made you angry, didn’t it?”

Surprised, she huffed out a sharp laugh.  “You’re the only gulla I’ve met who understands that!”

“Oh, I don’t understand it.  I just saw your face when he chose me.”  Sudjummar regarded her with cautious confusion.  “Don’t…Don’t humans couple for pleasure alone?”

“Obviously, you’ve never met Carla.”

“I have,” he corrected.  “And I have no idea why she does it, but it’s not for her pleasure.”  He caught the question in her eyes.  “No, I haven’t been with her,” he said.  “I would never hurt a female in mating, not even if she wants me to.  But tell me why you were angry.  Vorgullum will be away a long time.”

She rolled her eyes.  “And I need someone to provide for me, right.  Believe it or not, humans are expected to be faithful to one another, whether or not babies can come of it,” she added crossly.

“Well, of course, so are gullan, but what happens when one mate leaves the other for a very long time?” Sudjummar pressed.  “They can hardly be expected to remain celibate until they are reunited.”

“Yes, they can.  Yes, they are.”

He looked positively astounded.  “So, if the male goes away to hunt and is gone for, say, sixty days, the female doesn’t take another mate?”  His disbelief only grew as she shook her head.  “What about her safety?  Who will keep her sheltered and fed?  Who will feed her children?”

“She does.”  At his thunderstruck expression, she added, “Sometimes, her mate will send her things during his absence so that he can still provide for her in some way, but she certainly doesn’t run out and get a new mate.”

“But surely she couples!”

“Not until her mate gets back.”

“For sixty days?!  That can’t be healthy!”

“It works for us,” she replied simply.  “And what about the female gullan here with no mates?  Who provides for them?  Who couples with them?”

“You have to understand that we are not living now the way we should be.  There should never be so many unmated females living in the mountain.”

“You’re avoiding the question,” she observed, amused.

“Well, they take care of themselves,” he admitted.  “They cultivate the foods that grow here, and they cut clothing from the hides we bring them.  They’re helpful, so we all provide for them when things get hard.  And of course, there are a few that use whatever other talents they have to earn an easier life.”

“Like Furluu and the other safe females,” she said.

He looked mildly irritated.  “I was thinking of Horumn, actually.  Or your teacher.”

“But in other words, what you are telling me is that you give them just enough to make do unless you have a pressing reason to give them a little more.”

Sudjummar shrugged.  “I don’t do anything at all,” he said.  “Aside from crafting the occasional tool, and I do that out of a sense of tribal duty more than anything else.  You forget, they support me too.”  He twitched his withered wing at her.  “And you still haven’t told me why you were angry.”

“You are just not getting it, are you?  When a man says he cares about you, he shouldn’t just throw you at a total stranger and expect you to like it!  It makes you feel like…”  There was no gullan word for whore.  “Like you’re a tool he can pick up and put down whenever he wants to.”

“It shouldn’t,” Sudjummar said quietly.  “It should make you feel loved, that he wants so much to see you provided for.”

“Everyone tells me I’ll be provided for anyway and I don’t need someone to protect me.”

“Which is how you ended up with a broken skull the other day, I suppose.”

“That is a different matter entirely.”

“Ah yes.”

“How would you feel if you knew you couldn’t walk down the damn hall without having complete strangers rubbing their loincloths at you?”

“Deliriously happy.”

She stared at him and burst out laughing.

“It’s been a while for me,” he said seriously.  “Olivia, apart from that Great Spirit business, and the leadership business, and the healer business, and the Urgarna business—”

“Okay, I get the point.”

“—and the Issugul business, you would still be an attractive human female who has been proven fertile and who has more than half a wit in her head for a change.”

“Thank you, I think,” she said.

“If you were my mate, I would give up leadership of the tribe before I left you alone for even a day,” he said fiercely.

“And I’d leave you because I don’t like to be smothered,” she finished.

He stared at her, and then shook his head.  “You humans are so strange.  As fragile as you are, I’d think you’d welcome a strong protector.”  He twitched his withered wing again and looked at it.  “Even if it wasn’t me.”

“Don’t talk like that.  I think you’re very handsome.”

He snorted.  “For a cripple, you mean.”

“So your wings don’t work!  Neither do mine!”

His second snort was more of a true laugh.

“You look just fine.  And even if you didn’t, well my God, even Chugg gets tumbled now and then!”

“A sound argument,” he murmured, but his smile faded.  He glanced back at his pit, and then at her again.  “I’m tired.  Can we sleep now?”

“All right.”  She watched as he self-consciously lowered himself into the pit without removing his loincloth.  He lay on his side, his back to her, but the spark of that power was still churning inside of her, wanting nothing but to drive out and bite into him.  He lay there without touching her, without even looking at her, just wanting her. At last, she reached out—not with her power, but with her hand.  “I’m sorry I made you so uncomfortable,” she said.

“I’m not.  I’d just as soon we got it out the first day than have to wait for it.  And as uncomfortable goes, it wasn’t that bad.”

They lay there.

“I hate myself for saying this,” he said suddenly.  “Do you honestly think I’m handsome?”

The power tried to spark again.  She crushed it.

“I do,” she replied.  She hesitated, unsure if this was about to make things better or worse, then added, “You look an awful lot like Vorgullum, don’t you know that?”

“Only in the face.”

She had to laugh.  “The face is what people look at!”

“Humans, maybe.”

More quiet.

Sudjummar heaved a short sigh and shifted around until he was facing her.  “You don’t actually want to hear this boring old story, do you?”

“Do you want to tell it?” she asked.

He eyed her, seemingly more embarrassed than anything else, and finally said, “Simply put, it is this:  A long time ago, I fell in love.  In spite of the old leader’s law, I fell in love.”

Somurg made a sleepy whimper and they both looked around, but the sound was not repeated.

Sudjummar rolled onto his stomach and propped his head up on his folded arms, staring at the wall.  “If I spoke her name, you’d know it, so I won’t,” he said.  “Suffice to say, she’s very attractive and very intelligent, and very sheltered, in those days.  She had never been out of the women’s tunnels.  I only saw her because I could take tools as far as the cooking hearth.  We could never be mates, but I hoped to impress her so that we might couple.  That sounds so noble when I say it out loud like that,” he added and covered his eyes.

“Don’t cut your wings over it.  We’ve all had our less than noble moments where sex was concerned.”

“Well, I had a distinct advantage, being a metal-maker.  I brought her candle-bowls, and buckles for her loincloth, and pretty things to wear around her wrists and neck.  We spent long days in secret, just talking.  I let her be the one to guide me to the pit.  It seemed important at the time,” he muttered, and for a long time after that, he was quiet.

“This is painful,” Olivia said at last.  “I’m sorry.  Please, stop.”

He sighed.  “Olivia, bad stories are like good sex.  Sometimes, you just have to finish, whether you really want to or not.

“She was new to love and so was I, but before long, we were both drunk with it.  And like drunkards, we were clumsy.  My brother—he wasn’t Vorgullum in those days—learned of the existence of this secret lover.  He was ferociously angry with me, even after I assured him that she couldn’t catch my spark. And then one day, he stopped talking about it.

“Overnight, it seemed, my young lover cooled towards me.  She stopped meeting with me and soon, I saw nothing of her at all.  To say that I was devastated would be saying too little.  So, in desperation, I hunted her like an animal, separated her scent from the others and tracked her to the secret lair she had taken.  No easy task that, but my brother and I both have a keen sense of smell, keener than most.  I waited until mid-night before going in to her, so that no one would see us together.  I was so nervous about what I would do or say that I failed to notice she was not alone.

“My brother was sleeping soundly beside her.  I stood and stared for a very long time, and then I left.  As soon as I could, I confronted him.  We fought.  I demanded to know why he would take the one thing from me that was my own, when he had the whole tribe to choose from.  He told me…ah Olivia, he told me she had sought him out.  He told me she…wished to couple with a whole man.”  He closed his eyes against the memory, and then shook his head briskly.  “We may have the same face, but his is on a better body.”

“The opinion of one woman—” she began.

“It’s not one woman,” he said.  “You remind me that even Chugg doesn’t lack for company, but you’ll forgive me for pointing out that there are far fewer females in this tribe than males. That means, among other things, that the females choose their partners, and they don’t choose me.”  He made that small, hurt laugh again.  “With the exception of your Carla, and that’s no rare privilege.

“But you, Olivia, you are a precious thing.  The first time I saw you, I knew my brother would love you.  And he does, you know, despite what you say about politics.  It isn’t the same sort of love Kurlun has for Amy, but I believe it’s real.  And the first time I spoke to you, I knew I would love you as well.  Damn me.  It’s a hard thing to be right all the time.”

“We all have our burdens,” she said, smiling in the darkness.

“Oh yes, in a way it’s a comfort to be disfigured.  Imagine what life would be like for me if I were handsome as well as clever and wise and possessed of a spear that could thrust through walls.  That is—” he stammered as she burst out laughing.  “No, okay, I guess that’s exactly what that is.”

“Look on the bright side, you’d have all these great new tunnels.”  She wiped her eyes, still grinning.  “I like you.  I don’t see the happy side of Vorgullum often.”

“We see it more than we used to,” he replied.  “Do you know what the hell of it is?”

“What?”

“Because of you, I am beginning to like my brother.”  Sudjummar ran his claws in restless circles over his hard stomach.  “I’ve always blamed him for being different from me.  And I’ve blamed him for years for all the stupid mistakes that children make, and held grudges only fools can carry.  I wish that I were better than that, but there it is.  And now, seeing the man that you are making of him, I realize that we’re both better than that, and I can put it aside a little more each day.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when it’s gone.  Take up weaving, I suppose.”

“You think he’s a good person.”

“Don’t you?”  Interested.

“For the most part.”  She rolled onto her back and clasped her hands behind her head.  “Not in the beginning, certainly.  And there are times when I don’t like to think about the things he does, like the thing he’s doing now.  But I can truthfully say that he’s always been very patient.”

Sudjummar was smiling crookedly at her.  “That’s hilarious,” he said when she was through.  “My brother has developed many merits since he grew tall, but I have never thought him patient.  Strong, brave, worthy of devotion and respect, sure, but he has a temper on him that would make she-bear run.” His expression darkened suddenly.  “And I’ll bear the full force of that anger if he returns to find his tribesmen squabbling over you like otters.”

He kept his thoughts to himself for several long minutes, until after she’d begun to doze off.  In a low, considering voice, he said, “I’ll have to see to it that my shadow is full upon you as soon as possible.  It may not be pleasant.  Try not to panic.”

2

Olivia awoke to the sounds of her son giggling shrilly.  She hunted for the source, rubbing focus into her eyes, and saw Sudjummar kneeling before the fire, giving Somurg a sloppy bath in a shallow basin.  Somurg splashed with abandon, occasionally pausing to pound at Sudjummar’s arms and let out another squealing cry of pleasure.

“What are you doing?” Olivia asked, even though it was obvious.

“Well, he’s such a messy eater, I thought this was the easiest way of cleaning him.”  Sudjummar scooped up a palmful of water and rubbed it into Somurg’s downy pelt.

Fully awake, Olivia sat up and stared at him.  “You fed him?  What did you feed him?”

“Pulp,” Sudjummar said cheerfully.  “Babies can eat anything an adult can eat, only it has to be softer.  So I chewed it for him.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up to nurse him?”

“You were sleeping,” he replied, as though that explained everything.

When they were weaned, the Great Spirit had said.  When they’d had their last swallow of mother’s milk and had to rely upon the world to sustain them, that was when the babies would start to die.

“If it happens again,” she said, working hard to keep her tone neutral and the dread from showing on her face, “wake me up.  I know you gullan have a problem with interrupting the world of dreams or whatever, but I want to wake up to feed my son.  Nothing is more important to me than that.  All right?”

“As you like it.”  Sudjummar lifted Somurg out of the basin and dried him off with a soft towel, then wrapped him snugly in changing rags.  “And since you’re awake now, you need to get ready.  I brought fresh clothing for you.”

Olivia started to get up, got a good look at the clothes he’d indicated, and dropped back into the pit again, staring.  Sudjummar intended for her to wear a rabbit-fur skirt and a Maidenform bra.

Oh, you just never know where she’s going to turn up, Olivia thought, stunned.  “Um,” she called.  “You aren’t serious about this, are you?”

“I’m very serious.  Please, Olivia.”

“I’m going to freeze!”

An evil chuckle preceded his lascivious reply.  “Then I will take you into the dark and warm you, woman.”

She got up and stepped into the skirt, for which creation all of two rabbits had died and that was being damned generous.  It came with a belt of highly polished metal pieces, ostentatious as hell, but she supposed nothing else would scream his name quite as loudly.  “This is part of your plan, isn’t it?”

“It is but a small part,” he said modestly.  “I, on the other hand, possess a very large part…and a moderate role in the plan as well.”

The bra was nowhere near the right size for her, but she managed to get it on, even if it did squeeze her into the dreaded quadroboob.  He paused to admire her anyway, with what seemed genuine satisfaction.

“Now you come with me,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“We are going,” he said, “to take those clothes right off you.”

He led her out of the forge, down a series of lengthy passages, to the baths.  It was actually crowded this morning, more than she had ever seen before; she wondered if it were due more to Vorgullum’s absence and a general relaxing of the strict schedule he kept them under, or if the gullan were endeavoring to groom themselves in the spirit of the chase.

Sudjummar slipped into the alcove and returned with two large towels and a blanket.  He spread the blanket out next to the only empty bathtub, and set Somurg down.  “Behave yourself,” he said with mock sternness.

Somurg goggled at him, then stuffed a handful of blanket in his mouth and drooled busily.

Sudjummar turned to Olivia and caressed her shoulders before deftly unhooking her bra and setting it down where it wouldn’t get wet.  He didn’t bother to look around, or gauge the reactions of the others.  He knew exactly what message he was sending, but only Olivia could feel the reactions he provoked.  Still, it was a bath, the least likely place for any gulla to be overcome with lust, and the power’s urgings weren’t as strong as she’d feared.  Olivia was able to almost relax, and when she was naked, he put his arms around her waist and lifted her into the tub.

Only after she was settled did he unfasten his belt-pouch and loincloth.  But before setting them aside, he opened the pouch and removed a comb.  Sliding into the hot water beside her, he gathered in her in very close and began to comb her hair.

Hot water did what only hot water can do when it isn’t readily available from a tap.  She could feel her whole body soaking in the heat, opening to pleasure like the petals of a flower opening to the sun.  She leaned against his chest, closed her eyes, and just let go.

“I like this plan,” she murmured.

He hummed at her, a low mating thrumm, scarcely audible over the sound of gullan speech and splashing.  His hands wrapped through her hair experimentally, smoothing out the tangles and combing it into health with long, measured strokes.  “This is so incredible,” he was saying.  “So long and soft…like nothing I’ve ever seen.  Does it hurt when I do this?”

“No.  Do that.”

He began to play with her hair, separating and plaiting the tresses, only to comb them back out and stroke it out clean and straight.  At last, he was only lifting his claws through the thickest fall, fascinated by the way her hair poured out over his hands.

She turned to face him, shaking her hair gently out of his grip.  “Enough,” she whispered. “You’ll have me melting over you like wax.”

“There’s an interesting image.”  His eyes gleamed.

And it must have been, because that flare of heat and power coiled deep inside her, much more insistently than it had before.  She leaned forward at once, pulling out of his grip in an effort to control it.

Sudjummar apparently took the quick motion as a sign that she was done with her bath.  He jumped from the water, shook himself off, then reached down and lifted her out to stand beside him.  Again, he refused to allow her to dry herself, but ran a towel thoroughly over her body.

The power was growing hotter.

Sudjummar was dressing her, still in full view of the other males.  He dried and combed through her hair a final time, then released it with reluctance and collected Somurg.  Making certain that every male in the baths could see him with Olivia at his side and her son in his arms, he led her from the room.

“That went well,” he said cheerfully.

I’m going to rip his loincloth off with my teeth, she thought, and couldn’t keep from visualizing just exactly that.  She felt like her innards were boiling.  She was shaking from the effort of keeping her power contained.  In a moment, a very short moment, she was going to lose that battle.

“Sudjummar,” she managed to say.

He glanced at her, executed a flawless double-take, and stopped dead in the tunnel.  “What’s wrong?” he demanded.  “I can get Tina.”

He opened his mouth, presumably to bellow for a healer, and Olivia grabbed a handful of fur and yanked his mouth down against hers.  He had never been kissed before, obviously, but she didn’t let him break away.  She kissed him until she was sure he wouldn’t ask questions, and then she caught his hand and pulled him away from the lit tunnel, down a narrow winding passage, to the welcoming blackness of an empty room.

Sudjummar released her just long enough to unsling the pack from her shoulder and set Somurg on it.  Then he was groping after her in the dark, but she could see him just fine; the power pulsed hungrily insider her, burning in her eyes so that the light of his life-force and even that of little Somurg glowed brilliantly through the black.

“Where are you?” he whispered.  “Oliv—”

She fell on him, shoving him hard against the wall and pressing herself tight against him, as if she were trying to satisfy the power in the most direct fashion—by crawling bodily inside him.  His arms came around her at once, trying to embrace her, to caress her, but she didn’t want caresses.

Olivia hooked one leg around his hips and ground against him furiously, trying to unhook his belt with both hands.  That this would be best accomplished if she were standing back from him never entered her mind. With a frustrated growl, she found the edge of his loincloth and pulled it loose enough to slip her hands inside.  He was hard, he was hot, he was blazing in her mind’s eye like flame.

Power swelled, cramping furiously through body and soul alike, and finally surged free.  She howled, but there was no fear or even pleasure in the sound, only relief.  It was finally out and it felt so good, so strong, so divine, that no part of her was left to feel concern for the unsuspecting man it snared. Sudjummar’s body jerked hard, every muscle like steel, and then she was thrust up against the wall and deliciously split up the middle.  After that, she knew nothing but the pounding of her sweat-slicked body and the hot musk of his pelt and the dizzying echoes of his climax becoming hers provoking his.

She wouldn’t draw this out.  No, no matter how good it felt.  The Great Spirit might not care what happened to the people who suffered his spark, but Olivia did.  She’d hurt Bodual; she would not hurt Sudjummar.

Now that she had done it once, she found she could easily distance her mind from her body and see the hooks that held him to her.  She could free him any time she wanted, and she would (but oh it felt so good).  Still, she hesitated, watching their energies boil together with the fury of their coupling, feeling the somehow unimportant sensations of his thrusts.  The power was there, pumping steadily out of him, building up inside of her, ready to be used.

But how?  For what?

Olivia dropped back into her body and gathered some of the power.  She didn’t think about how she was going to do it and so it was easy, like flexing a muscle.  It also felt good to do this, maybe not volcano-good, but better than the sex that was putting the power into her in the first place.  She held the power for a moment, feeling it pulse in time to Sudjummar’s thrusts, and then probed at him with it.

He arched violently, slamming his claws into the wall and shoving into her as if he did in fact intend to drive her through the wall.  The constriction, the weight and musk of him, the feel of his hot seed battering at her; Olivia lost herself to wave upon wave of climax both physical and intangible.

She clenched her hands on his shoulders, concentrated, and did it again.

So did he, exactly the same way.

Olivia began to braid together tongues of power for a third attempt, then saw with her mind’s eye that Sudjummar was in tremendous pain.  Reluctantly, she released her half-formed probe and unfastened him instead.

He rocked back, slammed forward, expelled explosively inside her, and then dropped flat on his back with a crash and a groan.

Olivia fell to her knees, now blind in the dark, and crawled across him until she found his wing, trying to trace it with her hands, certain she’d broken it.  “Are you hurt?  Oh my God, what have I done to you?”

“Not sure.”  She felt the leathery slide of his wings over stone and he struggled to roll over and then to stand.  He made it to his knees and then his hand closed over her shoulder, forcing her to face him as if he could see her in the dark.  “Now, you say your human mate would leave you and expect you to be celibate?”  He sounded incredulous.

Nervous giggles bubbled out of her.  “That’s right.”

“That’s appalling.  Great Spirit, my brother told me about you and I did not believe him.”  He leaned on her heavily, finally got his feet beneath him and slowly straightened.  “I need to sleep.”

Olivia led him to the wall and leaned him against it, and then got back to her knees and crawled over the floor until she found her bra and Somurg.  “I think you broke your belt,” she said.

“That’s not all I broke.”  A short pause.  “Where is it?”

She placed the pieces in his hands and he felt them experimentally.

“I’ll have to tie it on until we can get back to the forge.  This wasn’t part of the plan.  I was supposed to be showing you off in the commons by now.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry! I’d thrash with you on a hot rock anytime you asked!”  He paused again.  “But don’t ask me again just yet.”

She got an arm under him, holding Somurg against her chest and carrying her pack awkwardly over her shoulder.  She was nervous about touching him, but the power, fed, remained quiet.  “Not yet,” she agreed, daring to slip an arm around his waist.  “Let’s get you back to bed.”

3

She stayed with Sudjummar all day while he slept, but hunger eventually drove her out.  Hoping to avoid a resurgence of the power, Olivia went to the women’s tunnels, arriving in time to share the last pot of stew with the tribeswomen before the kitchens were cleaned for the night.  Then, feeling guilty for spending so much of her day in isolation, she took herself to Tina’s clinic to see if Dark Mountain’s resident physician needed an assistant.

She didn’t honestly expect to find anyone there so late (the reflecting mirrors in the women’s commons were all dark, and Thurga was going around even now to put out the lanterns and candles in the tunnels), but to her surprise, she found Amy and Tina bent over Liz while Horumn taught them gullan massage techniques.  Liz seemed happy enough as she chatted away under the three of them, but the glance Tina gave Olivia was an ominous one.  Suppressing a shiver of dread, Olivia waited at the doorway until the lesson ended and Tina trotted briskly over to say, “How’s your head?”

“Fine.  What’s the matter?”

Tina took Olivia’s arm and propelled her bodily out of the clinic and into the tunnels.  “She’s going to lose the baby,” she said without preamble.

“What?  Why?  I thought—”

“The baby is perfectly healthy, as near as I can tell.  Liz is not.  She started having contractions last night, out of friggin’ nowhere.  Her blood pressure’s good, no fever, she’s alert, but if she stands up for more than a few minutes…”  Tina shook her head and glared over her shoulder.  “I think we got them stopped for now, but she’s only six months along.  If she’s got a problem with her works, it’ll only get worse as the baby gets heavier.”

“Can we do anything?” Olivia asked.

“Here?” Tina demanded, and bared her teeth like a gulla.  “If we were home, I could at least ease the contractions off with a tocolytic like levonal, but of course, if we were home, we could just let it happen and give the kid a fighting chance in an incubator.”

“But of course,” Amy added, coming up to join them, “if we were home, you couldn’t do a damn thing, because you’re not an obstetrician.”

“What should we do?” Olivia asked, looking from one to the other.

“There is nothing to do, except wait.”  Tina slammed her fist into her palm hard enough to make a few of the other gullan heading off to bed jump and stare at her.  “God damn it!”

“Do you know how to administer levonal?  I mean, if you had some?”

“Yeah, if I had some, but what’s the friggin’ point of what-if games?”  She started to say more, saw Olivia’s face, and broke off.  Tina stared at her, then softly said, “Want me to spell it?”

“Please.”

Tina did, added, “You can use ritodine or nifedipine in a pinch, but levonal is the only one I can think of designed for long-term use.  Remember syringes.  Lots of them, because she might need a lot of injections and I am not set up to sterilize needles.”

“I’ll do the best I can.  Amy, can you take Somurg?”

Amy put out her hands and grimaced as the baby promptly socked her in the jaw.  “Damark doesn’t know what fun is until he gets it in stereo,” she muttered.  “So, you’re going to knock over a pharmacy, huh?”

“No, she’s knocking over a hospital,” Tina corrected.  “And I hope you know those things are pretty well-guarded these days.”

“What are my odds of pulling it off?” Olivia asked, trying for a smile.

But Amy didn’t return it.  “It’s fifty-fifty, kid,” she said.  “You either will or you won’t, but you’ve got some guts and that ought to count for something.  Godspeed.  Or, you know, whoever.”

Olivia left them at that, running back through the mountain as fast as she dared go over the uneven rock.  Vorgullum hadn’t left many hunters to sustain his tribe in his absence and she knew there would be regular night hunts, but if it was dark already, she needed to hurry if she was going to catch them.  A male moved to intercept her when she entered the commons, but she shoved him out of the way with an impatient, “Not now, dammit.  Doru!  I need you.”

He pushed through his gathering hunters at once, spear already in hand.  “What’s the matter?”

“I need you to take me to the nearest human hive.  Tonight.  Now.  Someone get me a backpack.”

“What do you need?  I’ll go alone.”

“You can’t, there’s no way you’d know what to look for.”  And because they were now surrounded by concerned gullan faces, she told him why, keeping the explanation brief.

Doru listened and nodded once at the end.  “She’ll lose the baby,” he said, and rubbed at the base of his horns.  “A hard thing.”

“She might not lose it if we can get this medicine.”

He looked at her with a gentle blend of sympathy and gravity.  “If the earth wants her, the earth will have her.  That is life.”

“If the earth wants her, the earth is going to have to work for it,” she shot back.  “That’s Olivia.  Now are you going to carry me, or do I have to find someone else?”

He handed his spear to the nearest male and took the empty backpack.  “As you command.  Let’s go.”

4

Doru banked and dropped out of the sky to land on the roof of a Shop-Mart.  He set Olivia on her feet and crossed cautiously to the edge of the building and looked down at the lights of the small city.  “I don’t want to offend you, but do you know even roughly where we are?” he asked.

“I haven’t got a clue.  I know we left the Cascades behind us in the move, so I’m sure we’re in Canada somewhere, or maybe Alaska.”  She joined him and looked out at moving cars and streetlights and crosswalks and a thousand other relics of a world she had long since left behind.  “If you’re asking me what town this is, no, I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know where you are, how can you hope to find this magic medicine?  This is big hive, Olivia.”

“Help me find a ladder.”

“A what?  Why?”

“Do you see that thing down there?”  She pointed at a bank of telephones standing against the face of the Shop-Mart.  When he nodded, she said, “There’s a book there that can tell us exactly where the medicine is if I can just get down to it.”

He stared intently into her eyes, then looked at the telephones and nodded grimly.  “Stay here.”

Before she could protest, he crawled down the wall, raised his fist, bashed out the light of the Shop-Mart sign and then dropped easily to the ground.  A moment later, the beating of his wings heralded his appearance and he snatched her up under one arm and swept rapidly away.

Six blocks later, he touched down on the roof of an apartment complex and handed her the telephone book with a length of linked cable still dangling from the spine.  He hunkered down before her and watched with interest as she flipped impatiently through the Yellow Pages.  It wasn’t long before she stabbed her finger down with a triumphant, “Eureka!”

“Who?”

“Midvalley Midwifery,” she told him.  “A subsidiary of Midvalley Physicians and Obstetrics.  Right next to each other.”  She repeated the address to herself several times, then bent over the roof and peered down the parking lot of the complex until she found the name of the apartments.  She flipped through the phone book again.

“Now you know where it is?”

“Not exactly, but bear with me, Doru.”  She located the map in the front of the phone book.  “Okay, we’re on Fourteenth and Walnut.  We need to be on Sixth and Cedar.”

“Let me see that.”  He plucked the phone book out of her hands and turned it right side up.  That alone surprised her.  “Where are we, do you know?”

She found the cross-streets on the map and pointed.

“And where is this medicine?”

She placed another finger on the map.

“Got it.”  He tossed the book aside, then held out his hands.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

“What do these—”  He unfolded his wings and gave them a mighty flap.  “—look like to you, Olivia?”

“Sorry.”

“Hold on to me.”  He leapt from the roof, caught the air, and climbed high over the lights of the city.

Olivia twisted in his arms to look at them, spread out below her like a glittering blanket.  She’d never seen them this way; she’d never been in an airplane, never gone over the mountains at night and seen a city glowing from below.  It was amazing to her eyes, row upon row of yellow and orange, stripes of white alongside red passing each other endless as rivers, lined by flashing greens and blues and pinks.  So much light…and no sound at all with the wind rushing across her ears.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“What?”

“The lights.”

He was dropping out of the sky again.  “I’ve always thought so.  Too bad they’ve come to mean such danger.  Sometimes I wish the humans would just string them up and leave.”  He brought his legs forward and struck home with a gentle paf!  Absurd to hear such a huge creature make such a small sound.  “Is this the right place?”

Olivia peered over the top of the building and saw a sign nearly as tall as she was reading Midvalley Midwifery Services.  “Yes.  Now we just have to get in.”

“In is usually the easy part,” Doru said, crossing the roof to the access door.  “It’s out that gets thorny.”  He tried the doorknob, grunted, then hunkered down to examine the lockplate.

“Do you think it has an alarm?” Olivia asked worriedly.

“Only one way to find out.”  He seized the doorknob, gave a tremendous wrench and snapped the knob off in his hand.  He held out his hand for silence, his eyes pricked forward, and finally waved her over.  “I don’t hear anything, but stay close to me.”

She gave him a gullan salute, which he bared his teeth at, and then he
pushed the door open and led the way inside.  Unaccustomed to navigating stairs, he went down sideways, very slowly, and gripped the rails on both sides.  When at last they came to a door, he breathed an audible sigh of relief before squeezing himself through it.

“This place stinks,” he remarked as she joined him in the hallway.  He stepped forward and tapped a wall-mounted plaque with his claw.  “What do these words say?”

“You know those are words?”  Just when she had begun to think he couldn’t surprise her any more.

“I don’t know how they sound, because I don’t speak human very well, but I can recognize some of them.”  He studied the plaque, brow furrowed.  “That one,” he said after a moment, underscoring the word Level.  “That’s a way of marking the place you are inside the hive.  That little squiggle in front of it means a number.  That says we’re standing on the fifth height of the building.  But no, I don’t know anything else.”

“The pharmacy is on the first floor.  That’s where the drugs will be.”

“Hm.  Where else would they be?”

She looked around at him, confused, then surprised that she would be confused.  Of course there would be humans here.  Hadn’t she just been looking at the building directory?  The regular birthing rooms were on the second and third floors.  Surely someone was down there being pregnant; babies didn’t just come during work-hours.

“I…I didn’t think of that.  I’m not sure where else to look.”

“Well, we’re here.  Might as well throw a spear and see what it hits.  Easy, Olivia,” he said, giving her shoulder a pat.  “They probably won’t come up here unless we make a lot of noise, so we’re safe as long as we’re quiet.  And to save Gormuck’s baby, I’ll go down and fight them while you find the medicine. I’d just rather avoid that if we can.”

Olivia looked back at the directory.  They were on the fifth floor with Imaging, Lab and Counseling.  “If they have a lab up here, they might have a closet or something with drugs in it,” she said, not at all sure this was true.

“Lead on.”

Olivia oriented herself with the diagram and set off down the hall with Doru loping comfortably behind her until she found a promising sort of hallway on the other side of a locked door marked Supplies.  “There’s probably an alarm on this,” she said.

“Probably.”  He pricked his ears at some sound from below and then studied the door.  “But if there are, the little ropes are on the inside.  Can you see the medicine from here?”

“No.”

“Can you see where they put the medicine?”

“Give me your flashlight.”

He handed it over obligingly and Olivia used it to probe at the dark hall through its narrow security window.  About ten feet down, past Lab Supplies and Imaging/Tech, she could see a door marked Emergency and next to it, a clipboard with sign-in sheet.  There was also a sticker with Alarm Will Sound and another with Authorized Personnel Only.

“I think I see one, but the door definitely has an alarm on it.”

“Hm.  Let me think.”  He hunkered down and fanned his wings out, looking for all the world like a black gargoyle straight off some ancient European cathedral.  “Can you see a window?”

She looked around at him, puzzled, then past him to a perfectly good picture window in the waiting room to their right.

“No,” he said patiently.  “On the other side.  Can you see a window?”

She applied her flashlight again.  “Um, maybe the corner of one at the end of the hall?  It might be a poster, though.  I don’t know.”

“Good enough, I guess.”  He straightened, flexed his powerful frame once and said, “Get ready.”

“Ready?”

His leg drove out like a piston and blew the door explosively off its hinges and into the hall.  Olivia gaped for a split-second, then shook out of it and sprang inside.  He came on her heels, stopped at the second door, dug his claws in around its frame and ripped the whole thing out of the wall.  The ear-splitting shriek of the alarm went off at once.

“Go,” he said, and turned around, dropping to all fours and fanning out his wings to hide her.

Olivia dove into the closet and began fumbling through towels, bandages and plastic baggies filled with rubber tubing, but yes, there were drugs in here also.  She spilled most of them, tossing them aside when she finished scanning them so she wouldn’t waste time hunting through the same bottles twice.  She could hear human voices coming towards them and realized with a flare of surreal embarrassment that she was dressed in a bra and two bunnies.

Then Doru was roaring and at least three humans let out a close-harmony scream and bolted back the way they came.  “Hurry,” Doru said tightly.

There it was, dozens of syringes labeled levonal.  Olivia had no idea how much she needed, so she grabbed the whole basket containing them and emptied it into her empty pack.  For good measure, she took another double handful of bottles completely at random and dumped that in too.  She also took a blood-pressure cuff, a stethoscope, a box of latex gloves and as many sterile gauze sponges as would fill up her backpack.  “Done!” she panted.

Sirens.

“And that means trouble,” Doru muttered.  He seized her around the waist as the sounds of running footsteps came charging back down the corridor.

“Holy God, what is that?!”

Doru looked back over his shoulder and unleashed a roar that shook Olivia to her bones.  Then he ran down the hall, dug in his claws and said, “Oh shit.”

There was a window at the end of the hall after all.  It was perhaps three feet high, which was good as far as that went.  And it was about five inches across.  Doru might be able to squeeze his hand or one horn out, but nothing else.  She looked up at him, momentarily stymied.

He offered her a crooked smile.  “I’m open to suggestions.”

Olivia pinned the backpack between them, wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and said, “Charge them.”

He rocked his head back, blinking, and then gave her a broad, toothy grin and said, “As you command.”

He turned around, seized the nearest moveable object, which happened to be the emergency closet’s door, and ran back the way he’d come.  Doru exploded into the waiting area and threw the heavy slab of wood at the wall next to the tight knot of security guards who had gathered there.

Two of them broke and ran; the last pulled a gun and starting shrieking and pulling the trigger.  Fortunately, he had not yet realized the safety was on.

Doru set his feet wide apart, yanked himself to his full height, ripped his horns across the ceiling tiles, snapped his wings out to their full span, and split the air with the voice of a dragon.  The remaining security officer collapsed where he stood, freeing Doru to leap over his unconscious body toward the waiting room window.  He bashed it out with one blow of his huge fist and leapt, snapped his wings open and soared away over the flashing lights of red and blue and white.

“Well,” he said, laughing.  “That’ll get your blood moving.”

Her ears were ringing; she could barely hear him.  “If they had any pregnant women there, they are all in labor right now, I guarantee it!”

He let out another roar, caught the wind and rode it into the clouds.

5

The first words Tina said after opening the pack were, “Holy Christ, there’s an epidural in here!”

“Dibs,” Liz said immediately.

“Look at all this!”  Tina began to rifle through the pills and syringes in a kind of daze.  “What did you do, dump a whole shelf in here?”

“Just about.  Are there enough syringes?”

“For now.”  Tina frowned.  “Some of these are in prepackaged doses, so that’s good as far as it goes, but you’re going to have to go out again eventually and get just a handful of your basic needle.  They have ‘em at any drugstore; you won’t have to find a real pharmacy again.”

“There’s a relief.”  She exaggerated a grin for Tina’s benefit.  “You can tell Amy I wasn’t what you call a hundred-percent successful.”

“Whatever you were, you did something good,” Tina said seriously.  “I hope you know that.”

“Doru gets half the credit.”

Tina’s face softened.  “Does he?  God bless the big guy.  I’m going to get Tobi to give him a big wet one.  Hell, I’ll do it myself.”  She looked in the pack a final time, then zipped it shut. “Okay, I’m good here.  You can take off.”

Since handing over her responsibilities as the tribe’s main healer, Tina tended to wax authoritarian and so Olivia was more amused than offended as she was propelled towards the door.  Immediately on the other side was Horumn, who grunted when she saw her and said, “That rutting fool is waiting for you.” Without looking to see if Olivia followed or not, the aged gulla limped off.

Her good mood and sense of duty done well died at once.  She had not forgotten Carla, but she had been avoiding this moment.  Now it seemed, Carla was tired of waiting.  Olivia went to her workroom and there she was, sitting on a bench and looking edgy and impatient.

“Do you have it?” Carla asked tightly.  “Or do I have to find a fucking flight of stairs to fall down?”

“I have some.”  Olivia knelt down beside a Coleman cooler and fished through it until she found the 7-Up bottle with its evil-looking contents.  “But we need to talk.”

Carla heaved a sigh.  “Fine.  Give me the lecture.  Get it over with.”

Her naked hostility sparked a faint twinge of real anger in Olivia.  She slammed the lid of the cooler and advanced on the other woman like a predator.  “Do I have to remind you what will happen if Vorgullum ever finds out about you?” she snapped.  She hated using his name as a weapon, but it had the desired effect immediately.

Carla looked down at her hands and frowned.  “No.  I know.”

“Then why are you doing such a stupid thing?” she demanded.  “I mean…aren’t you even trying to be careful?”

“I was at first.  I don’t know.  It’s just easier.  It makes me feel…I don’t know, like I’m really here.  Most of the time, I just kind of drift along, wondering how all this happened.”  Tears welled up in her eyes, but her voice stayed steady, emotionless.  “All those times behind the bleachers with Jeremy Massey and I wouldn’t let him get to second base.  Can you believe it?  What was I saving myself for?  If I could go back in time, I’d drop and suck him off like a lollipop just so I’d know what it felt like to do it with a regular guy.”

“Carla—”

“What do you want to hear, huh?  Sutung tried to have sex with me on the fifth day.  We got naked okay, and then he…stuck it up a little ways and then he stared at me and pulled out and sat down and wouldn’t look at me.  He sat there for, like, an hour without moving or looking at me or anything.  He only got up because the fire was dying.  And after he dumped more wood on, he turned to me like…like I was shit he had to shovel!”  Carla reached up calmly under her sleeve, dug her fingernails into the side of her arm and opened four furrows clear down to her elbow.  Olivia reached for her with a gasp, only to see dozens of similar scars, some still scabbed, others white with age.

Without altering her expression or the tone of her voice, Carla went on.  “He couldn’t get hard right away.  He had to, you know, and all the time he’s staring at me like that.  Then he just put it in me and when he was done, he left and didn’t come back until the next night.  He didn’t touch me again until I had that season thing.  Do people do that?” she asked suddenly, anguished.  “Real people?  I’ve never heard of it before, but I don’t know!”

Olivia closed her eyes against the sudden, vivid memory of Vorgullum falling on her; his eyes blazing with empty lust, battering into her as she screamed and tried to get away; waking up hours later with his spend dried to a crust over her belly and thighs and blood matted into her pubic hair.

“So after a while we got to go out of our rooms and meet people.  I don’t know…there was this one guy…I don’t know his name.  I had to go to the bathroom, and usually when one of us has to go, we go in pairs, but this time I figured I knew the way pretty well so I just went, and when I there, this guy comes in and he…he…”  Carla’s brows wrinkled, like she was trying to puzzle out a particularly thorny math problem.  “He put his hand on me and then he…and I just found myself wondering why he was bothering to cover my mouth, you know?  Who was I going to yell for help to?  So I…kinda put my legs around him and let him.  He was looking at me, right into my eyes.  There aren’t any other mirrors here; it was the first time I really felt like this was all…still happening, you know?  It was real.  It hurt, but it was real.  Then he was done and he told me he’d kill me if I told—”  Carla laughed and shook her head.  “—and I got cleaned up and left.  No big deal.”

“Who was it?” Olivia demanded.

“Oh please, what are you going to do?  It was just a guy.  They’re all like that, you know.  He was just the first.  It’s happened, like, ten times since.  If they see you alone and if you give them the space and the time…”  She shrugged, smiling, but her eyes stayed distant.  “And then one day, I saw this other guy, and I kinda came onto him, just to see what he’d do, and he got down right there and did me on the bench, and it was no big deal.  So the next day, I went out to baths…You remember how you had to go down the Deep Drop to get there?  Well, this guy came along and I asked him if he’d take me to the baths, and if he did, I’d fuck him.  So he did, and I did, and it was no big deal.”

“He’d have carried you anyway,” Olivia said quietly.

“I know!  That’s not the point!  The point is…The point is….”  She shook her head slowly, her eyes staring unblinkingly at the floor.  “Pretty soon, they’re coming to me, and I took them all.  I take them two at a time, if they want to.  Some of them like to hit me when they’re doing it and that’s okay.  Sometimes they’re careful about not cumming in me, but I don’t care.  I got pregnant the first time, and I went to Murgull and she slapped me in the face and that was pretty real, too.  But that’s the only time she ever did it.”

She looked down dully at the potion in Olivia’s hands, then reached over and took it.  “I don’t care anymore.  I really don’t.  You’re right, Vorgullum will probably kill me if he ever finds out.  He can’t exactly kill everyone who fucks me.  That’s…that’s okay.”  Carla took the pop bottle and stood up to go.

“Wait.”  Olivia stared at her empty hands.  “I have something…”

Carla looked back at her.

“It’s called barrenroot.  You use it, and you can’t ever get pregnant again.  I’m pretty sure it hurts, though.”

“That’s okay,” Carla said, still with that eerie calm.  “Pain is fine.  That’s pretty real.  Let me have it.”  No hesitation.  Not even a moment of uncertainty.  She simply stood and waited with one hand outstretched.

Olivia walked woodenly to her worktable and unwrapped the dark brown root.  “You have to peel it,” she said.

Carla fingered the root.  “You stick it in you?”

Olivia nodded.  “Take the potion first.  Wait three days.  No sex for three days.  Then you…use it.”

“Okay.”  Carla stuck the root inside her shirt with the 7-Up bottle.  “I can go three days.  Thanks.”  She walked away.

Her footsteps were still receding when Horumn limped into the room.  The old gulla studied Olivia in silence for a long time.  “Best for all,” she grunted at last.  “You might not think so now, but it is truth.”

“I feel awful.”

“You feel too much.”  But Horumn came over and laid her hand on Olivia’s shoulder.  “Go home,” she said.  “Hold your Somurg.  Breathe in his breath.  He is healthy and strong.  Take your comfort for that.”

Yes.  He was healthy and strong.

For now.

6

Olivia was sitting in a drift of bear fur in Sudjummar’s forge, holding Somurg comfortably on her lap and watching the smith at work when Sutung entered the room.

“Just a moment, please,” Sudjummar said pleasantly, not looking around as he carefully filed the jagged edges of a candle bowl.

“It’s Olivia I’ve come to see.”  Sutung’s voice was very low, very even, and very angry.

Sudjummar put down his tools and turned at once, hackles raised and his good wing fanning out, ready to meet aggression with aggression.

Sutung eyed him with an expression of frustrated contempt.  “Courting her is the very last thing on my damn mind.”

Sudjummar relaxed minutely.  After a moment, he said, “Somurg will be fine right where he is,” and picked up the candle bowl again.

Slowly, Olivia set down her son and followed Sutung out of the forge and into the tunnel.

“I found the barrenroot,” he said in a tight voice.  “And if you didn’t give it to her, you probably know who did.  Fine.  Without question it is the most sensible thing to do.  But if I am to see no children from all this misery, I for damn sure will not be mated to her.”

He paused there, furiously, for her to object.  She didn’t.

“At tonight’s gathering,” he went on, eyes narrowing, “I am putting her aside.  It’s been more than a year and she is childless.  That’s all the cause I need.  I only need you to witness it.”

She felt her guts twist into a cold knot.  “Sutung,” she began.  “She’s hurting.  Please.  If she had someone to treat her with kindness—”

“Kindness!”  He twisted and spat.  “When have I harmed her?  After everything she’s done to me, when have I ever even raised my voice to her?”

“That’s not the same as being kind,” she countered.

He thumped a broad finger against her chest, his voice a liquid growl.  “You think I don’t know why she has become what she is.  Well, I do.  I knew she was virgin when I took her.  I took her anyway.  I did what I was ordered to do!  It’s easy for you to stand there and tell me to be patient and to be kind, but to bear our young is the only reason we brought your kind here and the only reason I could stand to stay mated to that miserable creature.”

“Sutung—”

“Miserable!” he snapped.  “She hurts herself, did you know that?  She’ll sit in the pit for hours, rubbing her wrists on the stone until she bleeds.  I don’t dare hold her because she cuts herself on my claws!  She burns herself with tallow!”  He shook his head hard, nakedly baffled and frustrated.  “I’ve removed everything from my cave but the bedding in the pit and twice I have come home to find her binding her head with blankets.  I can’t just stand over her all day and night, curse it!  I am one of this tribe’s damned few hunters and it’s my duty to feed them.  I watch her when I’m there, but when I’m gone, she’s out spraying the tunnels with rut-stink!  All this I could bear if I knew there was a baby, even if it wasn’t mine, but you have made her barren!”

“That’s not fair!”

“No, it’s not and I’m bound to her anyway!” he snarled, his voice steadily rising.  “I knew she was fucking them—how could I not know?—and I’d fight if I could name them, but how can I?  She can’t even name them!”

He broke off and his chest heaved as he struggled with his anger.  Finally, he continued.  “Do you think I haven’t tried to help her?  The first time she came back to me with another male’s seed-scent on her, she came with bruises, too.  I tried to get her to come with me to Vorgullum and she laughed in my face.  She said we were all the same, and then she put her hand down my loincloth and—”  His expression puckered in on itself, turning fury to baffled pain.  “And she told me how it was with him while she…did things.  Told me where each bruise came from while she…made me…”  He shook his head twice, hard and harder, then burst out, “It was obscene!  It’s always like that with her!  It is always obscene! What the hell would you have me do?”

Without warning, he swung and raked his claws across the tunnel wall, tearing four deep wounds into the rock with such violence she imagined for a moment she saw sparks.  Then he stood, his shoulders shaking with suppressed rage, and stared at the scars he made.

“If she were less mad, I could find a way to reach her,” he said at last.  “If she were more mad, I could return her and be rid of her as Bundel was.  As it stands, I must be bound to her.”  Sutung was quiet a little longer, and then turned to face her again.  “I tell you this:  Vorgullum would never allow me to put her aside if he were here, not unless he knew the reason.  And if I told him the reason, he might kill her.  I don’t want her to die.  Ha.  There is my kindness.”

She couldn’t meet his eyes, had to look away at the gouges in the wall.

“But you have his power in his absence.  You can sever our bond without dragging the reason out into the open air.  Half the tribe will know why and the other half would never question your decision, and there we sit.”

“What will Vorgullum do when he comes home and finds we’ve done this behind his back?”

“To you, nothing.  For me?”  He uttered an acid laugh.  “He’ll probably throw his good right hand at the side of my head, and give me a sound kick in the backside to grow on, but he can’t make me take her back and he knows it.”

“I can’t stand her up in front of everybody and say she’s barren.  She’d become another ‘safe female’ and I won’t do that to her.  I won’t make her fuck the whole mountain!”

“How can you ‘make’ her do something she’s done already for a year?” he demanded, bitterly incredulous.  “At least when they go to her now, they’ll have to take care of her, which is more than I can do by myself!”

He was right.  Olivia rubbed at her eyes unhappily.  “All right,” she said.  “All right.  I’ll do it.”

“Tonight.”  He turned swiftly and stalked away.

Olivia continued to stand in the tunnel, rubbing her eyes as if she could erase the previous scene from her mind and memory.  At last, she turned and went back into the forge.

“Well,” Sudjummar said, still filing meticulously at the candle bowl.  “That sounded like an interesting little talk.”

“What am I going to do?” she sighed.

“I should think that’s obvious.”  He lifted the bowl, examined it closely, blew shavings free of the lip, set it down and started grinding away again.

“I can’t do this, Sudjummar.  Look at Victoria. Look what she’s become! I hated Vorgullum for doing that to her.  How can I do it to Carla?”

“To Carla,” he mused.  “This only goes to show how very different we are.  I’m thinking of Sutung.”

Olivia chewed her lip.  “I’m going to do it, aren’t I?”

“And now she expects me to have visions,” Sudjummar remarked to no one in particular.

Olivia sucked in a breath, held it, and released it in a sigh.  “All right,” she said.  “Let’s get this over with.”

“That’s the spirit.”  Sudjummar ran his finger across the edge of the candle bowl, nodded briskly, and set it to one side.  “All right,” he said.  “I’m not going to give you advice, but I am going make an observation and you can feel free to tell me I’m wrong.  I’m not,” he added, “but you can tell me so if it makes you feel better.”

She regarded him warily.  “I’m listening.”

“Your problem,” he said, “is neither with Carla nor Sutung.  Both of them will go along just fine without any help from you, you just happen to make a convenient audience.  The real problem is that when you stand before the tribe tonight and give your command, you will become their leader in every sense, and you will never be able to take that back.”

She slid down the wall and sat, looking dejected.  “Vorgullum said you would be the leader,” she said, trying hard not to whine.

His expression became thunderously dark.  “Yes,” he said quietly.  “And I will be, just as soon as you stand up and announce your decision. It’s going to be a hard night for both of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Given the dangers of my brother’s mission, your mate may be called upon to assume the leadership of the tribe permanently.”  Seeing her face, he made an effort to find a more reassuring tone.  “I don’t think anyone really expects that to happen, but even if Vorgullum returned tonight, the male who had possession of you would still stand tall until he chose to stand away.  Up until now, no one has been very serious about pursuing you.  But when you sever Carla from Sutung, you’re going to remind every male in the cavern that you stand tall, your mate may become tovorak, and that I am a cripple.”

“Will there be fighting?” Olivia asked, now very frightened.

“I’m certain of it,” he replied, undisturbed.  “And it will begin tonight.”

“Oh, Sudjummar.”

“I think if I react fiercely enough to the first challenger, the others may think twice before they follow.”  He flexed his body for her, and it was still impressive, but she noted the faint uncertainty far back in his eyes.  “Now, give me Somurg and stay close to me when we enter the cave.”

7

There were maybe three dozen gullan and half the humans gathered in the hub of the commons, most of them clustered around Doru as he retold the tale of the Great Medicine Raid.  Olivia approached the center rock, but did not mount it, reluctant to steal his thunder.  When he swelled to his full size and gave an extremely subdued impression of his charging roar, she managed some applause along with the rest of them, but her heart wasn’t in it.  He pantomimed leaping through the window and swooshed his hand through the air, then caught sight of Olivia and leapt up.  “Is the medicine working?” he asked.

“It’s early to tell yet.  We’ll have to take each day at a time, but if we didn’t have the medicine, there would be no hope at all.”

Doru grinned.  “Saving babies is thirsty work.  Thumperjuice!”  He put out his hand imperiously and someone close by thumped a can of Coors into it.  He punched two holes in the top with his index claw and took a healthy swig.  “I give you Olivia the Fearless!” he announced, thrusting the can out to indicate her.  “It was her command that sent us to the hive; it was her hand that found the medicine in the human’s den; and when we were cornered, surrounded by dozens of humans with weapons and alarms, when I asked her what she would command, what did she say but ‘Charge them’.  Charge them, yet!”  He threw back the rest of his beer while the gullan bayed approval, then mimed lifting and throwing the heavy door again.  Chuckling under his breath, Doru settled on a bench and helped himself to a strip of roasting elk.

This seemed as good a time as any.  Olivia glanced around only once, to make sure Sutung was present, and when she saw him, she ascended the center stone.  Quiet fell at once, as if they had all been waiting for her to do this.

Strange, to look down and see gullan looking up at her just like she belonged there.  She tried remember what Vorgullum had said on these occasions and could think of nothing.  Helplessly, she looked back and there was Sudjummar with Somurg’s head on his shoulder, watching.

“Sutung,” she heard herself say.  To her ears, her voice was dark and heavy.  “Come before the tribe.”

Sutung took Carla by the arm, and she walked with him, looking bored.  When he reached the stone and turned to face the gathering, Carla sat down beside him and rested her chin on one cupped hand.

“This is Carla, mate to me this past year.  We were bound by need, not by desire, and no young have come of our union.  I know now that none ever will.  I would be free of her.”  He half-turned and glared up at Olivia as though daring her to refuse.

Olivia dropped to one knee.  “Carla?” she said quietly.

A startled murmur swept out over the crowd.

Carla looked around, amused.

“Carla, what do you say?  Would you be parted from Sutung?”

She shrugged.  “Whatever.”

“You understand what that means?”

Carla appeared to think about this.  “Probably that I’ll move in with Victoria.  Is that about right?”

Olivia nodded, sick.

Carla studied her, then laughed.  “God, don’t you look tore up about it.  Whatever, okay?  It doesn’t matter.  You need to hear me say yes?  Fine.  Yes.”

Olivia continued to look down at her, aware that her face was the same impassive mask she had seen on Vorgullum so often.  She stood, and turned to address the shocked assemblage of gullan.

“As both parties are in agreement, I sever the union.”  She took a deep breath, steeling herself.  “This is Carla,” she said clearly.  “She is safe to mate with.  Horumn, come and take her.”

Carla got to her feet, ignoring Horumn’s arm when the old gulla held it out.  She turned around and looked at Sutung, her lips curved into the coldest smile Olivia had ever seen.  “You made me into this,” she said.

He didn’t flinch.  “You made me into this.”

She thought about that, then laughed.  “Well.  Then it wasn’t all bad, was it?” she said cheerfully, and laughed again as she walked out.

Unable to think of anything else to say, Olivia climbed down from the stone and sat down next to Sudjummar.

On her other side, Thurga lowered her voice and said, “You asked the female?” in tones of stunned disbelief.

“Of course I did.  She was mated too, you know.”

Thurga frowned prodigiously, edged a little closer.  “I do not like this new change, Olivia Urgarna.  It is a small space between asking the female to accept and perhaps having the female come to the leader to sever her bond.”

Olivia didn’t know whether to feel humor or despair.  “What’s wrong with that?”

Thurga appeared taken aback by the question.

“Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me that a female always has the right to refuse any male?  Why should this be any different?”

“The time for refusing is before being taken as mate!” Thurga insisted.

“We didn’t have that option!”

Thurga opened and closed her mouth without answering.  She looked uncertain.

Olivia glanced swiftly past her, found without surprise that several gullan and humans were watching them closely, and said loudly, “We didn’t have that option, but we have it now.  Human or gullan, we are all tribe!  Who?”  She stood up and took two swift steps out into the crowd.  “Who will be parted from their mate?  Ask me now.”

There were five humans in the common caves.  Damark stepped closer to Amy and she patted his arm absently, looking back at Olivia with a thoughtful expression.  Ellen put her hand over her baby-hard stomach and let Mudmar rest his hand on her shoulder while his gullan mate, his true mate, touched the other.  Anita, sitting beside the male appointed her by Murk, made a discreet thumbs-up gesture and winked.  Sarah J., mateless in Sung’s absence, only twirled her spear and kept quiet.

Olivia faced Thurga again and folded her arms in unconscious imitation of Vorgullum at his most authoritative.  “We didn’t get to choose to come here.  We didn’t get to choose our mates.  We choose to stay.”

“Forgive me,” Thurga said, crouching slightly and looking at the floor.  “I should not have questioned your wisdom.”

“Feel free to question me anytime,” Olivia replied, allowing herself a faint smile.  “Keeps me honest.”  She touched Thurga’s shoulder briefly, and then sat back down beside Sudjummar.

“So,” murmured the metal-maker, not looking at her.  “That’s done it for sure.  Come with me.  Pretend we’re getting thumperjuice.”  He stood up and moved over to the stack of stolen human goods brought in earlier by the hunters.

Puzzled, Olivia followed.  “I said something wrong, didn’t I?”

“I sure didn’t think so.  But there are three males out there working themselves up for a challenge.  I’m going to provoke one.  I need you to be ready.”  Sudjummar stretched his good wing around her and lowered his voice until it was scarcely audible.  “Now,” he said calmly, “I think I know you very well, Olivia, and what I am about to say is going to make you absolutely furious, but I ask you to stand very still and quiet and let me say it all.  Promise?”

“Promise.”  She braced herself.

“There is going to be a fight.  I plan to win, but if I don’t, here is what will happen.  The victor will ask you to come to his pit, claiming you as his mate.  You can refuse.  No, Olivia, you promised.  Hush.  If you refuse, he will demand the right to couple with you once as victor of his challenge.”

“Oh weeping, creeping Christ, I knew it!” she hissed.

“You can refuse him,” he went on.  “If you refuse, you will be taken to the women’s tunnels as an unmated female.”

“What’s stopping you from coming directly to the women’s tunnels to fetch me out again?”

“Nothing.  Except perhaps the knowledge that if I do, I’ll almost certainly meet my challenger on the other side for a fresh fight.  As often as it takes, until I stop coming to claim you.  If you agree to couple with him—”

“You’d better not be telling me to,” she spat.

He waited for her to stop talking, began again, “If you agree to couple with him, he will take you to a certain chamber here off the commons.  Once there, he’ll ask you again if you refuse him.  You can, and after you sit there for a while, he’ll return you to me.  In the eyes of the tribe, I will have lost the challenge and you will have coupled with the victor, and all will be satisfied.  He might challenge me again if he’s feeling spiteful, but sympathy will be against him if he does, so I doubt it.  Do you understand?”

“Do I understand?  You’ve got to be kidding!  You’re about to butt heads over me like a couple of rutting goats and you expect me to prance off into the corner with whoever the hell wins, and I’m supposed to understand that?  Oh, but I can always refuse,” she said bitterly.  “There’s some comfort for me as I stand over your broken body.  I can always refuse.”

“In the event that you ever do stand over my broken body,” he said quietly, “I advise you in the strongest terms not to refuse.  Not in public, at any rate.”  He cast a swift glance over his shoulder.  “I’m running out of time if I’m going to have the advantage here, Olivia.  Tell me what you would have me do.”

“Oh, you…”  She didn’t bother to finish.  “Go,” she said at last.  “And for God’s sake, don’t lose.”

He offered Somurg, and when she accepted the baby, Sudjummar turned and moved away from her with studied casualness to melt into the crowd.

Olivia dropped heavily onto a bench and stared helplessly into her sleeping son’s scowling face.

“I told you it would be ugly.”

She glanced around at Doru, prepared to unleash some of her anger on him.  He was not looking at her, but instead leaned up against the cavern wall, scrutinizing the gathering as intently as if there were prey that moved among them, unseen.  His expression was calm, almost uninterested, but his body betrayed terrific tension.

“You know, I had actually begun to think of you people as civilized.”

One ear twitched.  “You’re not exactly catching us at our best,” he replied.  “How civilized would your race act if they had lived three hundred years without the right to choose a mate?  Three hundred years!  To have the barest handful doled out to privileged few and know that you were not selected because you weren’t fit enough to breed.  And then to have the most—”  He broke off, lowered his horns a moment, and continued. “Most desirable among them set aside and finally there is a way, a right and just way if not a particularly civilized way, to possess her.  What would your race do?”

She was miserably grateful he did not look at her.  She knew she would never be able to meet his eyes if he did.

Abruptly, Doru tensed and straightened up. “Get ready, Olivia.  Here it comes.”

Vorung was easing through the gathering, his eyes grimly fixed on Olivia.  Olivia stood up nervously, scanning the gullan for any sign of Sudjummar, but the metal-maker did appear to be present.  Her instinct was to back up, but her knees were against the bench, and the cavern doorway was beyond Vorung.

The graying male stopped before her, his wings fanning out and forward slightly.  Cutting me off from the herd, she thought.  Where is Sudjummar?

“Olivia.”  He thrummed her name openly, displaying his chest and flexing his arms and legs in the posture Olivia had come to associate with a blatant gulla come-on.  “I’ve come to court you.”

“I’m not interested,” she said, and was faintly pleased by her icy tone.

“But you are alone.”

“I’m with Sudjummar.”

“Not at the moment.”

“You told me you didn’t want to take me from my mate.”

His nostrils flared.  Vorung lowered his horns.  “Your son,” he said distinctly, “looks ill.”

The cave had gone very quiet.  The gullan were retreating to the walls, pulling their humans with them, clearing a space.  Still there was no sign of Sudjummar.

“My son,” she replied, “is sleeping.”

Vorung advanced.  “You grow thin, Olivia.  The metal-maker does not provide for you as he should.  You deserve better.  Come with me,” he hummed.  “I will bring you meat of my kill.”

Sudjummar stepped silently and easily between them, his powerful frame rippling in the firelight as he put his hand on Vorung’s shoulder and pushed him back.  He stepped forward as Vorung stumbled, shoved him on the other shoulder, advanced further, thrust both arms flat against Vorung’s chest and knocked him flat on the ground. He lifted his foot and drove it at Vorung’s head, stopping just short of crushing his enemy beneath his gleaming talons.

“What,” Sudjummar said reasonably, “do you want with my mate?”

Vorung eyed the talons poised above him.

Minutes crawled by in silence.  Sudjummar lowered his foot to the ground and held eye contact awhile longer.  When Vorung did not speak or move, the metal-maker turned his full back and limped to where Olivia stood clutching Somurg.  He caught her eye, shook his head warningly.  It wasn’t over yet.

Vorung rocked onto his hip, then gained his feet, and stretched his wings.  At the same time, the coarse hair on his head, shoulders and biceps began to spike outward like the hackles on a dog’s neck.  To Olivia, it looked as though he had doubled in size.

Sudjummar swung back to face him, his own body undergoing the same transformation as he lowered his horns and snarled wordlessly.

“Stand down,” growled Vorung.

“I defend what’s mine!” Sudjummar spat.

Vorung advanced on him, his wings arcing out impressively.  “What will you do, half-man?  Limp on me?”

The two males now stood alone in an empty circle ringed by frightened humans and solemn, watchful gullan.  Olivia reached tentatively to the back of her neck, half-expecting to find her own hair standing on end.  She felt cold; her face would be white as chalk.

Doru’s hand closed over her shoulder.  “Steady,” he murmured.  “Believe it or not, it’s almost over.”

Sudjummar raked his talons through rock, towering over his opponent with the massive body so much like Vorgullum’s own.  “Stand down, gray-flanks, or I’ll snap you like a dry bone!”

“You are made of dry bones,” Vorung scoffed.  “Dry bones and a mangy pelt!  What can you give this woman but fleas, crippled rat!”

“Palsied pervert!”

“Challenge!” screamed the other, and threw himself forward.

Sudjummar caught him with his left hand and slammed him face down on the ground with a terrible impact.  He limped around him in a wide circle, so that Vorung’s next leap would bring him away from Olivia, if he had the strength to move at all.

Vorung pushed himself raggedly to his knees, then to his feet, and looked groggily around.  He glanced back at Olivia, and the sight of her seemed to draw him back into furious focus.  His wings snapped out, he crouched like a cat, and sprang.

Sudjummar met him again, this time with his lame foot planted square in the center of Vorung’s loincloth.

The older gulla let out a whistling howl and dropped to his knees.  His wings snapped to his body like wet rubber.  He grabbed himself with both hands, bent double, and ground his forehead against the stone floor.

Long minutes passed.  Sudjummar simply stood and waited.

At last, Vorung made a sound.

The metal-maker tipped his head to one side.  “What?”

Vorung whimpered again.

Sudjummar limped a little closer, started to bend down.

Vorung’s hand whipped out, caught the smith’s good foot, and flipped it into the air.

Sudjummar let out a cry and dropped onto his back.  His good wing snapped tight against his body; his withered left wing struck the ground, then bent, then cracked in two.  Sudjummar and Olivia shrieked together.

Vorung couldn’t leap up, but he did manage a clumsy pounce, landing on the thrashing gulla and raising his clawed hands for a final blow.

Olivia started forward and Doru took her shoulders.  She struggled and he let her, but pulled her back against his chest and held her firm.

Vorung’s claws came down.  Sudjummar caught his wrists.  His huge hands closed.  And tensed.  And twisted.

And broke them.

Vorung threw back his head and howled, but Sudjummar did not release him.  The smith continued to twist his hands, continued to tighten and grind at the bones as they were crushed against each other in his grip.

When Vorung started pitching wildly back against the wall, Sudjummar threw him aside, rolled to his feet, and kicked him in the chin.  Vorung landed on his side, then dropped onto his belly, drooling blood.

Sudjummar seized his foe by one horn, yanked him up and lifted his right arm like a hammer.

“Concede,” croaked Vorung.

Sudjummar paused, his club-like hand poised at the arc of descent.

“I concede,” Vorung said again.

Sudjummar uncurled his fist, reached his hand under the other’s arm, and hauled him to his feet.  Without further interest, he turned away and limped back towards Olivia.

The circle of gullan began to break up.

Holding her wailing son, scarcely able to reconcile what she had seen, Olivia maintained enough presence of mind to know that both rivals needed medical attention and fast.  “Get Tina,” she commanded shakily.  “Tell her Sudjummar’s wing is broken.”  She did not mention Vorung’s wrists.

Three females set off at once to obey.  Less than a minute later, Tina bolted into the room with a backpack over each shoulder.  The paramedic stopped cold in the center of the room, stared at first one, then the other, and then back at Olivia.

“Sudjummar,” Olivia said.

Tina looked at her hard, but knelt and explored the break.  “It’s clean,” she said curtly.  “Should heal pretty quick.  Rumm, help me get it in place.”

Sudjummar didn’t make a sound as the human and gulla pulled his bones apart and fit them back together.  A splint was fashioned, and Tina stood back as Rumm, far more familiar with gullan anatomy, bound it on over the bent angles of his wing.

The paramedic faced Olivia, pointedly keeping her back on Vorung, who still lay on his belly, holding his wrists out at a terrible angle and making a thin, whining cry in the back of his throat.

“Is my mate well?” Olivia asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

“He’ll heal.”

“Then see to that other one.”

With obvious relief, Tina swung around to inspect the damage.

Sudjummar stood up and advanced on Olivia, his eyes glaring, his hand held out in a gesture that stank of ritual victory.

She wanted to stay long enough to hear whether or not Vorung would be crippled for life.  She went to Sudjummar instead, feeling light-headed and nauseas.  When he took her by the arm and led her swiftly from the cave she was absolutely certain the first order of business would be a solid, ceremonial screwing in that fabled tunnel set aside for that purpose.

She was wrong, however.

“I am in a great deal of pain,” he whispered, as soon as they were far enough down the passage so as not to be overheard.

Olivia stopped at once, her hand going to her middle before remembering that she wasn’t wearing her belt pouch or her pack.  “My things are at the forge,” she replied.  “Can you make it that far?”

He turned a tight smile on her.  “Could you carry me if I can’t?”

“No.”

“Well, then I guess I’ll just have to try.”

They traveled blindly down tunnels they both knew by heart.

“Olivia, there is something troubling me,” he said at last.

She made a small sound of inquiry.

“You’re acting very strange.  Almost as if you expect me to…I don’t know…order you to put up your skirt and lie down.”

She swallowed hard.  It made a dry, guilty click.  “The thought had crossed my mind,” she admitted.

She could sense his disappointment in her.  It only made her feel worse.  She cradled Somurg for comfort, which only made the baby start fussing.  “What was I supposed to think?” she blurted unhappily.  “I thought you’d bash each other around like goats or something!  I wasn’t ready to see blood!  I wasn’t ready to hear your wing snap or…Vorung’s wrists…”  She could still hear the sound of bones grinding themselves into splinters.

“That,” Sudjummar said, “was not a typical challenge.  That was what we know as a blood challenge, and it’s extremely rare.  I expected him to concede after I kicked him in the stones.  I thought that was what he was trying to tell me or I never would have gotten so close to him.”

“If he’d killed you, was I supposed to walk off into that goddamn tunnel with him while you lay there dead?  How can you think that’s not wrong?”

He was silent a little while, then abruptly said, “Do you know what a wolf is, Olivia?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Noble creatures,” he remarked.  “Very civilized.  Social animals, for the most part.  The leader of the pack is a female, and she takes a powerful mate.  She must, because every male in the pack wants her badly, and if she’s to get anything accomplished in her busy night, she needs a strong mate to keep the others off her back.  So to speak.”

Olivia managed a shaky laugh.

“Wolves challenge each other occasionally.  Usually, their fights are settled swiftly and relatively painlessly.  Very rarely, blood is drawn.  Once in a great while, a wolf is killed, do you see?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t yet, but I’m trying.”  He touched her arm again in the dark, a comforting gesture.  “The first time the leader’s mate is challenged is almost always the bloodiest, but is almost never fatal.  If the mate is sufficiently formidable, any other challenges are quick ones, almost formalities.  But if the mate shows weakness or lack of resolve, then even if he is successful in defending her, he is likely to be challenged again and again.  He is also much more apt to be seriously injured or killed.

“Tonight, in a way,” he said slowly, “I was fighting not only Vorung, but all of them.  Did you see the way they watched me?  There hasn’t been a real challenge in this tribe in better than a hundred years.  No one knew what to expect and I gave them one hell of a show.  There were a great many in that cave that put themselves in Vorung’s place and grappled with me in their minds.”

“And got their wrists crushed,” Olivia reminded him.

“That, too.  With luck, it will prevent further fighting, at least until my wing is healed enough that I could meet another blood challenge.”

“What about Vorung?”

“I’m sure he’ll heal,” he said absently.  “But in the meantime, he’ll have to depend on others to provide for him.  And he’s forbidden to challenge for you again in any case.”

They reached the forge and in the light of its ever-burning fires, Olivia got her first good look at him and felt slightly encouraged.  In spite of the break, the dry flesh at the wing’s extremity was warm and living.

“There is something that worried me,” she said hesitantly, reaching down the glass jar containing one of Murgull’s most potent painkillers.

“Yes?”

“It was inexcusable of me to think that you would take advantage of me after this…blood challenge.  I know you better than that and I’m sorry.  But would Vorung have shared your opinion?”  She met his eyes over her equipment.  “Would he have fought you and won and then…been content to just sit in the dark in that stupid room and not do anything?”

She couldn’t help the slight, squeezing anxiety that pressed into her guts when he only stood and considered the question instead of hastening to reassure her.  His answer, when he finally ventured it, did little to soothe her.

“Vorung?  Probably.”  Sudjummar watched as her hands began to shake just the tiniest bit.  “Even a blood challenge does not give a man the right to force an unwilling woman.”  He threw her a quick, quirky smile.  “That’s why the Great Spirit gave us hands.”

She laughed without meaning to, without much wanting to, but that was funny.  “Is that so?”

He started to shrug and winced.  “May I have that now?”

“Only a swallow.”  She watched closely while he drank, then took it back.  “I don’t know if this stuff is habit-forming, but from all Murgull’s cautions, I’d have to guess so.”

She had just finished capping the jar and returning it to her place on the forge’s worktable when Sudjummar sleepily said, “Oh, say, that’s nice.”  She glanced up and he smiled at her dopily.

“Feel better?” she asked.

“Much better.  Olivia?”

“Yes, Sudjummar.”

“I am very sorry that you had to see me do that.”  The metal smith reached out to touch her cheek, her chin, the curve of her throat.  “And I am sorry, but you’ll have to see it again.  Do you hate me?”

His resemblance to Vorgullum was now complete.  “No,” she said with unhappy honesty.  “No, I don’t hate you.”

“Are we still friends?”

“Still friends.”

He nodded slowly.  “Can you bring me some bedding?  I don’t think I can climb up to my lair.”

Olivia retreated to the smith’s private chambers to gather up the two thickest sleeping bags, but when she returned, Sudjummar was lying on his stomach on the bearskin in the corner, fast asleep.  She covered him up, lay down beside him with Somurg, and quietly cried herself into oblivion.

8

Sudjummar was back in the forge before Olivia even woke up the next morning, which irritated her.  She could hear him hammering the entire time it took to change, feed, and clean Somurg, and by the time she finished wiping the baby-spit off her shoulder, she had the beginnings of what she suspected was going to be a damned good headache.  When she confronted him in an attempt to make him take it easy for a few days, he listened to her politely, then went right back to banging on a new mining pick.

“Good grief, man, doesn’t that hurt?” she finally exploded.

He paused, glancing at her coyly over one shoulder.  “Not at all,” he said.  “Because if it did hurt, if it hurt enough to keep me from my work, why then, that may impede my ability to feed and defend my mate and her child.”

Disgusted, she punched her hands onto her hips and glared at him.  “You’re acting like a goat.  Do you think Vorung is going to get up and go off hunting?”

He laughed.  “Of course not!  Vorung lost!”

“You—!  Fine.”  She untied the carrier sling in which Somurg had been riding and set the baby down.  “Watch him for me.  I’ve got better things to do than try and talk sense into a goat-head like you.”

“As you will, Olivia.”  He had turned back to his work, but she was convinced he was smirking at her.

So Olivia went to the women’s tunnels to look in on Liz.  Rumm, Crugunn and Thurga were there in a tight circle around the human, engaging in a group massage.  Liz looked positively transcendent with pleasure while her attendees chatted and gossiped over her.

“How are you feeling?” Olivia asked, coming over with a smile.

Talk ceased.  Heads turned.

“Fine,” Liz replied blissfully.  “I hear you made quite a speech last night at the gathering.  Good for you.”

“Thanks, I was pretty impressed with it myself.”  Olivia ran her eyes over the awed and envious expressions on the gullan, feeling weirdly smug.  “And did you also hear about the great challenge?”

“Several times,” Liz acknowledged, and opened her eyes.  They were sparkling with mirth and not a little cynicism.  “I’d wager you were thrilled to death to be the bone in their dogfight.”

“Blood challenge,” one of the others murmured, savoring the sound of it.  “Who would have thought Sudjummar to be so fierce?”

“Honestly,” sighed Liz.  “Why don’t they just hold pissing contests and be done with it?  But no, they’ve got to roar and beat their chests and fling each other around until they’re bleeding all over.  Like you’re going to think that’s so attractive.”

“Apparently, there’s a room just off the commons where the victor gets to claim his prize.”

“Get out of town!” Liz exclaimed, and then shook her head in bemused contempt.  “Forget pissing contests, they should have dick-fights.”

“Whoever can break a brick first, wins,” Olivia agreed.

Liz started laughing, then stopped, hissing.  “Basin, basin!”

Crugunn leapt up, seized the shallow metal basin that was used as a bed pan, and slid it expertly underneath the human’s hips.  After a second, she nonchalantly withdrew the pan and took it away to be emptied.

“Sorry,” Liz said uncomfortably.  “Little guy tends to object to being jiggled by stomping on my bladder.”  She was silent for some time, then added in a low voice, “I guess Cheyenne’s going to be using one for a while, huh?”

“Probably.”

“Did Vorgullum really cut her legs off?”

The question took her aback.  “No, but he came pretty close.  He…do you know what hamstringing is?”

Liz nodded and closed her eyes.  “Both legs?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”  She had too many gullan hands massaging her to tense up, but Liz shuddered.  “You know,” she said uncomfortably.  “Gormuck and I got off to such a rocky start…I used to hit him and rip his fur out whenever he came at me when I was in season.  Not that it stopped him; I don’t think anything short of bolt of lightning can affect them much when you’re in season, and even that would probably only slow them down.  But we used to fight.  Or rather, I used to fight, and he used to stand there and take it.”

Rubbing her leathery hands expertly against Liz’s thighs, Rumm remarked, “He’s never mentioned this.”

Since it had been made very clear that males generally did not have lengthy discussions with unmated females, certainly not those of an intimate nature, Olivia and Liz both turned as one to stare at Rumm.

The female continued massaging, looked up only after the silence had time to sink in, then uttered a gulla’s deep laugh.  “My brother,” she explained.  “I am thirty years his junior, but we are close.  He speaks often of you, his mate.”

“Happily?” Liz asked suspiciously.

“With resignation.”  Rumm shrugged.  “He wishes you would be more…”  The gulla lifted one hand and moved it in suggestive circles.

Liz dropped her head back onto her arms, grumbling, “We can’t all be Olivia.”

“Hey!”  But she was laughing, not really offended.  To Rumm, she said, “Your brother actually talks to you about sex with humans?”

“He was curious.”  Rumm shrugged her wings.  “I am curious, for all that this matters.  I know I will never have a mate.  Vorgullum would not be so foolish as to bring human males among us.”

“Okay,” Liz said in a clipped voice.  “Tell me what he says about me.”

Rumm regarded her curiously.  “Are you angry?”

“Not yet.”

Rumm reached for a ladle and poured a dipperful of some kind of mildly soap-scented oil over Liz’s back in trickles.  She began to rub again.  “He says you were virgin when he took you,” she said after a moment.  “And it made him feel monstrous.”

The other females working Liz over murmured in low sympathy.

Rumm said, “And one day—forgive me, Olivia—one day Vorgullum was telling the hunters of human pleasures, and how a human screams and thrashes with her mate in passion.  And Kurlun agreed and told of the postures in which humans like to couple—”

“Postures?” Liz interrupted, startled.

“She puts her ankles on his shoulders,” Crugunn explained.

“Oh my God,” the humans said together.

“That is not customary?” Rumm asked, pausing in her ministrations.

“Does it sound customary?” Liz gasped.

“Not for me, but Kurlun seemed not to think it extraordinary.”

Crugunn added pensively, “Which rather makes me wonder what he would find extraordinary.”

“Okay, we’re all very impressed with Amy.  Get back to Gormuck,” Liz commanded.

“Well,” Rumm said.  “Wurlgunn said that his Beth comes freely to his pit and loves him, holds him.  Gormuck began to see that you did not.  And when he came to you that night and put his hand upon you, when you lay still as death beneath him, he began to understand that he was despised by you.”

“I didn’t despise him,” Liz whispered.

“But after some moons had come and gone, he returned from the hunt and you praised him, and he was so pleased that he called you to his pit and you went with him.  He tried to give you pleasure.  And then you held him.”  Rumm shrugged her wings.  “That is what my brother speaks of, when we speak of you.  He knows he is not the mate you wanted, but you hold him.  He cares for you.  It… It saddens him that you do not want to bear his child.”

Liz winced.  “I regret those words,” she said softly.  “I could tell you that humans are emotional and not terribly reasonable when they’re pregnant—”

“It would even be the truth,” Olivia put in.

“—but it doesn’t excuse my behavior.  God, I wish he was here right now.  I wish I could tell him I was sorry.  I hate to think I might actually have this baby while he’s away.”  She was quiet for a little while.  “But I probably will.  Olivia?”

“Hm?”

“Do you think…Oh, this is going to sound so stupid.  Do you think anyone out there is going to want me when I leave the women’s tunnels?”

It was Crugunn who answered, first with laughter, and then with, “I think, with a new life in your arms, there will be several suitors to pick among.  That is what I think.  Especially this child, which might so easily have been lost.”

“That’s…actually a little comforting.”  Liz hesitated.  “I just don’t particularly relish the idea of a pack of them beating each other up over me.”

The three gullan sighed.  “Blood challenge,” Rumm murmured.

“Who do you suppose will be next to challenge the metal-maker?” Crugunn asked in her light, gossip-is-good voice.  “There were eyes on Olivia like stars in the sky at this gathering.”

Olivia frowned.

“It will be Thugg,” said Rumm.  “He’s made no secret of his desire.”

“I have half a bottle of thumperjuice that says it will be Vorast.”  Thurga said this last with a hint of challenge.

Liz caught Olivia’s eye and started laughing.

“Thumperjuice, hm?  I have a lantern, with fuel.  It will be Thugg, and it will be blood challenge.”

“Blood challenge, yes, but not Thugg.”  Crugunn tossed her hornless head as if the very idea of Thugg in physical combat were ludicrous.  “Who was it that prodded Vorung into challenge, hm?  Logarr was watching, and Logarr is watching still.”

“Logarr,” Thurga mused, and then shook her head.  “He knows nothing would ever come of it.  He’s not even tribe, not really.”

“Who would stop him?  Vorgullum is gone.  Olivia’s kind heart would have brought him in to a hunter’s feast once,” Crugunn said, her eyes gleaming as she smiled at Olivia.  “Now, perhaps he thinks it will bring him in to her pit.”

“Logarr told Vorung to challenge?” Thurga asked, still skeptical.

“It didn’t take much encouragement, I think.  Rumor has it Vorung has quite a taste for frog-skin.”  Crugunn waggled her hips and laughed.  “And as long as he wants a human, why not take the best of them?”

Liz rolled her eyes at Olivia, who covered her face with a muted groan.

“Vorung should have known better than to blindly challenge Sudjummar.  Left to his own, he might have fought later, and fought better.  But there stood Logarr, whispering to him as Olivia stood upon the rock.  No, mark me, Logarr sent Vorung against him so that he could see for himself how Sudjummar would fight, and he means to draw blood of his own.”

CHAPTER FOUR

POWER

1

It seemed safer to spend the next few days in the women’s tunnels, away from what Horumn called ‘the stag-heads’ and the struggle with the Great Spirit’s spark that too often flared up around them.  Olivia tried to use her time well, teaching Tina more of Murgull’s potions and helping in the clinic, and seeing what she could of Sudjummar when he brought Somurg to nurse.  She even went to see Cheyenne as time wore on, only to find the other woman had finally gotten her wish and been given her own lair.

Cheyenne lay naked in a pit on her back.  Chains ran from pitons in the wall to each arm and each leg.  Her long red-and-brown hair had been pulled back into a single rope and wrapped through an iron loop that hung suspended by a chain from the wall.  Her eyes were closed and stayed closed even when Olivia approached.

“She lunges,” said Yawa when Olivia had been staring at that loop for some time.  “She bites if she is able.”  Yawa watched Olivia examine Cheyenne’s red welts where her skin met iron, and then returned her attention to a stack of ancient Sports Illustrated magazines.

Olivia knelt at Cheyenne’s side.  “Are you okay?” she asked quietly.

Cheyenne sighed without opening her eyes.  “What do you think?”

“Can you roll over a little?”

For answer, Cheyenne seized the right-hand chain and pulled on it to heave herself on her side.  Her back was spotted with tender red marks, but no open sores.  Not yet.  The backs of her knees were heavily bandaged.  Olivia unbound one of these and ran the tip of her finger across a puckered scab—the lasting mark of Vorgullum’s rage.

“Can you move your legs at all?”

“A little bit.”  The toes of her left foot twitched.  The right foot curled inward slightly.  “Not much.  It gets a little better each day, but I’m not planning any walking holidays.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“So am I, sister.”  Cheyenne returned to her back.  Still she had not opened her eyes.  “I tried to go on a hunger strike.  That big bitch sat on my chest, chewed my food and spat it down my throat.”

“So eat,” grunted Yawa without looking up from her magazine.

“Kodjunn said they’re going to take my babies.”  Cheyenne’s lip curled, but without heat.  “He said I can see them, if I behave myself and act like a good little slave.  You know, I used to help women get away from situations that weren’t even close to this bad.  Now here I am.  This is so fucking unfair.”

Olivia took a fold of canvas tent and covered her with it.  Cheyenne shuddered when the material touched her, and then lay still.

“I’m never getting out of here, am I?” she asked dully.

“No.  None of us are.”

Cheyenne finally opened her eyes.  They were bloodshot and slightly yellowed.  “Why do you keep coming to see me?” she asked.

Because no one else will.  “Something to do.”  Olivia tried on a smile.  It felt too tight.  “I have way too much spare time these days.”

“You need to find a healthier way to fill it.”  Cheyenne’s eyes slid shut again.  “Not enough you’re calling yourself the fucking Messiah, now you’ve gone and sent Carla out to be a bat-whore.  How did that feel?” she continued, sounding sincerely interested.  “When you got home and had one of those furries grunting in your face and humping between your legs, did you think, ‘Right now, Carla’s getting gang-jumped because I said it was okay?’”

Olivia touched her hand to Cheyenne’s forehead, found it cool and dry.  “See that she gets lots of milk and other liquids,” she said.

“I try, Olivia,” said Yawa, rolling her eyes.

“Who’s next?  I’m curious.  You see, what I find so fascinating about you is your total willingness to play the part of Christ Our Savior.  You fly out in the night to get medicine for Liz, but you drop Carla off in the Red-Light District of the bat-cave.  You killed Maria and you got Beth pregnant.  Olivia giveth and Olivia taketh away.  This would be funny if it wasn’t so sick.”

Olivia stood up and turned away from the pit.  “Massage her.  Ask Horumn how if you don’t know.  Treat those sores on her back twice a day, and try to encourage her to roll onto her sides as much as she can stand it.  And I want some softer bedding in this pit the next time I see her.”

“And who is going to give fine bedding to this beast out of love for her?  Or me?”  Yawa sighed, but nodded.  “As you command, Olivia.”

“As you command,” Cheyenne echoed, and laughed.  “If I had it to do all over, I’d have killed you when I had the chance.”

Olivia left without speaking.

She supposed she ought to stop by Horumn’s residence and check on Victoria and Carla, but the thought depressed her.  She walked past the Eldest’s lairs without stopping and left the women’s tunnels behind her.  The thought of a bath was tempting, but she didn’t want to deal with people—the males would come onto her, the females would be jealous of her, the humans might be annoyed by her notoriety, and the gullan would be surprised by her discomfort.

Giving up on the entire night, Olivia resolutely made her way towards the forge.  If Sudjummar wasn’t in too much pain, she would welcome the chance to cry on his shoulder and listen to his familiar voice explain the way of things in his mellow good humor.

The forge was bright, but the hammer wasn’t striking.  She thought Sudjummar had stepped out, but then heard Somurg’s piercing giggles and realized Sudjummar was probably feeding him again, in spite of her wishes to the contrary.  It was her own fault for sequestering herself and she knew it, but still!  He knew he was supposed to bring him to her! Olivia broke into a run.

Sudjummar was perched on his anvil, talons digging comfortably into the sides, his wings curving sharply towards the ground, one of them edged in a hard clay cast.  His back was to her, but she could see his arms moving as he presumably tickled at the baby that squealed and smacked back at him.

“Sudjummar,” she said, making an effort not to sound accusatory.  “You promised you—”

The gulla turned.

His eyes were blazing with molten gold.

The Great Spirit stood Sudjummar’s body on the anvil, gathered Somurg to his breast and glared at her as steam from the forge floated up around his powerful body.

“You have not summoned me,” he said.  He made no effort at all not to sound accusatory.

“Please don’t—” she began, rushing forward.

The Great Spirit’s hands flexed slightly on Somurg’s back, his expression darkening like the sky before a storm.  A faint tremor ran through the stone beneath her feet.  “You think I mean to harm my son?”   His voice was a thunder of quiet menace.

“No,” she said, stopping with one hand still outstretched.  “No, I think you’re going to harm Sudjummar.”

The god glanced down as though considering the integrity of the body he wore.  “Hm.  I cannot manifest in the same space with one of my own save that I inhabit him.”  He looked up again.  “What do you propose?”

“Let me go someplace private.  I’ll call you.  That way, you won’t have to possess anybody.”  Her eyes pleaded.

“Acceptable.”  The Great Spirit leapt from the anvil and leveled a claw at her sternly.  “But do so swiftly.  I have been patient long enough.”

Olivia turned and fled.

She raced through the dark passages by touch, stumbling into uneven walls and scraping her knuckles badly in the process.  When she was sure she had found a true cavern and not just a wide tunnel, she put her back against the wall and called for him.

Light flared from dozens of points along the wall where ancient candles stood forgotten.  The Great Spirit appeared before her, exploding into existence, even larger and more imposing than he had on the mountainside.  Even lacking wings, he gave an impression of vast size and seething power; his crest of horns gleamed gold in the candlelight, like the aura medieval scribes drew around saints.  Or demons, given the appearance of the Great Spirit.  “Did I not impress you with the dangers that await you?” he demanded.  “Did you think you could ignore my warnings?  Ignore my commands?”

“I haven’t been back that long,” she protested, and he immediately looked annoyed with her.  “And my mate left, and…I’ve had other concerns!”

“Indeed.”  His eyes narrowed.  He advanced on her.

She backed up, struck the wall.

He glared at her.  “I will not strike you,” he said crossly, and thrust his hand under her skirt.  “Unless necessary.”

Olivia’s arms and legs went immediately rigid as marble; she dug her fingernails into her shoulders, turned her face away and squeezed her eyes shut.   The Great Spirit found and cupped her sex in his palm and pushed one finger inside her as though testing for warmth.

“Hm.”  He ran his eyes across her hands, digging bloody crescents into her own skin.  “Is something the matter?”

“No.”

“You have succeeded in mastering the power I have given you.”  He withdrew his hand.  “Now I will strengthen it.  You may lie down, if you wish.”

Olivia sank slowly to the floor, shivering, and rolled onto her back.

He knelt between her knees, put one hand on her thigh and looked at her intently.  After a short silence, he said, “You are causing yourself to bleed.”

She forced her hands to unlock and waited.

He did not move.  “Look at me.”

She shuddered, her stomach tightening.  “Why?”

“Because I wish it.”

Olivia opened her eyes, took several hard breaths, and faced him.  His molten eyes regarded her beneath a furrowed brow.  His erection swelled out over her belly; small drops of clear oil glistened on the head of the thick shaft.  She felt faint pain as two fingernails broke against the stone and she forced her hands flat again.

He said, “Do you wish to sleep?”

An image rose in her mind of herself flopping beneath him while he fucked at her for six or seven hours.  She shook her head.

He seemed satisfied with that.  He took her hips in both his hands and brought her up against his glans, his eyes drilling into her unblinkingly.  A gush of thick heat poured out across her thighs and he bore down on her.  “When you are immortal this may become easier,” he remarked, pumping another jet of cum to grease his entry.  His hard stomach came flat against hers; growling pleasure, he moved one hand beside her head, toyed with her hair idly, and then just looked at her, wedged hot and deep and hurtful.  “You are crying,” he said.

“Sorry,” she sobbed, and tried to stop.

He lowered himself until his massive body weighed over her like a satin-wrapped slab of lead.  His eyes filled her field of vision.  She could see patterns of red and white and gold swirling in them like lava.

Slowly, he eased his shaft back and then sank it inside her again.  He studied her expression.  “Tell me why you make that face.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“That cannot be helped.”  He ground his hips against her, as if gauging her reaction.  “However, I can provide you with pleasure, if you require a distraction.”

She wanted to shout How could this possibly be pleasurable? full into his face, but didn’t dare.  He seemed to be expecting an answer.  She nodded.

His hand slipped between them to lay over her belly.  He made a half-circle there, above her womb.

An orgasm like acid ripped out from the core of her, causing her to arch once, screaming, against his hard body.

He examined her face as she fell back, looking faintly smug, then proceeded to thrust into her.  Satisfied that he had given her all the pleasure she needed, he lowered his head until it settled in the join of her neck and shoulder and set a hard, steady rhythm, sparing her no further thought.

She had no idea how long she lay beneath him, his breath burning on her skin, her back rubbing back and forth over the stone, before she started crying again.

“Your wounds are paining you?”  He spoke without lifting his head.  His voice was a low roar in her ear.  He did not break rhythm.

Olivia turned her head, tears pouring into her hair, and looked dully at the blood-crusted slivers she’d carved into her shoulders.

“I shall teach you a thing,” said the Great Spirit.  “Look at me.”

She started to turn her face into his.

“No, woman.  Close your eyes and look at me.”

Oh.  She obeyed, feeling within her for the power and using it to slip out of her physical body to see them both.  The ease of this was very oddly not alarming, as natural as if she’d been doing it all her life.  Looking down, she thought that she looked completely miserable.

“Behold the wounds of your body.”

She had no idea what he was talking about.  Experimentally, she drifted further back from her body and the colors washed out of the air like paints in the rain.  The Great Spirit was an aura of raging flame; the seed he spent almost continuously inside her, a maelstrom of blinding white.  Then she realized she could see her body as a pale blur, and that there were faint bluish smudges on her hands and shoulders.  Her battered sex was a bruise of indigo, but that, she supposed, was beyond help as long as the Great Spirit moved inside her.

“Take my essence.”

How?

“In the manner with which it is done,” he replied blithely.

Olivia groped at her body with her mind.  It had been so easy when she’d done this with Sudjummar, but—like the old joke about the centipede who stopped to wonder how he walked and could never walk again—thinking about it only complicated things.  Watching the blurs of light below, she saw the Great Spirit cum, his storm of white fading slightly and her own body glowing brighter.  This made the blue wounds stand out in stark relief.  Olivia tried to focus her mind on the torn places, tried to fit them together somehow.  Nothing happened.

With Sudjummar, she’d actually gathered the power up somehow.  That boggled her mind a little, now.  How had she done that without hands?

The Great Spirit laughed, even as he thrust steadily into her.  “You are no longer bound to the constraints of flesh, Olivia Blake.  If you wish hands, form them.”

Well, of course.  Olivia looked at herself (her floating self, as opposed to the real one, still pinned under the Great Spirit) and with a curious flexing sensation, pulled herself into shape.  It was ridiculously easy, and she felt much better just for being back in a body, even if it was a noncorporeal one.

And now that she had hands, all she had to do was reach down into the churning light that was her and dip up a palmful of power.  It had no weight, no substance, but clung to her spirit-fingers in a thick, gummy mass.  Now what? she asked, wiping it from one hand onto the other.

“Will yourself whole,” the Great Spirit told her.

As simple as that, huh?  Well, all right.  She tried smearing the glowy stuff over the bruised points on her shoulders where she’d clawed herself, and to her astonishment, the dark crescents faded at once.  She floated closer, brought her physical self into focus, and saw only dried flakes of blood.

Olivia hovered a moment, in thought.  Then she retreated again, examined the seething mass of fiery light that was the Great Spirit, and nudged at it with her mind.

“What is it?  Do you require further pleasure?”  His hand moved to cover her belly.

She almost told him no, but curiosity compelled her.  Yes.

From this safe distance, she watched the flames of her body blaze briefly with climax, but she felt nothing.  She watched the pulsing knot of white increase as the god ejaculated twice in rapid succession.

She thought of Sudjummar in the cavern outside the baths; of forming a probe with her power and forcing him to orgasm.

Olivia concentrated, reached into the raw energy collecting at the core of her physical body and formed a tendril of snapping power.  Cautiously, she pushed it out at the god.

“Mm.”

Clearly, that didn’t work.  She gathered a larger amount, did it again.

He lifted his head from her body’s shoulder and looked back and up at her, his brow furrowed in amused curiosity.  “What are you trying to do?”

Can you feel it?

“Somewhat.  What is the intention?”

She couldn’t think of an answer that didn’t run the risk of offending him.  She sent him the image instead of a cat batting at a ball of string.

“Ah.”  He ‘distracted’ her again with a series of brutal climaxes, ejaculated almost as an afterthought, and continued to thrust at her, as steady and emotionless as a piston in a car engine.

Olivia watched the god work at her.  Whenever the knot of white energies grew too intense, she would absorb a part of it until her spirit body was almost too bright to look directly at.

“Enough.”  The Great Spirit spent a final jet of semen, then withdrew from her and tipped his head back as if he could see her spirit floating in the air.  He probably could.  “Return.”

Just a second.

Olivia gathered some of the raw power and pressed it into the center of her body, soothing the ugly bruise back to white.  When it had faded completely, she dropped until the physical world came into sharp focus and looked at herself critically.  She looked all right.  Sad, but all right.  Without thinking, she raised a spirit-hand to run through her spirit-hair and in astonishment, saw her physical body do the same.  She made herself scratch her nose next and then, without moving her spirit-self at all, concentrated until her body sat up.

While the Great Spirit watched, amused, she pulled her Olivia-body onto its feet and walked it up and down the room.  It wasn’t a graceful walk, but she thought it might be, with practice.  And she wanted to practice, which was a disturbing thought on some level, disturbing enough that she slipped her body back on and fell into the grip of weight, gravity, and dimension.  She took a few breaths, running her hands down her body to reassure herself of its reality.

Almost by reflex, as soon as she saw her hands she checked the time.  Three in the morning.  She should be exhausted.  Even if she hadn’t just spent the last seven hours having sex, she should be falling-down sleepy.  Instead, she felt keyed up and over-caffeinated.  “How come I’m not tired?”

“And why should you be tired?  Have you not absorbed the very essence of my divine power?”  He spoke patiently, as though to a slightly stupid child.  The Great Spirit straightened, since she was obviously done rubbing her hands all over herself.  “I will leave you now to explore the limits of your new strength.  Swear now to summon me again tomorrow.”

“Now wait a minute,” she heard herself say.

He turned slowly to face her, his face setting into an expression that prepared to be angry.

“There are things I have to do in this tribe,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm and non-provocative.  “And I don’t have that much time.”

“Time,” he repeated, as if the concept were vaguely distasteful to him.

“Yes, time!  Time to spend teaching Tina everything this tribe will expect her to know when I am gone.  Time to spend with my friends, my son, who I will never see again after I leave this mountain to be with you!  I don’t want to take seven hours out of every damn day just to fuck you!  I want to be able to savor what little I have left.  Isn’t that all right?”

He crossed his arms and glowered at her.  “I must build in you the power to take Bahgree’s essence and consume it.  This too shall take time.”

“I just…look, isn’t there any way we could compromise?”

He lifted one brow coldly.  “Compromise.  I.”

“Please.”

It was the right word.  She could see him considering the idea, albeit with an air of great unwillingness.

“What do you propose?”

“I’ll summon you when I can, if you leave me alone the rest of the time.”

“How is this arrangement at all to my benefit?”

He was preparing to refuse; she could see it in his eyes.  Frantically, she cast about for some idea of what she could offer him in exchange for a little peace.  Inspiration struck.

“I promise to summon you and stay with you when I am in season.”

His eyes blazed once with vibrant lust.  He smiled slowly.  “Indeed.  Then I accept these terms.  This cavern will be our meeting place.”

“Fine.”

The Great Spirit’s mouth broadened in an unselfconscious leer.  “Long has it been since I have possessed a female in the fullness of her season.”

“Urga comes into season every single month!”

A shadow of frustration crossed his face.  “It is different,” he said.  Abruptly he released her and stepped away.  “But I warn you now, Olivia Blake, hold to your bargain.  I do not require your cooperation to couple with you.  I do not require you to be conscious.  I give you this time in the spirit of compromise.  Fail to please me, and I will have it back again.”

Without another word, he vanished, taking the light with him and leaving Olivia alone in blackness.

2

Olivia was having an absolutely creamy dream in which she was sleeping all alone in a great big bed filled with down comforters and big puffy pillows.  Just sleeping.  Ah, bliss.

She awakened to a finger poking her in the shoulder, and rolled over with a croaking, “Muzzit?”

Beside her, Sudjummar grumbled something under his breath and snuggled down deeper in the bedding.  Olivia stared at him until it sunk in all the way that the metal-maker was sound asleep and someone else was still poking her, not too hard, once a second, regular as the pendulum of a grandfather clock.

“Hell?” she inquired politely, rolling onto her other side.

Amy was seated cross-legged in the pit.  She dropped her pointing finger back in her lap and said, in English, very pleasantly, “Happy birthday.”

Olivia frowned and rubbed at her brow, as if she could massage the meaning of the words directly into her brain.  “What?”

“Happy birthday.”

“How the hell do you know it’s my birthday?”

“I don’t,” Amy said with a shrug.  “But I know it’s mine.”

Stunned silence.

“What?” she exclaimed again, loudly enough to wake Somurg.

“I made a calendar way back in the beginning, just to stay on top of things.  Today is August 14.  Happy birthday to me.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m telling everyone.”

Olivia rubbed a little more coherence into her head.  “What the hell happened to July?” she asked.  “When did Vorgullum and the others leave?”

“June 30.”  Amy propped her chin on her hands and added, “Dunno what happened to July.  You’ve been gone a lot.”

“I have not,” Olivia said crossly.  “I just haven’t been too damn crazy about hanging out in the commons and watching stag-headed males swagger around.”  Which was not entirely true.  Ever since Vorung had challenged and lost so spectacularly, the other males had treated Olivia with polite, if watchful, deference.  And if there were some instances that could be called flirtatious, Olivia simply stonewalled them by ignoring them.

But Amy had a point.  Olivia had spent every fifth day letting the Great Spirit fuck her blind, and, it seemed, every other day doing the same thing to Sudjummar.  Although she did her best not to hurt him, she frequently left him unconscious when she went to the women’s tunnels, there to help Tina manage the clinic and to avoid any spark of lust that might set off her stupid power again.  When the day came that Sudjummar told her she was coming into season, Olivia had managed a tactful retreat, saying that she preferred her love play to have less of urgency and more of pleasure and she’d make it up to him later.

Then she had gone to the pre-arranged place and called the Great Spirit.

He appeared at once, already facing her.  He stalked towards her, seized her by the waist and lifted her, thrust his face towards (but not touching) the V of her thighs and inhaled.  Slowly, he lowered her, still tasting her scent with an expression of great relish, until he fit her atop his massive organ and pulled her fast around him.  His eyes were half-closed cambers of dull flame.

Then he plunged inside her, and that was as much as she dared to experience, fairly leaping from her physical self and flying out to the very tether of her spirit.  Looking down, she could see nothing of herself, only the blazing inferno of the god’s great lust.  She did not try to play with her power, not even to heal the damage he was almost certainly inflicting on her.

There was no sense of time at this distance.  She only hovered still and silent far above and waited until the radiance of the Great Spirit began to dim in intensity.  She lowered herself then, but cautiously.  The lower half of her body was black with agony; her womb was a white furnace of raw power.

Olivia healed herself with a flex of mental effort, dipped a toe back into her husk, decided it was safe, and fell all the way inside.

She opened her eyes, aware of tremendous heat and pressure.

The Great Spirit was lying atop her, still hard but not moving.  He had turned his face into the hollow of her throat and was lapping at the sweat of her skin, contented as a cat with cream.

He sensed she had returned, and with a low sound of reluctance he pushed off and out of her, then crouched back and watched her slowly gain her feet.  His eyes were banked coals of immense satisfaction.

“That was pleasant sport indeed.”   His voice was thunderous, relaxed and contented, for all that he remained erect and undiminished. “And well savored.  I look forward to our next compromise.”  And then he’d vanished, again taking the lights and warmth from the room.

Olivia had stumbled through the tunnels to discover three days had passed.  Her seasons never affected Vorgullum for more than one night.  Either the Great Spirit was more attuned to them or…or she was already changing.

Now Olivia looked at Amy and said, “What’s going on in the world, birthday girl?”

“Whole lotta nothing.”  Amy stretched languidly and stretched out next to Olivia, propping her head up on her crooked arm.  “Sarah B. is almost done with being pregnant.  Liz is pregnant but holding it together.  Ellen and Anita are both getting huge and pregnant.  Cheyenne is freaking people out and pregnant.  Beth is still an itty bitty bit pregnant.  Nobody else is pregnant.  I would like to get through one whole day without saying the word pregnant.”

“Smugg?”

“Smugg is a perfect little leather-winged angel.  Damark is crazy about her.  How’s Somurg?”

“Doing a pretty good impression of his father, most of the time.”

“Which one?”  Amy lifted a hand in mock surrender as Olivia started to scowl, and said, “Sorry, I know.  Touchy subject.”  She made little circles in the bedding with her finger.  “Tina wants you to go to town and get more syringes.”

“Ah shit, I forgot all about that.”

“No prob.  She’s got enough for four more episodes, she says, but with Liz, that could mean four weeks or four days.  Who knows?”

“I’ll get Doru to take me later on.  What time is it?”

“Just after six.”  Amy smiled faintly.  “I keep expecting Kurlun to pop in with a present.  I could use another can opener.”  Her lip trembled slightly.

Olivia slipped her arm around the other woman’s shoulders.

“Oh, where are they?” Amy whispered.  “Why don’t they send a scout back, just once in a while, just to let us know!”

“Try not to worry, Amy,” she said gently.  “Vorgullum said it was going to be a long trip, but it’ll be over soon, and you’ll be wrapping your ankles around his shoulders in no time.”

Amy started, and giggled into her hand.  “Who told you about that?”

“Like something like that wouldn’t get around.”  Olivia rolled her eyes teasingly.  “Making me look bad.”

“Yoga classes.  Best fifty bucks I ever spent.”

Sudjummar finally lifted his head and peered over Olivia’s shoulder at Amy with a great show of surprise.  “Um…hi,” he said, clearly wracking his brain in an effort to remember whether or not Amy had been there when he and Olivia had tumbled into the pit in a thrashing kinetic frenzy the night before.

Amy immediately switched to gullanese and put on her sexiest, smokiest voice.  “Hey there, Iron-Tooth,” she purred.

Sudjummar looked faintly impressed with himself.  “This is Amy, right?” he asked, glancing at Olivia.

“Well, clearly I didn’t make enough of an impression,” Amy huffed and started to rise.

Sudjummar caught her wrist and thrummed sleepily.  “I’m sure I could spark a memory with a little effort.”

Amy giggled again, looked at Olivia for help.

“She’s playing a joke on you, Sudjummar.”

He released her at once, flustered.  “Oh, sorry.”  He watched her leave, then turned to Olivia and said, “What was that all about?”

“Amy was just telling me how time passes.”

“Time is such a trick, isn’t it?”  He wrapped an arm around her waist and rolled onto his back, draping her easily atop him.  He crooked his other arm behind his head and thrummed at her.  “Best to make the most of it.”

She considered it.  His easy-going morning arousal had sparked her power, but after so many sessions with the Great Spirit, she could control it.  Still she was tempted; she hadn’t once been with him without that power boiling through her, and it might be nice, she thought, just to relax and make love.  And he might think it was nice, too, not to end up in half a coma.

“I have things to do,” she said at last, and pulled back out of his reluctant grip.  “And so do you.  I keep you in this pit too much as it is.  That pile of broken tools in the forge is almost as tall as I am.”

He growled, rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself to his feet.  “Oh all right.  Leave Somurg with me.”

Olivia had been gathering her baby-supplies preparatory to pawning Somurg off in the women’s tunnels.  Now she glanced cautiously back at him.  “You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.  We get along just fine, don’t we, cousin?”  He scooped Somurg out of his cradle and nipped lightly at the baby’s nose.  Somurg immediately punched his uncle in the eye and giggled.  “And he’ll give me something to do when I get bored trying to catch up with work.”

“But you’ll—”

“Bring him to you for feedings, yes.  And if I can’t find you, I’ll give him to Amy.”

She came to kiss him.  “Thanks.  I know it’s overprotective—”

He laughed.  “There are worse habits than insisting on nursing your son.  Oh, if you see him, tell Doru I’ve got his spear done,” he added.  “So he won’t have to come down and break the other wing after all.”

She promised, gave the sensitive patch between his wings a scratch for goodbye, and left while he was still growling after her to come back and finish what she’d started.  She stopped by the women’s tunnels only just long enough to make sure Liz was all right, and only then because it was on her way and she could borrow an empty backpack or three from Tina, who reminded her patiently three times about the syringes in the course of a two-minute conversation.

Then Olivia took herself out to the common caves, catching the band of gullan males and the two human huntresses on their way out for the night.  “Doru, can I borrow you?” she called.

He had been sighting down the shaft of a spear with an expression of deep dislike.  He tossed it aside immediately on hearing his name and trotted over eagerly.  “Is my weapon ready?”

“Yes, you can pick it up anytime, but I was hoping you’d take me into town again.”  She gave him her most winning smile.

His grin widened and he hauled his body back to its most impressive posture.  “Same place?”

“No.  We just need a few things.”

He deflated slightly, then tossed his horns at the hunters and told them to go on without him.  “Hodrub, stay with Sarahjay,” he added sternly.  “And Sarahjay, dammit, stay with Hodrub!  Mudmar, you lead the hunt.  Get another goat for Horumn.”  He started to turn towards Olivia, and then swung back one last time.  “And Tobi, for Urga’s sake, if you drop your spear again, stop fighting and call for help!  All right?”

“Got it!” Tobi sang, saluting him.  She wore her spear in a sling across her back, and as she ran out towards the chasm entrance, she drew her own pair of climbing spikes and slipped them over her small hands.

Doru shook his head slightly, watching her go.  “Lost her spear in the last hunt,” he muttered.  “Jumped a rogue stag with those ridiculous little metal claws.  Head on.”

“Was she hurt?” Olivia asked, appalled.

He bared his teeth, looking mildly chagrined.  “No, actually, she killed it.  Which means I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I didn’t even know she had a set.”

“You thought you were the only one?”  He chuckled.  “Let’s see, who else has them?  Sarahjay, of course.  Amy, I think. Tina, and I know Liz used to have some, but I think she gave hers up after she got heavy.”  He indicated a full belly with one hand.  “Of course, Vorgullum offered them to all the humans after he saw how quickly you took to them—all but the Beast, that is—but not many were interested.  And why not, we were always willing to carry them before, and there aren’t as many long drops in this new mountain.”

“You sound disappointed.”

He hooked his hand into claws and brought them up before her eyes.  They seemed pointier than she remembered them being.  “They need wearing down,” he explained.  “The flightless males are having an even worse time.  It’s not a bad mountain,” he said grudgingly.  “And I suppose it’s better for the humans, easier to reach the baths and all that, but I’ll be glad when Vorgullum says we can return to Hollow Mountain.”

“And if he never does?”

He shrugged his wings and shoulders in the same movement.  Then he grinned.  “If nothing else, at this rate we’ll have enough babies to start a whole new tribe in a few years.”

He walked her to the entry and held out his hand expectantly, shaking his head when she showed him her climbing spikes.  “Yours don’t need wearing down, and I’ll feel better if you’re in my arms.”

She sheathed her spikes unwillingly in her belt pouch and climbed onto his chest, locking her hands around his neck.  “You let Tobi climb it,” she observed, aware that she sounded sulky.

“I can’t stop Tobi,” he said, laughing, and started up.  “But she’s like a little snake…a senseless little snake.  And I’ll tell you this—if Tina ever knew she was climbing this wall on her own, she’d have my wings off.”

“You know I came down on my own the very first night we found it,” she reminded him.

“Good for you,” he replied blithely.  “But I bet you a box of thumperjuice you went back up in someone’s arms.”

This was true.  She scowled.

“Well?”

“I had some help,” she said vaguely.

“Ha!  I’ll tell you what kind I like best when we get to the hive.  I’ve come to respect you a great deal,” he added, giving her back a pat on his way to find another clawhold. “But there’s independence and utter stupidity.  We don’t let our own young climb out until after they’ve fledged.”  He trailed off into wistful silence, thinking, no doubt of the fledging season to come.

They gained the aerie and he pushed her helpfully over then sprang up beside her and opened his wings.  He scanned the tree line, grumbled something under his breath about Mudmar’s formation, then turned and peered out at the distant lights of human habitation.  “I suppose you need a whole hive and not one of their dens,” he said.  “All right, come here.”

He bent down a little so she could hop up and lock her arms around his neck again.  His hands encircled her waist and then he leapt out over space, dropping low in a glide over the tops of the trees.  He swept his eyes over the ground mechanically, grunted when he spied a small band of elk, then arched up and curved away towards the outlying town.

“You should learn to hunt,” he said, ducking his head against her ear to be heard over the roaring wind of their passage.  “You’d be good at it.  And I could use the help.  Vorgullum has forty-three hunters with him.  I have eight and a handful of elders.  And Tobi’s efforts notwithstanding, we’ve had to rely more heavily on our stores than I’d like, and there’s not that damn much in our stores in Dark Mountain.”

“Why don’t you ask the other gullan females?” she shouted.

“I have!  The same night, the same hour that Vorgullum left, I was in the women’s tunnels with an armload of spears!  I only found three willing to try and not one of them could get off the ground without help.  I put them with the humans, but when the game bolted, Tobi and Sarahjay charged forward and all three gullan dropped their spears and ran screaming.  Our own fault,” he snarled sourly, and shook his head.  “Maybe little Smugg will join me in the skies, but those other females are useless.  I couldn’t put a spear in their hands again if you ordered them to take it.  And believe me, if I thought it would make a difference, I’d ask you to order them.  Eight hunters—six gulla and two humans, and I hate to admit that the humans consistently bring back more food.  Even if they find no game, they’re expert raiders.”

He was swooping low over the outskirts of the city now.  “Tell me where,” he said, banking towards the commercial lots.

She twisted as best she could to see, and let go his neck long enough to point at one of the grocery/drug/souvenir shops so prevalent in small towns.  This one was called Big Bill’s Corner Market, and had a giant plastic statue of a lumberjack in the parking lot.  “That’s good,” she said.

“That’s still active, but we can wait,” he said, but touched down on the roof and set her on her feet. “This is a good place to raid.  I come here a lot.”

“Do you?”

“Oh yes.  They’ve got bigger places around, and when we really need food, we tend to raid those more than this one, but I like this place best.  Best damn thumperjuice in the whole world.  And it has light-makers, and some of those coverings you humans wear, and these.”  He hooked a claw in the strap of her backpack.  “And the jars the females use for storing herbs, and pots and pans and metal knives and just all sorts of useful things.  I love it here.”

He hunkered down comfortably to wait out the closing of the store and she sat down facing him and drew her knees up to her chin.

“Tell me of your Somurg,” he invited.

“Well…he’s little and noisy and hungry all the time,” she replied.  “He’s also messy and wriggly and extremely loud when he wants to be.  But he’s soft and warm…and when he isn’t spitting up on himself, he smells wonderful.  He’s started grabbing at things he wants, and since I’m one of those things, I’ve got a good patch of scratches.”  She opened the front of her leather vest slightly and showed him the upper swell of her breast.

Doru hissed sympathetically.  “I hope you’re treating those.  I’m old enough to remember what babies like to hold in their grubby paws.”

She fastened her vest, nodding.  “If those claws get much longer, I’m going to go after him with one of Sudjummar’s files.”

“To have such troubles,” Doru murmured.  He growled in the back of his throat and ran his claws over the gritty rooftop in small, discouraged circles.  “Tina has agreed to go to Gullnar when she’s in season, and when he gets back, of course.  Tobi said she would come to me, but she hasn’t.  I could push the issue if I wanted…but I won’t.”

“Vorgullum is bringing more humans.”  The thought still stung.  “You could take one.”

He was shaking his head.  “Not until he commands it.  And he will, I know it, but not this time.  He has enough goat-headed males biting at his ankles.  It will be years before he gets to them all.”  He contemplated this, staring up into the rain.  “But he will.  Truth, we’ve lived under the shadow of slow death so long, it’s hard to imagine finally being free of it.”

“And all it took was the lives of one or two hundred humans,” Olivia said with quiet bitterness.  And Bahgree’s blessing, once the Great Spirit had his way and Olivia had given up her mortal life.

“Fewer by far than it’s cost us,” Doru was saying.  He stood and paced to the edge of the roof, looked down at the thinning parking lot.  “How’s your mate holding up?”

“His wing has healed…as much as it’s going to, at any rate.”  She considered his broad back.  “Do you know something I don’t?”

“It escaped no one that you chose to spend your season apart from him.  I…understand that humans don’t appear to find their season as enjoyable as gullan females.”  He sounded puzzled by this, but doggedly continued.  “But the clear message you sent was you don’t want to share his pit.”

“Not that it’s anybody’s business but my own,” she said tightly, “but Olivia Issagul is certainly living up to her reputation.”

He glanced back at her, a shadow of doubt in his eyes.  “Olivia, perhaps you have forgotten, but we gullan can scent the musk of coupling, and you haven’t worn it in some time.”

Olivia opened her mouth to argue, remembered the sensation of power, drawing in the essence and scent of her partner as he lay atop her, and frowned instead.  “Sudjummar’s forge is practically right next to the baths.”

“I’m not saying this to hurt you.  I’m saying it to spare you, and to spare him.  Thugg is working himself up.  He’s not young and he’s not too smart, but he’s strong and he’s determined…and he thinks you might be amenable.”

“Not another blood challenge,” she groaned.

“Thugg?  I doubt it.  It isn’t considered terribly fair to bring blood down so soon on a male who’s had his wing broken in the last fight.  Thugg’s a lot of things, and not all of them good, but he’s fair.”  He studied her obvious distress with an expression of frustrated sympathy.  “If it makes you feel any better, Damark is having the same problems and he’s none too young to begin with.”

“Blood challenge over Amy?”

“Believe it.  You should hear some of the things Kurlun says she can do.  But it sort of takes the wind out of your wings to square off against Damark and hear Amy shout for him to rip your stones off.  Helps to know where the female stands, so to speak.  But of course, Amy isn’t leader.”

“Neither am I.”

“Yes, you are.  I know, we’re supposed to pretend we all believe Vorgullum made his brother tovorak so that he could give you to him.  Ha.  Sudjummar stands tall because you made him tall and for no other reason.”

He returned to her side and extended one wing around her to keep the rain off.  She huddled against his side, grateful for the heat of his body.  “Would it make any difference if I stood Sudjummar up in front of everyone and called him leader?” she asked.

“Absolutely it would make a difference.  He’d be half-killed before the words were out of your mouth.  Sudjummar is flightless and crippled.”  He lowered his horns slightly.  “Which is a pounding shame, because he’s as clever as his brother and far more patient.  There are times, Olivia, when I want to seize some of the thicker heads in my mountain and bash them together.”

A number of cars were starting up in the parking lot.  Doru half-rose and twisted his head to see.  “Not long now,” he said.  “The humans inside need a little more time to sort themselves out.  Then we can go in.”

“Doru, what can I do to make the others back off?  What can I do that I’m not already doing?”

He exhaled through clenched teeth, looked down at her grimly.  “You’ll hate me if I answer, so I’m not going to.”

“Vorung may never be able to use his hands right again.  You’ve lost one hunter already; do you want to lose Thugg, too?  Tell me.”

He closed his eyes, opened them to look up into the rain, then turned and faced her again.  “Leave him,” he said darkly.  “If you won’t take another mate, then wait out Vorgullum’s return in the women’s tunnels.  Hard, yes. Unfair.  But it will keep Sudjummar alive.”

“Right, and send every male with the slightest ambition down to pester me whenever I try to leave.  How am I supposed to get anything done?”

“I said you wouldn’t like it.”  He turned his face back to the sky.  “You could try coupling more and taking less baths.  Couldn’t hurt.  And you need to spend your next season in his company.”

“Impossible,” she said.

He looked at her intently.

“For reasons I could not begin to explain,” she added.

“Are you meeting with someone in secret?”

“Not in the way you mean.”

The corners of his mouth curved slightly.  “How many more meanings are there in that?  You are, aren’t you?  Hm.  Is it Logarr?”

“What is this, Twenty Questions?”  She paused.  “Why would you say Logarr?”

“I expected him to challenge long before now, the way he watches you.  Are you meeting with him, to prevent him from fighting Sudjummar?”

“Oh, and is that the next piece of advice you have for me?” she demanded.  “Just sleep with every male who might challenge Sudjummar?”

He recoiled, plainly startled by her vehemence.  “No, of course not!”

“Just the ones looking for blood challenge, is that it?  You know what, my sex life is none of your goddamned business!  You’re as bad as the rest of them!” she exploded, very dimly aware that this was both untrue and unfair.  “Sniffing around to see when and with you and how often!  Why the hell should I have to defend myself in the first place?”

He inched away from her, this great hulk of a gulla, and showed her his empty palms.  “Easy, Olivia.”

She was not mollified.  “Yeah, that’s right.  Easy Olivia!  Well, you can take your suspicions and your advice and pound them both right up your ass!”

She stalked away from him to the furthest edge of the roof and sat, glaring into the trees.

Time crawled.  Below them, two more people left the store, called goodnights as they got into their separate cars, and drove off.  Somewhere in the night, a dog started barking.

She began to feel a little ashamed of herself.  And then more than just a little.

“I’m sorry,” she grumbled.

“I’ve heard worse,” he said mildly.

“I shouldn’t have gotten so mad.”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all.”  A note of baffled frustration crept into his tone.  “Humans are so touchy about coupling.  Like it has to be some sort of evil secret.”

“Well, you gullan don’t exactly mate right out in public.”

“No, but we talk about it.  Tina says, privacy.  Privacy means you keep such things quiet.”  He shook his head as if in disbelief.  “The only things we keep so quiet are unpleasant ones.  Don’t humans like sex?”

She was spared having to answer by the sound of voices below.  Keys jingled.  Footsteps splashed through the rain.  Car doors opened and closed; engines growled to life.  Doru watched them pull out of the parking lot and off down the street.  “That’s the last of them,” he said, and crossed over to the roof access door.

She expected him to snap this one open the way he’d done at the birthing center, or, for that matter, at High Hill Apartments.  Instead, to her surprise, he opened up his belt pouch and removed an oddly-shaped tool of some sort: a strip of metal, perhaps two inches wide and twice as long, very thin, with a hook-shaped hilt wrapped in leather.  It wasn’t new, and by the look of it, it had seen a lot of use.

Doru gave the doorknob a jiggle, then, keeping his grip on the knob, deftly inserted the metal strip just below the lockplate and gave it a swift, upwards jerk.  The door popped open.

So did Olivia’s mouth.

He glanced back at her as he returned the tool to his belt-pouch, and grinned at her expression.  “Bam, as my Tobi would say.”

“Where did you learn to do that?”

“Oh, we’ve always done it,” he replied airily.  “It doesn’t work so much anymore, though.  But that’s another reason I like this place.  Come on.”

Olivia followed him down the dark stairwell and stopped at the bottom to let him lean out into the dimly-lit hall for a sniff and a cautious look around.  His ears turned, pricked forward, then relaxed.  “All clear.  Let’s go.”

Olivia stepped out into a carpeted hall.  She could see the dim evening lights of the store at the end of the corridor, and directly across from her were two bathrooms, an employee’s lounge consisting of a weathered couch and a card table, two vending machines and a water fountain.  Slowly, almost overwhelmed by the novelty of it, she crept up and pushed the button for a stream of cold water.

“So that’s what that is!”

Olivia pinned her hair back with one hand and drank.  The water was very cold, and tasted oddly stale after all the mineral-rich water of the mountain.

“Let me try it.”  Doru nudged her out of the way and hunkered down awkwardly around the fountain.  He took the first spray right in the eye, but caught the second in his open mouth.  He made a game attempt to lap at it, then withdrew and shook his upper body violently.  “I’ll have to practice at that.  Say, is this the same as those white ones?”  He aimed a thumb back at the bathroom.

“No.  Those are for…for using in place of wastewater canals.”

He blinked at her.  “That isn’t very sanitary,” he said slowly.  “The water doesn’t go anywhere.”  He looked back at the restroom door, frowning.  “No wonder it smells so bad in there.”

“I think I should show you.”  She squeezed past him and went into the men’s room.  She waited until he was behind her, then reached out and pushed the handle on the nearest urinal.

He jumped back, his wings slamming into the stalls, and stared as water poured down and flushed itself away.  “Damn, look at that!”  He glanced thoughtfully at the stall, peered over the top of it and said, “Same principle?”

“Yep.”

“That’s amazing.”  He turned and examined his reflection in the mirror, then looked down at the sinks.  “Same here?”

“No, Doru, those are for washing up in afterwards.”

He poked at the faucet experimentally, then managed to turn the hot water tap.  He offered the very tip of his finger to the trickle that emerged and his face lit up.  “Hey, it’s warm!  Ouch, it’s hot!”

Olivia slipped under his wing and stood in front of the second sink.  She turned both knobs until she had a full, warm flow, then pushed at the soap dispenser and held the resulting pink goo up for him to sniff.

Doru grinned, adjusted the temperature at his sink, banged out three or four good squirts of soap and lathered himself up to the elbow.  He washed his hands with unfeigned enthusiasm, then sniffed his pelt and snapped his teeth at his reflection.  He started to shake himself dry again and she raised both his eyebrows by cranking out some paper towels and handing them over.

He rubbed at his pelt tentatively, reached past her to take a few more, then crumpled up the whole damp mess and put them carefully in the sink.

Laughing, Olivia fished them out again and put them in the trash.

“Bam,” he murmured, peering through the metal flap at the rest of the trash.  “Fucking bam.”

“Come on, let’s go shopping.”

He backed away from the sink reluctantly and followed her out into the hallway.  “First,” he said, “we find new packs.  We can always use new packs.  You go get the…whatever it is that Tina wants.  I’ll meet you back by the meat.”  He trotted off, claws clacking primly on the linoleum.

Olivia moved cautiously around the registers to the pharmacy at the front of the store.  She half-expected that the needles would be in the back, locked up tight with the other medications, and was surprised to find a display of them on the shelf in front of the pick-up window.  She opened her pack and tossed the entire box inside, then helped herself to a glucosamine monitor, six boxes of strips, a digital thermometer, three bottles of pregnancy-formulated vitamins, and one big bottle of aspirin.  On her way to find Doru, she also added a double handful of every kind of battery she thought they could use.

Doru was wandering down the souvenir aisle, and looking for all the world like a conscientious consumer with his huge hiking pack slung over one arm.  He held out his hand absently and looked astonished at the weight of the pack when she gave it to him.  “What did you get?  A bag of rocks?”

“Too heavy for you?”

He frowned at her.  “Hardly.  Here,” he added, opening his own pack for her approval.  “I found some human coverings.  Are they suitable?”

Olivia rifled through a haphazard jumble of quilted vests, sweatshirts, and hoodies that said things like ‘Welcome to ARLITTLE.  It’s Effin Cold Here.’ and ‘Inupiaq Pride’.  “Fine,” she said.

“Good.  I wasn’t sure.  I also got some timepieces for your humans.  Most of theirs are broken now.”  He zipped the pack shut and shouldered it.  “What next?”

Olivia was about to lead him towards the grocery section when a dark neon sign caught her eye and she swung back.  “How about a new disc for Liz’s radio?  I don’t know about you, but I’m about through with Ricky Martin.”  Olivia jogged down the aisle to Entertainment and knelt down in front of the display of CDs.

“That doesn’t look like the thing the box takes,” Doru remarked, eyeing the square case dubiously.  “I don’t think it’ll even fit.”

“You need to trust me more, Doru.”  Olivia picked one of each of the best-sellers and stuffed them in her already-bulging backpack.

“That’s enough,” he said firmly.  “Let’s get some food so the night isn’t a total loss.  And remember, you still owe me a box of thumperjuice.  This way.”

As they neared the coolers and banks of frozen foods, Olivia became aware of the hum of machinery for the first time.  It reminded her of something so she stopped, trying to puzzle it out.

Doru glanced back at her, then at the nearest freezer, then grinned at her.  “Listen to that!  All of them desperate to mate with something!”

Olivia giggled, clapping a hand over her mouth.  That was exactly what they sounded like, a gullan thrumm, in an electronic way.

Doru uttered a low, toneless impersonation of the mechanical hum, then chuckled and opened the cooler to fish out a six-pack of Coors beer.

Olivia moved past him, opening her last backpack, and began to fill it with pork roasts, working her way down the aisle until she ran out of room and had to go find Doru.

He was waiting for her by the checkout lane with his backpack straps over his arm, eating pepperoni strips out of the cashier-station jar.

“Done?” she asked, amused.

“Done.”  He took a few pepperonis for the road, then walked her to the rear of the store.  He sent her up the stairs ahead of him while he returned to the office and plugged the monitors back in.  When he joined her again, she was standing at the edge of the roof, looking out at a sea of moving lights.  It had stopped raining, and the moon looked down at them, half full in the sky.

Doru stretched hugely, flapped his wings several times, then began the arduous task of adjusting the bulging backpacks until he thought he could carry them and her at the same time.  “The thumperjuice will have to ride between us,” he explained.  “But that’s all right.  Hold on to me.”

She clamped onto his neck and he wedged the beer between them.  “I’m not too heavy, am I?” she asked worriedly.

He cocked an eye at her.  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

She looked around at the three packs hanging from his arms, then back at him and jiggled a little as he prepared to jump from the ledge.  “You’re sure I’m not too heavy?”

“Very sure, but you can do that again if you want to.”  He took her by the waist, leapt out into space and dropped like a stone.

She had just time enough to shriek before he leveled out a good two feet over the pavement and arched up into the air, laughing.

“Joke!” he shouted.  “Just a joke!  Sorry!”  He tried unsuccessfully to dodge a slap to the side of his head and aimed himself for the mountain.  “Ouch!  Don’t hit me!  Ouch!  I said I was sorry!”

She subsided, glowering at him.

He coasted along in the cool air for a long time in silence, and then grinned at her again.  “Heh.  Well, it’s easy to see where your Somurg gets his sweet disposition.  Ouch!”

3

Karen came weeping into the commons one week later.

She was not crying in a very feminine fashion, with delicate tears and little sniffles.  She brayed like a donkey, and all of her face, part of her hair and most of her shirt was covered with damp secretions of some form or another.  Moaning and sobbing and glaring at everything with misery-slick, swollen red eyes, Karen staggered as far as the flat rock in the center of the cavern and just stood there, looking at them.

“Karen?”  Bodual came a cautious step away from the small band of males who had returned from checking traps and now were waiting for Doru’s command to hunt.  He had his hands out, open and empty, as if it were a feral dog he were trying to coax to him and not his estranged mate.

Karen looked at him.  Her tears subsided.

“Are you all right?” Bodual asked.

She dragged her sleeve across her eyes, and looked at him some more.

Bodual sent Olivia a worried, baffled glance.  They hadn’t had much time together since their mutual encounter in the grip of Olivia’s new-born power, and what few meetings they’d had were purely platonic ones, but they’d almost certainly exchanged more words than he and Karen had.  Oh, she occasionally got bored enough sitting around the mythical Augurr’s lair that she came out to the women’s tunnels to do a chore or two, and she could usually be found in the commons in the late afternoon, sitting with Carla and Crugunn to gossip, but she wasn’t friendly.  Even Liz, who had been her roommate ‘before’ seldom saw her these days, and Bodual, her abductor, rarely got more than a scathing glance and an insult out of her, even when he brought her a share of his kills.  Now that she needed comforting…he clearly had no idea what to say.

Karen’s wet eyes began to burn.  Her sniffing stopped.  She looked at him, looked at all of them.

And then she exploded.

Gullan scrambled back before the fury of the shrieking, slapping storm that suddenly tore through them.  Males grabbed whatever human was nearest and leapt up the wall.  Females dropped whatever chore had been occupying their hands and did likewise.  Olivia seized Somurg at the same time she was herself yanked into space, right as Karen started throwing things, starting with a clay jug full of water that hit the wall right where Olivia had been sitting.  It detonated, soaking her right side and giving her a smack to the temple with a large shard just hard enough to scratch the skin.

A gullan hand caught her arm; Bodual’s anxious face filled her vision.  She felt his thumb prod at her forehead and then he looked beyond her, at Sudjummar.  “I swear, I didn’t do this.”

Karen finished emptying the fuel bin, found an iron poker and was striking sparks off the walls, floor, and anything foolish enough to cross her.  She overturned a bench.  She broke six inches off another.  She heaved the poker into the far wall, grabbed a cinder shovel and started flinging live coals out of the fire and across the room.  All the while, she screamed and screamed with rage.

Olivia finally realized she was hanging in Sudjummar’s arms thirty feet off the floor, and that every pair of eyes that was not on Karen was on her.  Oh shit, she thought, disgusted and a little afraid.  Aloud, she said, “Take the baby and put me down.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Sudjummar asked mildly.

“I have to.  Put me down.”

He began to edge down the wall, came within six feet, and just dropped her the rest of the way.  Olivia dodged a burning chunk of wood, watched Sudjummar leap back out of reach, and then looked at Karen, who was now using the cinder shovel to knock a good-sized hole into the hearth.

Damn it.

Olivia walked directly up to her, took the shovel out of her hands, and then slapped her soundly across the face.

Karen fell over as though Olivia had shot her in the head, and went back to weeping.

“Stop it right now,” Olivia said in her hardest voice. “Get up.”

Karen swiped at her eyes, lifted herself to her knees, and surveyed the cavern with froggy, swollen eyes.  She cast a single, flinching glance up at Olivia, then glued her gaze to the backs of her hands and just hunched there.

“I mean it, goddamn it,” Olivia said, in English.  “You could have killed someone.  Just what the hell did you think you were doing?”

“He left me,” Karen said bleakly.

“Who, Bodual?” Olivia asked, blinking up at the wall where Karen’s mate looked just as confused as she was.  Why on Earth Bodual’s leaving should either surprise or bother Karen, since she’d been living all this time with—

“Augurr!” Karen wailed, and burst into tears again.

Above them, someone snorted.  Olivia threw a withering glance upward that she hoped included everyone, then hauled Karen up to her feet.

“What about Augurr?” she asked, then glared at the other gullan again.  “Would somebody please get down here and start cleaning this up?”

“I’ve been living with him for months,” Karen sobbed.  “Ever since we got here!  He said he loved me.  He said he’d make me his mate.  He said that!”

Olivia looked up again.  Bodual turned his face into the wall, his back stiff against the sidelong glances and rolling eyes of the other men around him.

“He lied to me!” Karen shouted.  “I found him in my pit with Carla!  He said he loved me and he was fucking Carla!  She’s supposed to be my friend!”

“What did you do?” Olivia asked warily.

“I kicked them apart and tried to claw his eyes out, what do you think I did?” she snarled, and fell to sobbing again.  “Now he says he doesn’t love me and he never did.  He threw my things out!  He…He dumped me!”

Olivia caught Bodual’s eye while Karen wept.  It wasn’t easy to do.  His head was bent, embarrassed, hiding from the scornful stares of the other gullan. When he did ultimately meet her gaze, it was with an awkward, plaintive look of his own.  Short of saying out loud, ‘Please, don’t make me take her back,’ he could not have been more clear.

Damn it.

“Thurga,” Olivia said, and sighed.  “Take her to the women’s tunnels for now.  I guess I’d better go sort this out.”

She waited, but no one jumped in with any arguments and so she left.

Olivia had worked up an excellent head of steam by the time she reached the fabled quarters of the tribal eunuch. She knew exactly where to go.  She’d never even met the man, but enough females had visited and gossiped about him for her to have a perfect map in her mind.  If she needed validation, there were Karen’s belongings strewn below the chute to his lair; she stepped over them and spiked her way up and into the smallish cave he occupied.

A single candle burned from a natural shelf on the far wall, illuminating her surroundings just enough to show her the rich furs and soft bedding of Augurr’s pit, the finely-woven basket holding the foods that his many admirers brought him, and of course, the man himself, if only in silhouette.  He sat on a bench, chewing on a hunk of bread and flipping through a Playboy, and he didn’t bother to look up when she approached him.

He was not, she thought, a handsome gulla, but he was an imposing one—not necessarily in his physique, which was light and lean like Kodjunn’s, but in his bearing—and his confidence certainly added to his undeniable charisma.  Even now, as he ignored her in the aftermath of Karen’s meltdown, she suspected that women would flock to him even if he weren’t an eunuch.

And there was something familiar about him.  Something…she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Augurr evidently decided she wasn’t going away until he told her to.  “If this is about Karen, I’m not interested in discussing it with you,” he said.

“Well, I intend to discuss it with you anyway.  Do you have any idea the state she’s in right now?”

He snorted, still perusing Miss February, 2001.  “I’ve lived with her long enough.  I can imagine.”

His utter indifference threw her.  He wasn’t acting casual.  He wasn’t angry.  He wasn’t defensive or guilty.  If anything, he was very mildly annoyed, but at Olivia’s confronting him, not Karen.  Her own temper began to rise, as if to compensate.

“If you’ve lived with her this long, don’t you think she deserved better than the way you chose to end it?”

“Why?  She’s not my mate.”

“She says you promised to claim her for one.”

He shrugged, turned a page.  “Some women need promises.”

She stared at him for a few seconds, unable to believe he could say that with such a complete lack of concern.  Her fist balled.  She looked down at it, forced it open, unfastened her climbing claws, then balled it again and punched Augurr right in the face.

He fell backwards over the bench with a yelp and sprawled in the pit, kicking wildly until he caught enough leverage to push himself up on his elbows.  He stayed there, one hand at his snout, staring at her.

“She had a mate!” Olivia spat.  “You took another man’s mate!  Don’t you dare try to shrug that off!”

“She didn’t want him,” he said quickly.

“None of us wanted them!  We were taken!  But she had a chance to grow to like him and you ruined it!”

“I didn’t ruin anything.  She hated him before she ever met me.”

“You still should have sent her away!  You knew she belonged to another man!”  A thought occurred to her.  “A man who would never fight challenge with a castrated male!  Was that it?”

He shrugged his wings just a little.  His eyes never left hers.  It wasn’t the eyes she knew as much as the line of the brow, the curve of his cheek…and his horns.  Rough horns, not smooth like most gullan’s.  Striated, like a goat’s.  She’d seen those before, too.  Kodjunn’s horns were like that.

“When I leave here and ask Karen if she went to you or if you found her, what is she going to tell me?” she demanded.

His brow furrowed slightly.  She could see thoughts and excuses moving behind his eyes, but at last he said, “She was looking for me.”

“Did she find you?” Olivia pressed.  “Or was she just alone in the tunnels next to your lair?”

He said nothing.

“You answer me!” she shouted.  “I’m not one of your giggling little girls!  You know who I am, so you answer me when I talk to you!  Did she—”

“She was alone.”  He inched back a little more.  “But she wanted me.”

Olivia closed her eyes, too furious to look at him.  Karen probably had gone looking for him.  She could remember the interest in Karen’s eye when she’d first heard about the tribe’s lone eunuch.

She opened her eyes again.  “Did she want to go back to Bodual when it was over?” she asked, much more calmly.

More thoughts, more silent excuses.  He said, “Yes.”

“Did you let her go?”

“I didn’t hold her.  She could have left if she’d really wanted to.”

“But you told her that you loved her?”

“Yes.”

“That you would take her as your mate?”

He started to shrug, then thought better of it.  “Not in so many words.”

“What words did you use?”

His eyes flicked away from her, darting about the cave as if seeking help somewhere in its shadows.  “I may have said something like…‘If you were my mate, I would never let you go.’  And…And maybe that if she were free, I would want to claim her.  But she wasn’t free,” he added quickly.  “And she knew it.  Maybe she pretended to be, but she wasn’t.  I didn’t promise anything!”

“No, you just led her on so you could rut with her and then you threw her out when you got bored!”

He started to say something, then stopped and began again, suddenly defensive.  “It was just sex.  I didn’t hurt her!  I don’t understand why you care.”

No, obviously he didn’t.  And maybe she shouldn’t.  She doubted Vorgullum was interested in the sex lives of his tribesman, provided they gave him healthy babies.  But no, that wasn’t entirely true; if Vorgullum knew that Augurr had talked Karen into leaving her mate for a relationship that could never end in a baby at all, he’d be furious.  Which was no doubt why Augurr waited for Vorgullum to leave before he put Karen aside.

And he just lay there on his back, looking up at her and waiting for her to finish shouting and leave.  Then he could go back to his Playboy and the next dumb women who wanted a turn with the tribe’s only safe male.

Disgusted, Olivia remembered Crugunn telling her that Augurr had got a number of females pregnant, been sorry as hell, and gone right on doing it.  Crugunn had made it sound tragic and even funny, but the truth was despicable.  It wasn’t funny at all, but deliberate, indifferent, and unbelievably cruel.  The only thing that remotely compared was—

She stopped suddenly, gazing at him with wide, shocked eyes.  At his horns in particular, horns that, like Kodjunn’s, were more heavily striated than the horns of other gulla.  “Get up,” she said calmly.  “And turn around.”

His whole body tensed and his eyes dropped to her climbing spikes, tucked through her belt.  “If I do,” he said, and his voice cracked just a little.  “You must promise you will not kill me.”

“Some men need promises,” she said viciously.  “Turn around.”

He did, shaking, his wings clamped tight around his body.

Between them, running in a stiff line down to his hips, he had a kind of bristly, black mane, frosted at the very tips.  In all the time she’d spent in this mountain, she’d seen only one other mane like it: the one that ran down Kodjunn’s back.  Or two others, if you counted the one on the back of the male she’d seen with Bolga.

“I know you,” she said softly.

He glanced at her.

“I saw you.”

His brows began to knit.

Her face flushed with rage and now she did haul back and punched him in the kidney as hard as she could, sending him crashing down again.  “It was you!” she shouted.  “It was you with Bolga that night!  I saw you with her!”

If he’d protested, if he’d looked confused, if he’d even cocked his head…but his eyes flashed wide and the look in them was all the guilt he hadn’t been able to dredge up for his confrontation over Karen.  “I can explain,” he said rapidly, backing away.  “It wasn’t my fault!  She…She was in season!”

“Take it off, take the goddamn loincloth off!” she roared, grabbing a good handful of his fur and yanking him into the candle’s glow.

He fumbled at his belt, begging her with every breath not to do this, and when he realized that she would not be moved, his legs seemed to give out.  He sagged to his knees, staring up at her with both hands pressed over his groin until she seized one of her climbing claws and raised it.  Then and only then did he take his hands away, revealing his fear-shriveled penis and the thick, taut sac of his perfectly-sound scrotum.

She was too astonished at this proof of her suspicions to feel anything at all for a while.  Augurr was castrated.  Everyone knew that.  How could he hide something like this from the dozens of women he must have been with?  And what about the story?  The old leader taking him up to the top of the mountain, getting him drunk…

The story…which hadn’t come out until after the old leader was dead.  Ostensibly because Augurr wasn’t the only one making babies and he was afraid to provoke a rebellion.  And because…what was it Crugunn had said?  Because Augurr was a full-moon’s child.  Behold his crest! Horumn had cried at Somurg’s birth.  That crest, so like Kodjunn’s…so like the Great Spirit’s.  The children born at the full moon were sacred to the tribe; perhaps Augurr hadn’t liked being forbidden anything at all.

“You made it all up,” Olivia said, stunned.  “After the old leader was dead, you came up with that story and made sure you spread it around to all the right people.  And they believed you.  Why not?  What kind of man would make up a lie like that, knowing every other man would feel nothing but contempt for him for the rest of his life?”  She shook her head, anger filling all the dark spaces inside her that shock had carved.  “But you got all the women you wanted.”

“I never hurt them!  I never forced any of them!”

“Get up,” Olivia said coldly.  “Get up right now and walk.”

He started to fasten his loincloth on, shaking so badly he was only tangling it, but she slapped him again.

“Leave it,” she spat.  “I think it’s high time your tribe found out just what kind of man you are.”

4

Gullan saw them, ran before them, and by the time Olivia reached the commons, the entire tribe had gathered to see Augurr’s deception with their own eyes.  There were no discussions, no accusations, no questions.  The males wanted to take him out of the mountain and hack him into pieces.  The females, mostly silent, huddled together and watched, sick realization on too many faces.  Karen had started crying again the moment she saw Augurr.  Carla, brought from the women’s tunnels with the rest of the tribe, went to comfort her, and astonishingly, Karen threw her arms around her and clung to her like a sister.

Head bent and hands at his sides, Augurr allowed himself to be displayed on the center rock in the commons while the entire tribe howled for blood.  He never raised his eyes.

Olivia stood off to one side of the rock with Sudjummar, staring dully out at her tribe and wishing she’d handled this another way.  Most of her anger had bled out of her by the time she’d reached the commons and what little remained had been slapped cleanly away by the first roaring demand for death.  Now she stood, as still and silent as Augurr himself, struggling with the sick realization that she was about to order a man’s execution.

“What are you going to do?” Sudjummar murmured.

“I don’t know.”

Sudjummar cut his eyes at her warningly.  “I hate to say it, but that’s not good enough, Olivia.  So let me put it another way.  Are you going to have him killed or merely castrated?”

Olivia closed her eyes and turned to face the wall so that no one could see the agonized expression on her face.  “I don’t want to do either.”

The heat of his body as he leaned over her to put his mouth against her ear was a very welcome if deceptive imitation of privacy.  “If you do nothing, two things will happen almost immediately.  First, someone is going to rip Augurr open, and I mean that literally.  Right open, right with his bare claws.  I have a damned good idea how you figured out that Augurr might not be as safe as he has claimed to be, and I can’t be the only one.  So unless you want to see Augurr’s living organs spilled out in front of you, you must give some sort of order.  And secondly, Olivia, if you command us to do nothing and you are disobeyed—as you will be disobeyed—a large number of gullan will refuse to concede to your leadership any longer.  There are many who resent following a female anyway, even if that female is under the Great Spirit’s hand, and those who remain loyal will almost certainly be forced to defend you, and that sort of defense gets bloody in a big hurry.  People are going to die, Olivia.  So I ask you again, will you have Augurr killed, or will you have him castrated?”

She looked at him weakly.  “Can’t you tell them?”

“I will,” he said.  His eyes were grave and troubled.  “But they don’t want to hear it from me.”

They looked at each other in silence as the tribe continued to snarl epithets behind them.

“I can’t have him killed, Sudjummar.  I can’t do that.”

He nodded as if agreeing with her, unsurprised but unrelenting.  “Then you’re having him castrated.  Publicly?”

“No.”

He nodded again.  “That’s for the best, I’m sure.  Some of these here might think otherwise, but no one really needs to see something like that.”  He paused diplomatically.  “Who did you have in mind?”

“Oh Jesus, I don’t know.  How many will I need?”

“Three, at least.  One to hold the knife and two to hold him down.”  Another tactful silence.  And then, he softly added, “And one of them needs to be Bodual.  Karen is his mate.”

Instinctively, Olivia turned and sought Bodual out in the crowd.  At first, she thought he must have snuck out, but then saw him leaning heavily against the far wall, both hands pressed to his stomach as though he were fighting not to throw up.  Doru stood close to him, his hand beneath one of Bodual’s arms, holding him more or less upright.  The big hunter was leaning close, saying something Olivia doubted she’d be able to make out even if she were in arm’s reach of them.

As if he could feel her watching, Bodual glanced around, unerringly locking his eyes with hers.  They looked at each other with sick helplessness across a sea of enraged gullan.  Then Bodual closed his eyes and said something.  Doru glanced back at her, patting Bodual’s shoulder, and gave her a grim nod.

“Okay,” she breathed, more in answer to Doru than to Sudjummar.  And said it again, louder.  “Okay.  All right.  Bodual.  And Doru.  And…and you.”

“Hell, I knew you were going to say that.”  Sudjummar rubbed at his eyes wearily and nodded.  “All right.  Great Spirit help me, I’ll even hold the knife.  Okay.”  He looked up again, his eyes locking with hers intently.  “You know that no matter what, Vorgullum will kill him when he returns.”

She couldn’t answer that.

Sudjummar straightened and stepped back from her.  “Then make your command, leader, and be quick before things get out of hand.”

Olivia nodded and numbly pushed herself up onto the rock behind Augurr.  Silence dropped over the assemblage as swiftly as if someone had thrown a switch, and she faced the tribe.

“Sudjummar,” she said quietly, and Augurr’s back tensed.  “Doru.  Come and take him.”

The metal-maker put one hand on Augurr’s arm and waited until Doru had threaded his way through the crowd to take the other.  They lifted Augurr between them and set him on the ground.

“Bodual,” she said.  “Take him out to the peak of the mountain and make an honest man of him.”

Bodual’s eyes slid shut and for a second, she thought he would faint.  But he opened them again and his eyes were hot.  “I’ll do it,” he said, and yanked the knife from his belt with a vicious jerk, pointing the blade back into the crowd at the women clustered at the far end of the cavern.  “But I want her gone when I come back.  I have no mate after this day!”  He swung around, shaking on his feet, to glare at Karen.  “Do you hear me, you water-blooded bitch?  This is what you wanted, is it?  Now you have it!  You’re none of mine!”

Karen wailed and began to sob into her hands once more.

Bodual stabbed the knife back through his belt.  Took a breath, nodded again.  And finally started moving, like a marionette being tugged along by an inexpert puppeteer.  Doru and Sudjummar went before him, and a large body of the crowd moved at once to follow.

“They go alone,” Olivia said sharply.  She steeled herself against the immediate outcry that billowed up after this statement, but Doru and Sudjummar never even slowed down.  “It is not your right to see justice done.  It should be enough for you to know that I have done it.”  She raked her eyes across them as Augurr was carried away and was inwardly relieved when no one turned his back on her and followed.

“That’s enough,” Olivia said when they were gone.  “Now I want every male in this cavern to leave us, please.”

After a moment, amid much muttering and dark talk, the males obeyed.  Alone with the women, Olivia relaxed slightly.  She climbed down from the rock and drew them into a tight circle.

“You never noticed?” Amy hissed immediately, staring into Karen’s anguished face with open incredulity.  “How could you not notice?  What did you think was slapping at your ass, a little bag of peanut butter?”

“He never gets undressed in front of us,” Carla said.  “Christ, not even I knew, and he should have known I wouldn’t say anything even if I had.”

“He only does it from behind,” Sarah J. said.  She didn’t look at them.  Her eyes were huge, glassy, horrified.

“Or on a bench,” said Thurga faintly.  “When your wings are fit…you can’t see…”

There were mumbles of agreement.  A lot of mumbles.

“I’ve seen him in the baths,” Ellen ventured, plainly baffled.  “He must…He must tuck them between his thighs or something because when he came on to me, those were not there.”

One of the gullan women gave her a sharp look.

Ellen noticed and uttered an incredulous, angry little laugh.  “Oh my God, Duruna!  Of course I haven’t been with him!”

Olivia looked around at them, dread sitting in her like a hot stone.  “Who has?  Raise your hands.”

There were thirty-three gullan females and seven humans other than Olivia herself.  Olivia counted twenty-one hands.

“Keep them up if you have ever been pregnant.”

Twenty hands.  Jesus.

“Keep them up if there is even the most remote possibility that Augurr fathered that child.”

Fifteen hands, but the only that belonged to a human was Carla’s.

“Keep them up if the child is still alive.”

One hand.

“Who?” said Olivia.

The female with the upraised hand took a deep breath, and laid the hand on the shoulder of the female to her right.  Mother and daughter looked ill.

“All right,” Olivia breathed.  “All right.”  She pressed the heel of her hand into her eyes and tried to think.  Several long minutes crawled by and she kept arriving at the same conclusion.  “He’s a pervert, isn’t he?” she said without opening her eyes.

Strengthless whispers of assent.

“What is usually done?” Olivia asked.

Crugunn looked around helplessly and then spread her hands.  “I don’t know.  When has something like this ever happened?  We all went to him willingly.”

“He’s a full-moon’s child,” another gulla whispered, and several others voiced murmurs of concern.  “If you mutilate him, the wrath of the Great Spirit will fall upon us all!”

“You were all thrilled with his mutilation before,” Amy snapped.  “And I doubt the Great Spirit is jumping for joy to know his kid is fucking his own daughter!”

Olivia thought of the tale of creation as Vorgullum had told it, of the Great Spirit’s willingness to breed a daughter just to throw to his sons, and said nothing.

“Our leader is merciful!” Thurga was insisting, bravely standing against her sisters.  “And the punishment is just!  She does nothing more than what he has proudly claimed for years!”

“If Vorgullum were here,” another said hesitantly, “he would kill Augurr.  I think perhaps it is better to mutilate a full-moon’s child and give him a chance to restore his honor than to kill him.”

“Vorgullum will kill him anyway,” argued a third.  “So now we have mutilated and killed one!”

“But Vorgullum is not here yet.”  This statement, delivered in a flat, contemptuous, and blessedly familiar tone, silenced all the others.  Horumn rose from her place on a bench and limped over to them, striking her crooked staff into the ground extra-hard to show her displeasure.  “And those who stand tall in his absence have made their will known.  How dare you question it, here, before Olivia herself!”

The gullan drew back almost as one body, tucking in their wings and shuffling their feet as they looked away.

“Olivia’s words are wise,” Horumn continued.  “Augurr will lose his stones, eh?  Bah!  His perversions go with them and what remains behind will be a man with sound body and strong wings.  He will have no more foolish, rutting she-goats to feed him.  Before the tribe, Olivia will order Doru to teach Augurr to hunt now that Vorung cannot, and if he learns to use his spear on game half as well as he has used it on you rutting fools, he will be forgiven in time.”

“How can you speak of forgiving him?” one of them cried.

“We are women.”  Horumn’s hand tightened on her staff.  She raised her chin with cool dignity.  “We must be pragmatic.”

Most of them still looked uncomfortable, but no one else spoke.

“Unanimous?” Olivia asked.

Nods all around, some more reluctant than others.

“Karen, what do you want to do?”

She wiped her eyes and sniffed.  “About what?”

“About Bodual?”

Karen’s brows puckered in what seemed to be genuine confusion.  “What about him?”

“Do you want to keep him?”

Karen worked her mouth soundlessly, then looked down at her hands and shook her head.  “Even…even if I wanted to, he’d never take me back now.  Not now.  Because of me, he’s got to…”  She reached up slowly and covered her face and began to cry.  Carla, standing beside her, hugged her close and murmured soft things in her ear.  “And I don’t want him.  I wanted Augurr!”

Carla looked up over Karen’s shaking shoulders and mouthed Horumn, and nodded once when Olivia tried to shake her head.

Olivia looked to Horumn, who looked away, and then to Amy, who raised an eyebrow and looked stonily back at her.

She heaved a sigh without strength and said, “Okay, Karen.  Horumn’s going to take you to the women’s tunnels for now.  If Bodual wants some official divorce, he can get it tomorrow.  I’m all done.  Go on, all of you.”

Olivia sat down on the center rock as the room emptied and folded her head on her knees.  “What a lousy night,” she muttered.

“It’s about to get worse.”

Olivia looked up and saw Amy’s temporary mate, Damark, standing in the doorway.  “How could it possibly get worse?” she asked wearily.

“Wurlgunn just landed and he’s alone.”

5

Olivia felt a queer sense of division in her psyche.  She imagined she was a vampire and Damark had just driven three stakes into her heart.  The first, a white stake of excitement as she thought the travel party had returned.  The second, a red stake of realization as the word ‘alone’ was comprehended.  The third, a black stake of terror.

She half-climbed, half-slid off the rock.  “Where?” she breathed.  All three stakes were nailing her chest flat, stealing her breath and freezing her blood.

Damark glanced behind him.  “Here,” he said, and moved aside.

Wurlgunn staggered into the cavern, covered with blood.

Olivia let out a reedy cry and felt the world swirl around her like filthy water going down a drain.  She must have blacked out for a little while, because although she felt herself falling, she wasn’t aware of hitting the ground.

The next thing she knew was that her bare legs were pressed against the stone floor and it was freezing.  Her upper body was held in Wurlgunn’s arms, and he was rubbing her briskly to revive her.  He was also saying something in a frantic tone of voice, but she couldn’t make herself listen.

What had ambushed the travel party?  What was the fate the others had shared?  She didn’t want comfort.  She wanted to grieve.  She wanted oblivion.

She let out a moan and started to struggle against the hands that confined her, when some of what Wurlgunn was saying actually penetrated her reeling mind.

“—the cliff!” he cried.  “It’s pouring outside!  I couldn’t see where I was flying!”

“You crashed?” she said weakly.

“Of course I crashed!”  He uttered a high, relieved gust of laughter.  “I came in too low and hit the cliff!”

She had never heard anyone sound happier about flying into a solid object.  She burst into giggles herself.

“I thought everyone was dead,” she said, hugging him.

“No, no, no!  Everyone’s…fine.”  He flicked his eyes towards Damark, a quick glance Olivia was certain she wasn’t meant to see.  “He hasn’t decided which hive to raid yet, but—”

“Hasn’t decided yet?” Olivia echoed.  “What the hell is he waiting for?”

Damark snorted.  “That fool,” he muttered.  “He saw human tracks or yellow snow or some other stupid thing and he’s making everyone freeze their stones off while he makes absolutely certain there’s no ambush.”

“Some of that is true,” Wurlgunn agreed, nodding.  “Especially that part about freezing stones.”  He hesitated, sending Damark another furtive glance.  This time, the aged gulla began to frown.  “He knows it’s taking longer than he planned, so Vorgullum sent me back here to tell you that all is well and he hopes to return in three months.”

“That long!” she wailed.

“He also wants you to send someone back in my place with whatever news you have to give him.”  He allowed himself to appear slightly puzzled.  “Such as what is happening on the aerie with Augurr and those others.”

“What has he been doing all this time?” she cried, ignoring the thinly disguised question for now.

Wurlgunn tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling.  He was picking out an answer, and she was irrationally certain that he was doing his best to say as little as possible without actually lying to her.  “Well,” he said slowly, “Kodjunn has been copying as much as he can of the tribal histories into a little human book, the kind with paper?  And the storerooms had to be cleaned out before we could fill them…and Vorgullum wants to fill them so we won’t have to hunt after…well, after.”

Olivia sat up and pushed her way out of his arms, glaring at him accusingly.  “He’s got forty strong males with him right now,” she said sharply.  “He doesn’t need that many to clean out the storerooms.  What is he doing?”

Wurlgunn licked his lips, glanced back at Damark a third time.

“Stop that!” she snapped.  “I’m the leader here, not him!  You talk to me, damn it!”

His shoulders slumped and he looked down at his hands as though reading the answer there.  “I will.”  He met her eyes briefly.  “But not here.  Where are you staying, at the forge?”

She nodded.

“Then let me go and greet my Beth.  I’ll come to you tonight with all of the truth as I know it.  All right?”  He was pleading with her, fully aware that she could demand answers now if she willed it.

She opened her mouth to tell him Beth could wait, but forced herself to be still.  Vorgullum was all right.  The travel party was all right.  She could afford some patience.  “Fine,” she said between clenched teeth.  “Come to the forge tonight and we’ll catch each other up, but you better come ready to talk.”

Looking vastly relieved, Wurlgunn retreated from the cavern.

Olivia continued to sit, nursing her anger and depression.  Three more months.  Three!  When they’d been gone two months already!  He was supposed to be back by now and he hadn’t even started!  After a moment, Damark stumped over and lowered himself painstakingly onto the bench beside her.

“You are good to give him this time,” he remarked.

“I’m trying to be patient.  I’m not patient by nature.”

He grunted.  “Perhaps not, but Amy says you are one of the most sympathetic women she’s ever met.  If you are, then surely you could see he hated holding back his secrets from you?”

“I noticed.”  She made a face.

“Whatever it is that he doesn’t want to tell you,” Damark said, “I’ll give you a day and a night in the pit with my Amy if you can prove that Vorgullum didn’t order him to keep it secret from you.”

“What would I do with a day and a night in Amy’s pit?”

Damark looked first startled, then rueful.  “Forgot who I was talking to,” he said.  “Kurlun used to say that,” he added, a trifle wistfully, “whenever he meant to make a point about something he was certain of.  And then I had a day a night in the pit with Amy.  It is a statement of great conviction.”

“Say you’re right,” she said.  “Vorgullum ordered him to come back and tell someone, and make sure that the someone wasn’t me.  But why?”

“Because he’s a fool,” Damark grunted, and labored upright again.  “A fool to try and keep a secret from Olivia, and a greater fool for sending Wurlgunn to do it.  Wurlgunn, of all people.  No better with his mouth than with his big, stumbling feet.  I wouldn’t worry, Olivia.  Sure as water runs downhill, you’ll get the truth tripping out of that stone-headed idiot.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on him,” Olivia said, frowning.  “Wurlgunn’s a good man.”

Damark looked oddly pleased to hear this.  “I did my best,” he said.  “And just between you and me and the rock wall…he gets his sweet nature from his mother.  He got his big, stumbling feet from me.”

Damark winked at her startled expression and limped out of the room, presumably to find his Amy.

6

Olivia tried to take her mind off things with a brief visit to the women’s tunnels and a long soak in the hot baths.  When she thought she could handle Wurlgunn without either bursting into tears or yelling at him for not showing up sooner, she dressed and went to the forge to meet him.

But just outside, she could hear voices, the kind of low talk that did not want to be overheard.  Slipping up to the mouth of the forge, hiding from the light that spilled into the tunnel, she heard Sudjummar saying, “Is it serious?”

“I don’t know.”  Wurlgunn’s sigh.  “I don’t think so.  He flew back to the mountain on his own power, and Tordurk got the little rock out, but…he didn’t look good when I left.  I mean, he was talking, he was lucid enough to give me orders, but…he looked bad, Sudjummar.”

Somurg made a muffled wail and there followed a faint rustle as Sudjummar dealt with him.  “He was talking, you say.  Was he walking?”

“No.  He wasn’t even flying all that well, and that was before Tordurk got the rock out.  He lost a lot more blood then.”  A meaningful pause.  “People are going to ask me what’s happening over there.  What do I tell them?”

“The truth.”

“Are you sure?”

“It will all come home to us sooner or later, and I’d just as soon not make anyone think of you as a liar when it’s over.”

Concern colored Wurlgunn’s voice.  “You realize what will happen?”

“I’m not a fool.”

“What will you do?”

Olivia’s mind backtracked in a state of unreal calm over the conversation, picking up certain words at random and setting them down again until it began to make some sense.  Her heart stopped beating blood, and started pumping out ice water.  She moved around the doorway and walked in on them.

“Vorgullum,” she said, and both males jumped and swung on her.  “Vorgullum was hurt?”

Wurlgunn’s eyes showed the whites at the corners.  He glanced at Sudjummar, who was staring intently down into Somurg’s face.  Seeing no help there, Wurlgunn lifted his chin with tangible effort and met Olivia’s eyes.  “I don’t know what the weapon is called,” he said hesitantly.  He raised his arms as though sighting down a short spear, mimed tugging at something with one claw.

“A gun,” she said, still calm.  “Vorgullum has been shot?”

Wurlgunn took a deep breath, and nodded.

Olivia sat down, right there in the doorway.

Sudjummar played with the baby and did not look at her.

“What happened?” she asked.

Wurlgunn sighed, scratched at the base of his throat.  “We’ve been so careful, Olivia, really we have.  There was no sign the humans had gone into the mountain, much less down to the tunnels; not a sniff of them anywhere. But you know Vorgullum.  He had to be sure.  We were making wide patrols ever night, hunting double rations to build up our stores like I said.  Vorgullum was raiding a human camp.  He believed the human was inside the little shelter, but the human came out of the trees.  Vorgullum thinks he was drunk.   He heard the human at about the same time the human saw him.  The trees were too close to simply take to the air, so Vorgullum tried to frighten the human off.  The human…shot…him.”

Olivia blinked slowly.

Wurlgunn took another deep breath, bracing himself.  “Shot him,” he concluded.  “Three times.”

Olivia reached up and gripped herself by the shoulders.

“Vorgullum killed the human, crawled into a clearing, and flew back to the mountain.  Two of the little rocks hit his arm and went right through.  One got stuck in his chest and had to be cut out.  He lost a lot of blood, but he was talking afterwards.  He’s just…very weak.  He wants me to send back Horumn.”

Olivia was already shaking her head.  “He can have Horumn if he wants her, but he’s getting Tina, too.”

None of them spoke for what seemed a very long time.

She looked from him to Sudjummar, and back to him.  “What else?”

But it was the smith who answered, in a low, angry voice.  “My brother is injured.  His successor must step up to take command.  That means you.  That no longer means me.”

Olivia got to her feet and faced Sudjummar, who gazed back calmly into her black stare.  “Who is the most likely person to challenge you when this news gets out?” she demanded.

He thought about it.  “Huuk, I think.  Huuk or Thugg…but Thugg’s always been loyal even when he hasn’t been very nice.  I don’t think he wants to be tall as much as he just wants you, so if anything, this news might actually make him stand off.  Whereas Huuk would probably prefer Thugg in his pit, but for a chance to be tovorak should word come that Vorgullum is dead?”

“Fine.”  She turned to Wurlgunn.  “Go find this Huuk person and tell him that Sudjummar orders him to take Horumn and Tina to Hollow Mountain.”

Wurlgunn’s brows rose.  “Huuk could probably handle Horumn, but not both of them.  He’ll need someone to carry one of them.”

“Then that’s what you’ll do.”  Olivia’s fierce glare wavered; she touched his arm.  “Take a little time to see Beth first.  But please hurry.  And don’t answer anyone’s questions if you can help it.”

“But if they do ask,” Sudjummar called as Wurlgunn headed for the tunnels, “don’t lie.  As delaying tactics go, this isn’t bad,” he added, brushing at Somurg’s cheek.  “But I hope you realize that’s all it is.  A delay.”

“There is nothing wrong with you!” she hissed.  “Nothing!  I refuse to be stripped from you for such a stupid reason!  I refuse!”

Sudjummar finally looked up at her, his eyes deep with pity.  “Olivia, I know it’s hard for you to understand our laws, but they exist for a reason.  It takes a strong male to stand tall in these evil days—not cleverness, strength.  And I won’t kill a man just to keep you, and believe me, it will come to that.”

She stared at him until her eyes hurt.

He sighed and looked back down at Somurg’s sleeping face.  “We’ll play it your way.  For now.  We’ll see.”

CHAPTER FIVE

LOGARR

1

It seemed mere minutes had passed before the four of them left for Hollow Mountain (including Huuk, who made a point of saluting Olivia as he left to carry out his part in the mission he had been so honored to accept), but a glance at her watch told her it had actually been more than five hours. Wurlgunn spent most of the time in his lair with Beth, and Olivia was certain that he was not the gossiping kind, but Damark was right about him.  He didn’t have a secret-keeping face and he hated to lie.  By the following night, when she and Sudjummar made the official announcement, the entire tribe already knew Vorgullum had been shot, but all Olivia heard were words of reassurance and concern.  She dared to hope there would be no trouble.

The next day, Olivia even dared to venture into the commons alone, reasoning that to hide in the women’s tunnels would only make Sudjummar’s position that much more vulnerable.  Still, it seemed like things were all right.  She’d acknowledged Vorgullum’s injury, made certain to appear this morning on the arm of her metal-maker, and made an obvious point of placing Somurg in Sudjummar’s arms when he returned to the forge, but she was horribly afraid that the only person impressed by all her efforts was herself.

Now she sat making cord from sinews with the other women, wondering whether or not she would ever see Vorgullum again, when she became aware of a gulla standing before her.

She looked up warily.  It was Thugg, and he carried the point prong of an elk’s antlers—the trophy taken by a hunter who has stalked and killed the beast without aid.  “Oh damn it,” she said, deeply dismayed.  It seemed Sudjummar wasn’t right all the time after all.

“Olivia,” he said without preamble, “take this and come with me.”

“I’m busy,” she replied, ignoring the way the cave had fallen silent, the way her heart slammed against her ribs.  “Play with your antler later.”

“I am done with playing,” Thugg said firmly.  “You’ve lost weight.  You look pale.  Come with me, Olivia.”

Olivia stood up and turned to face him.  “Of course I lost weight.”  She spoke in the slow, impatient way of a woman addressing an idiot.  “I just had a baby and I needed to lose weight.  Of course I look pale.  I haven’t seen the sun in over a year.  And just why you should think that pale means unhealthy is beyond my comprehension since you furry people never even knew pale until we got here.  I am not coming with you.  I’m busy.  If there is something you want to say, say it, and let me get back to what I am doing.”

“Here is what I have to say.”  Thugg held out the antler.  “You can’t eat the metal toys that Sudjummar makes.  He is not providing for you.  I will.”

Olivia looked at the prong in his hand, then reached out and took it to look at it more closely.  “I’m supposed to eat this?” she inquired coolly.

There was laughter.

Thugg had brightened considerably when she took the prong, but didn’t seem to know how to react to either her sarcasm or the mockery from the crowd.  Flustered, he fanned his wings out to hide her from the others and leaned in close to hiss, “No, you’re not supposed to eat it, you’re supposed to be impressed.  That’s a trophy from a black-tail, damn it.”

“I’m not impressed.”  She put the bit of antler back into his hand.  “Now leave me be.”

“Leave you…?”  Thugg swept his eyes across the loose crowd.  “I’m not leaving you anywhere!  You…Where is Sudjummar?”

“Working.”

Thugg threw her a look of hotly mingled frustration, discomfort, and exasperation.  “May I speak with you for a moment in private?”

Olivia glanced at the other humans, who all stared back without a great deal of sympathy, then at the gullan females, who watched raptly, and finally, warily, at the men, who looked either envious or curious.  Something was happening, all right.  She supposed she’d better find out exactly what.  Olivia stood up, shrugging, and stepped into an alcove with Thugg, in full view of the others, but where their voices couldn’t carry as far.  “What is it?”

He scratched nervously at the side of his throat.  “How much has Sudjummar told you about challenges?”

“Just what I need to know to understand what I’ve already seen.”

He nodded, looking annoyed.  “Let me tell you what’s just happened,” he said.  “I gave you the trophy of my kill and you took it!”

“I gave it back,” Olivia said, her heart beginning to beat a little harder.

“That doesn’t matter, you still took it!  In front of everyone!  I don’t even have to fight for you now.  In the eyes of the tribe, you accepted me!”

She stared, horrified.  She wanted to disbelieve him, and if he had gloated over the information even a little, she would have.  Unfortunately, he looked just as uncertain as she and that left her no choice but to believe him.

“You are my mate now,” Thugg was saying.  “We need to go back before the others so that I can claim you.  Sudjummar should challenge me—”

“You mate-stealing dick!” she yelled, and made sure she yelled it loud enough for everyone to hear.  By the second wave of laughter, everyone had.

“How was I supposed to know he wouldn’t be here?  You’ve got no business wandering around in the commons without your mate!”  He watched her nervously, then added, “Look, I know you’re not happy with me, but you need to come with me for now. Just to my lair.  I’ll go tell Sudjummar and see how he wants to handle things.”  Thugg winced.  “Probably with his fist in my face, but this isn’t my fault.  I won’t take you to my pit until he’s had the chance to challenge me for your return.”

“How very understanding.”

“This is not what I had planned!”

“Well, you didn’t plan things very well, did you?”

He looked guilty, but couldn’t argue.  Taking her by the arm, he brought her back out into the common cavern.  “You are all my witness!” Thugg announced.  “I claim this female as my mate.  I claim her son as my own.  Do you refuse me, Olivia?”

“No,” she said crossly.

“Good,” he said, dropping his voice.  “Good enough, let’s g—”  He broke off abruptly and shoved her back.  Olivia stumbled and swung around, ready to start yelling again, when she saw what he had seen.

A large male had shouldered his way to the front of the crowd and was coming towards Thugg, one that Olivia knew, although she had never seen him in the commons before.  He wasn’t really tribe, after all.

Thugg raised his hackles and spread his wings guardedly.  It was a pathetic display.  Logarr had six inches and maybe fifty pounds on him.  “What do you want?”

“To challenge for your mate,” Logarr replied, and sprang, a motion unexpected and strangely beautiful, his feet thudding into Thugg’s shoulders.  Logarr hopped gracefully over his opponent’s head as Thugg flailed.  Thugg managed to tuck his wings under him before his fall to the stone floor could snap them, but a gulla on his back was frighteningly vulnerable.

Logarr crouched, watching closely as Thugg flipped himself onto his side, got one knee beneath him, then brought himself to his feet.  At any moment in this defenseless time, Logarr could have easily knocked him down.  He chose to wait until Thugg was standing before striking out again.

Then he pounced, driving one shoulder into Thugg’s midsection and slamming him up against the wall.  Logarr backed up a step, then cracked his knee into Thugg’s stomach.  He allowed Thugg to drop, then brought his joined hands down between Thugg’s shoulder blades.

Thugg made a horrible sound—a belching, amphibious croak—and fell on his face, gasping.

Logarr stood over him.  All were silent, even Olivia.

Thugg reached up shakily and wiped blood from the corners of his mouth.  He tried to push himself up.

Logarr took a step back, giving him room enough to stand.

Instead, Thugg made a clumsy lunge for Logarr’s knees.

Logarr dodged easily and stomped hard on Thugg’s back, slamming him down flat again.  Then he waited, a man at peace with himself and the world.

Thugg spat something, but it wasn’t surrender.

Logarr scooped him off the ground, punched him the stomach, and threw him against the wall.  He held him there with a few more punches, and then let him slide back onto his face on the floor.  He stood.  He waited.  Then he picked Thugg up and slashed him open from his left shoulder to his right rib.

Thugg screamed, and hidden in the agonized sound was a single word: “Concede!”

Logarr glanced at Olivia.

She stared at him, unable to decide what she was feeling.  It had all happened so quickly and now she was faced with the thing she had feared the most. There was a storm of emotion inside her, but none of it could be identified.  There was no fear, no dread, only a kind of numb anticipation.

Logarr looked down at Thugg.  “You may not touch that female,” he said.  “You may not challenge for that female.  Your word on it.”

“My word,” Thugg said hoarsely.

“Break it ever, and I will hunt you out.”  Logarr led him over to a bench and sat him down.  “Whether she is mine or not.  My mark is on you.”

“I know the law.”

Logarr turned back to Olivia.  His gaze was steady and speculative.  “Will you come to my lair?” he asked, absurdly gentle.

She shook her head.

He nodded as if this were the answer he had expected.  “Then you will yield to me.”  It was not a question, but he watched her as carefully as if he expected rebuttal.

Time stood still while Olivia considered her options.  She could refuse, at which point Logarr would almost certainly march down the tunnel, haul Sudjummar out of the forge and beat him half to death.  Or she could yield, as Sudjummar had explained, as far as the victor’s alcove, and there refuse him, which might still cause Sudjummar no end of trouble, but was at least a painless way out of this mess.  She felt herself nodding.

He put out his hand and her own slipped into his grip.

Logarr led her out of the cavern, through a labyrinth of short passages and alcoves, to a very small room.  She could see nothing, but she could sense its smallness.  He felt his way cautiously ahead of her, found the bench she had known would be there, and put her on it.

“Do you intend to refuse me?” he asked.

“You’re damn right I do.”

“I see.”  The back of his hand brushed against her cheek; she twisted away.  He was quiet for a moment or two, and then he said, “I am sorry for what I am about to do, Olivia.  I wish that it had been anyone but you.”

Before she could move, before she could scream, he seized her.  Her back slammed down on the stone bench.  He levered her legs apart, pushing his way between her thighs where her kicking feet could do no harm.  Her skirt pooled up around her waist.  His hand came down over her mouth.  She clutched at his immoveable arm and heard him say quite calmly, “I am very sorry for what I am about to do.  This excuses nothing, but I want you to know it anyway.  I am very sorry.”

He parted her labia with two fingers and slid his hand down to lay his palm flat against her pussy.

Olivia tried once, futilely, to buck him off before he could finish whatever bizarre examination he was performing and then a bolt of something hot and white as lightning cracked from the center of his palm and up through her womb to explode in the core of her body.  She screamed against his hand as heat like acid unfurled out from her middle, burning into every tissue, scathing and licking through her with flames of agony.  She screamed and screamed and screamed, and finally her voice broke and she could make only a harsh rasp of terror and at that, he released her and stood up.

Olivia threw herself to one side, crashed into the hard ground, and scrambled blindly away from him.  He caught her again, hauled her up by the back of her belt and put her flat on the bench again.  He held her there with one hand, unfastened and removed his loincloth with the other.  He caught her kicking legs effortlessly and pried them apart, coming between her thighs to straddle the bench.

She felt the hot brand of his member press on her from behind and that heat inside her exploded again with white-hot blistering force.  His hands gripped her hips, lifted and tilted her, but for a long time he only rocked, not penetrating but only rubbing the hard length of him against her throbbing pussy in slow, even strokes.  She was aware of a wet, sucking sound as he moved, realized further that she was having a massive, closely-locked series of orgasms, each coming so fast and hard on the other that they melted together into a streak of intense, seething pain.

Desperate, Olivia slashed out with both hands and caught the thin fur on his face.  He hissed, released her, caught her again and yanked her off the bench only to turn her around and push her flat again, belly-down.  Her breasts pressed painfully against the cold stone.  The lip of the bench dug into her belly when he lifted her from behind and this time he pierced her with the head of his engorged member and shoved hard.  She clawed vainly at the stone, believing in her terror that she could hear steam hissing from their bodies as he sank himself by painstaking degrees deep inside her.  At last the hard plane of his flanks slammed home against her bottom and he crouched, breathing hard, perfectly motionless for exactly ten beats of her pounding heart.

Then he reared back and slammed into her again.  Her cry was crushed against the stone.  He yanked her hips back, shifted her slightly to an angle and began to pump his hips in ruthless rhythm, grinding her against the bench and slapping their bodies together with brutal force.

And with every thrust, she came in agony.  Every slight movement of the thick organ driving at her intensified the scathing sensation that wracked her from within and it seemed she had no outlet for it.  Orgasm after orgasm battered her, but there was no sense of release.  There was nothing of pleasure, nothing even of physical sexual response, only this great, churning, burning, battering, thrashing chain of explosions and the silent shrieking of her fear.

Logarr’s breath was coming hot and ragged, burning her back like the steam from a vent.  The hammering action of his hips increased until he was throwing himself at her in a frenzy, splitting her in half along the great wedge of hot iron he fucked her with.  Without warning, he threw back his head, wrenched her hard against him, arched rigid and fast inside her and drove a torrent of something acid-hot into her.  For one terrified instant, she thought the battering force of his seed had punctured the wall of her womb; the heat of his cum struck and slashed through her until it seemed to suffuse her entire body.  A jet of it, gallons of it, thick and hot and horrible with animal pain.  It emptied into the core of her for eternities and he was immobile throughout, not even breathing, until it was done.

Logarr made a sound of tight agony and fell atop her.  He was shaking.  His chest ground against her as he gasped in swooping lungfuls of air, but gradually, his breath evened out.  His thighs unlocked.  He slid back, stood up.

Olivia lay stunned.  She could not move, could not speak, was conscious of drool snaking out the corners of her mouth.  The sensation of unrelieved climax was mingling with the heat of Logarr’s strange seed, and receding back into her womb.  She heard rustling as he fastened his loincloth.

“Are you awake?” he asked.  His voice was steady, but tired.

She made a sound.

“Good, because there is something I mean to say to you, and I want to be certain you understand.”  He paused.  “Do you understand?”

“…yes,” she managed.

“You are weak.  That will pass.  I have put a power into you and in order to translate it, you must get it out of you in the same way it got in.  Soon.  Or else you may die of it.”

“What have you done…to me?” she whispered helplessly.

“I’ve made it difficult,” he replied, and that weariness was back in his voice.  “I can’t make it impossible, I don’t think anyone can do that, but I have made it more complicated.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I will tell you everything, but not tonight.  I am done with you for now.”  He came back to help her to sit up.  “But I am commanded to couple with you again,” he said.

“Why me?”

“You will know the answer another time.  What is important for you to understand is that I will fight your mate to claim you if you do not come willingly.  Thugg was convenient.  I knew you didn’t want him.  But I will fight Sudjummar if I must, and I may have to kill him to defeat him.”

The strength was seeping back into her bones but she held onto him while he smoothed down her skirt with his claws. “Who?” she gasped.  “Who commands you?”

“I have told you all I intend to tell you for now.  You will learn a little more each time I am with you.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, and you can do it in secret.  What we do in the grip of this power carries no scent.  No one will know, tonight, that I have been inside you.  In fact, they will think they know that I have not.”

“What if I don’t want to know any more?”

“Then I won’t tell you,” he answered.  “But I will still have you.  There is a hand upon me, Olivia.  I am not allowed to refuse, but I am sorry it was you.  Please believe me.  I would have given my last breath if only it had been anyone…but you.”  He put his hand on her arm and led her out again, down the maze of narrow passages and thick walls, to the common cave.

Thugg was sitting down while Thurga ministered to him.  He looked uneasy and depressed, but his injuries, while ugly and doubtless painful, were not serious.  Next to him, holding Somurg and exchanging a few tense words with some of the other males, stood Sudjummar.  He looked around at the first whisper of Olivia’s name, his hackles raised and a growl in his throat, but Logarr did not acknowledge the threat in either the sight or sound.  He walked Olivia over to the smith and released her arm.  “Your mate,” he said simply, and left.

Sudjummar watched until Logarr was gone, then gave her a pained glance and looked away.  “I should have been here.”

The words had no immediate meaning for her.  She could scarcely believe it, but she was beginning to be very aroused. “Is that what you think?” she said at last.  “Look at Thugg.  That could have been you!  I don’t care about Logarr, I care about you!”

“You don’t…blame me?”

Blame you, I’m going to destroy you, she thought desperately.  “It doesn’t even matter to me,” she assured him, and drew him down for a private embrace.  She had to stop herself from fidgeting.  She could not believe how horny she was.  “But if you require a show of proof, I can provide some.”

He drew back and looked at her in frank astonishment.

“I had to yield,” she said, for his ears only.  “But only as far as the other room.”  Louder, as much for the benefit of the crowd as for him, she added, “But you, my mate, you I will yield to gladly, passionately, and as often as you demand.  In fact, I eagerly await your demand.”

Every second that Sudjummar spent just looking at her was its own hell of crumbling willpower, but at the end of it, he smiled his crooked smile.  And while she fought not to leap at him or thrust her hand up her own skirt, he finally shifted Somurg to the crook of his arm so he could put his hand around her hip.  “Far be it for me to deny a female in such obvious pain,” he said.  “Come to my pit, my mate.”

He had no idea how much pain she was in.

Sudjummar led her away from the commons towards the forge, murmuring something she could not bring herself to hear about how he was sorry and what to do if it happened again. Olivia tried to keep pace at his side, but they hadn’t walked more than a few minutes before she started having hot flashes and twinges of knife-bright pain, a hundred times worse than anything she had felt trying to control the Great Spirit’s spark.  Logarr had said something about getting this power out before it killed her; she realized all at once that he meant exactly what he’d said.  Caught on the edge between lust and panic, Olivia pulled him with her into the first dark tunnel she saw.

“Are you insane?” he asked.

“Yes!”  She took Somurg out of his arms and set the baby down.  He fussed, but she was beyond caring.  “I need you right now!”

“Anyone could walk by,” he protested.

She tugged blindly at his belt, not bothering to remove his coverings but only to loosen them.  He wasn’t hard yet and he was still trying to reason with her, but one bolt of the Great Spirit’s spark solved both problems.  He shoved her up against the wall with a mindless snarl as Olivia yanked her skirt up, and then he was inside her and whatever it was Logarr had poisoned her with flared out and emptied into him. Sudjummar roared in her face and tried to flinch back, but the power had him and drove him on in a fever of sexual action.

There was some pleasure, and there was much lust, but most of what Olivia felt was simple relief.  She held onto him as he bucked and thrashed against her, her eyes closed and her teeth bared, and just let her body achieve its own fulfillment as her power achieved release.

It was done in less than a minute.

Sudjummar staggered away from her, hit the opposite wall of the tunnel and sank down its rough surface, clutching at his groin.  “I’m sorry,” he gasped.  “I don’t know why…I’m not like that.  I’m sorry.”

Olivia picked up her screaming baby and tried to quiet him, too ashamed to speak.  Even if this doesn’t kill me, she thought, it’s going to kill him.

“It won’t happen again,” Sudjummar was saying.

And no.  It would not.

2

Logarr emerged from the shadows as she left the forge three days later.  “It is time,” he said calmly.

“I’m not meeting with you.”

He gazed at her, neither surprised nor disturbed.  “Then I will challenge your mate,” he said.

“I’ll tell him to concede to you and I’ll refuse you.”  She lifted her chin, glared at him.  “I’ll go the women’s tunnels and I won’t come out again until Vorgullum comes back and puts an end to all this.”

He smiled.  It was not a threatening or unpleasant expression, much as she wanted it to be.  It was just tired.  “As you like it, Olivia,” he said.

“And you’ll leave me alone?” she asked suspiciously.

“No.”

“What are you going to do to me if I don’t come to you?”

“Something like this,” he answered, and before she could do more than flinch, he reached up and tapped her on the forehead with one claw.

Just a tap.  Hardly worth noticing.  If she’d been asleep, it wouldn’t have even woken her up.  She started to ask him what on Earth that had been meant to do and didn’t.  Couldn’t.

She couldn’t move, could only watch him approach her until she could feel the heat from his body.  She made a conscious effort to do something, anything, even blink her eyes, but her body was not her own.

Logarr spoke, his eyes locked with hers and strangely sad, far removed from the things he promised her.  “You will come to me, Olivia.  Your thighs will open around me.  Your body will ache and tremble where I touch it.  I will taste your sweat and caress the secret places within and without.  I will have you, Olivia, possess you, consume you.  And I am sorry.  I wish that it had been anyone else, anyone.”  His finger brushed at her slack palm.  His eyes dropped to look at it and for the first time, his voice faltered.  “I still remember the way you smiled at me…the way you reached out your hand…”

She tried to scream, but all she managed was a soft sigh as she pushed air uselessly between her open lips.

“Do not resist me,” Logarr whispered, kneeling before her in the empty passage.  She couldn’t see him, but his voice invaded her completely, almost as though it originated in her mind.  “Do not resist her.  You can’t win.  Believe me, I know.”

His hands caressed her ankles, slipped up her legs, over her thighs, her hips.  Her skirt pooled over his wrists, tickling her where the hem lightly kissed her.  She wanted to struggle and could not move, wanted to moan and could scarcely continue to breathe.

“I told you my name and you did not understand it.”  His hands eased between her thighs, slipped up to cup her buttocks.  “What is logarr, Olivia?”  He flexed his arms, shrugging her legs up over her shoulders.  “What is logarr?”

Your name! she thought, frozen and staring, feeling nothing but his hands caressing her hips, his breath warm on her bare pubis.  Your name, please, I can’t think!

“Perhaps this will clear your mind.”  He pulled her forward.  The wedge of his snout pushed her thighs even further apart.  He licked her, his tongue slipping through the petals of her pussy, sliding back and forth slowly while she stood motionless and insensible.  Then his tongue stabbed up into the core of her, and she was freed enough from his spell to rock against him.

He was right, though.  It did clear her mind, cleared it of all but screams of pleasure, even if the only sound she could make aloud was slow, measured breathing.

“Now,” he murmured.  “What does logarr mean?”

River, she thought.

“That’s right.”  He bent his head again, catching her clit between his lips and lashing at it with his tongue until even her frozen throat released a breathy groan.  “And who do we know from the river, Olivia?”

Bahgree, she answered.

“Very good.”  He pressed his mouth to her pussy again, drinking the ready oils of her body’s hunger and making certain she could hear the shameless, unlovely sounds she made.

You’re…not…Bahgree? she thought, desperately trying to put force into the statement, but ending it on a shaky question.

He paused, licked his lips.  “Do I look like a water woman?” he asked, bemused.  “Even remotely?”

Then…what..?

And suddenly he sucked in a deep breath and put his mouth tight against her sex and exhaled, pouring something thick and searing with heat deep into the secret heart of her, where it immediately sent out waves of throbbing need.  Logarr withdrew slightly, rubbed his tongue once, expertly, against her clitoris, and then set her down on unsteady legs.

She promptly folded up on the ground with both hands writhing against her aching sex.

“I am not the Great Spirit,” Logarr told her, moving away.  “You don’t have to be willing for me to use you.  Don’t fight me.  She’ll make me hurt you if she has to.  Please, Olivia.  Just…Just let me do what must be done.”

She rolled onto her stomach, grinding out a moan of agony as his footsteps receded into the darkness.

Listen, her mind said firmly.  If someone were to come along right now and see you, they’d think you’d been stabbed.  Go home.  Go to Logarr.  Go jump off a cliff, but stop thrashing around like a worm that’s been cut in half!

Good advice.  Excellent advice.  Olivia pulled herself up with the help of the wall and went back to the forge in a daze.   She plucked the hammer from his hands as Sudjummar bent over a cook pot, turned him around and flung him backwards on the anvil.  He tried to say something and she did a thing she had sworn never to do again: Olivia brought out a spear of her power and impaled him with it to shut him up and make him fuck her.

There was no kind way to describe the use she made of him.  She raped him, driving against his insensible body for hours before giving up with a scream of rage as she realized she could not be free of the sexual storm that churned inside her.  She ran from the forge, leaving him crumpled in a heap at the base of his anvil; she ran to the room she used to meet with the Great Spirit and she did the second thing she would not have imagined possible of herself.

She called for the god.

And he did not come.

Shaking with need, both hands twisting furiously between her thighs, Olivia stared in disbelief at the dark cavern and screamed again.  The pain was so intense, she was aware of nothing else.  She leaned into the wall, gasping for air that did not even half-fill her aching lungs.  I could die, she thought.  I could really die.

She broke, and the instant she did, before she could even try to think of how she was going to find Logarr’s lair among the mountain’s many tunnels, a spark lit in her mind like a beacon, throbbing as she was throbbing, pulling her effortlessly in.  She had no idea where she was going, but she went.  Eventually, she turned into a private passage and climbed, not even thinking of her spikes, up the narrow entry chute.

There were two or three candles glowing from the sleeping room.  Olivia half-walked, half-staggered in to him.

The driving urgency that had gnawed at her since their earlier meeting ebbed away as Logarr came naked to meet her.  Olivia didn’t wait for him to crack her defenses this time.  She opened up the full force of the power inside her and threw it all directly at him.

In the back of her mind, she had suspected it wouldn’t have any effect on him.  She was astonished when he rose bodily into the air and was thrown into the wall.  He landed hard, but kept his feet and looked at her in amazement.

More than amazement, Olivia discovered uneasily.  Hunger.

“Come on, then,” he growled, his eyes smoldering with desire.  “Half the fun of mating is the chase.”  He threw out his hands and, as before, all of that energy came crashing back into her, a thousand times more powerful.  There was no sensation of flight, but she must have flown anyway because her back struck the wall and she was pinned there, suspended a good three feet over the floor.

Logarr took two running steps and leapt.  His body slammed once, hard against her and she felt another galvanizing blast of pleasure.  His claws sank easily into the stone.  To her fevered mind, he seemed to be melting it.  He dug one hand into the wall and put the other on her left breast.  He heaved himself up and shoved his groin against her so that she screamed and locked her legs around his waist.  Though she tried, she couldn’t get her hands between them to remove her clothes, not even enough to pull her skirt out of the way.  When she had frustrated these efforts, she resorted to beating and scratching at his back, almost in tears.  He ignored that, too, now grinding his hips against her with torturous lassitude, his erection pushing her skirt hellishly against her throbbing sex.

“It would seem the chase is over.  What say you, Olivia?”  He stroked her breast, nibbling at her throat, but his eyes were tired.  “Are you willing yet?”

The last shreds of her self-respect blew away and she found herself pleading with him, begging him.

He drew back enough to pull her skirt up, rubbing his palm against her damp sex, thrusting inside her and teasing at the burning nub of her clit with his thumb.  “Very willing,” he observed.  “Open to me, Olivia.”

She spread her thighs until her hips ached, thrusting at him and screaming, lost to all but the primal need to get rid of the swirling, seething power that churned itself into frenzy deep inside her.  There was no way to vent it, no means of channeling the force through and out of her, as she did with the Great Spirit.  She could not concentrate through the storm of sensation enough to remove herself from her body.  She was caught, she was lost, she was his.

Logarr spread her labia with his fingers and pushed the head of his cock inside her.  Still suspended, he rocked forward, sheathing himself in one powerful thrust.  Immediately, Olivia bucked against him and began to cum—a hateful, ruthless wind of climax that blew her before it mercilessly to the next, never allowing for release.  She was aware of nothing but the heat and pain of their union; she did not know that she had been cracking her head steadily against the wall with each thrust until he cushioned her with his hand.

After an undeterminable length of time, his steady pace grew somewhat ragged and she knew what was coming.  He held her immobile, simultaneously straining upwards.  She opened her mouth, moaning with pain and pleasure in equal amounts, thinking that he had to be ripping up through her womb, that he was killing her.

Logarr locked hard into place, spending his gallons of hot seed inside her, not moving even to breathe.  It was power, pure power, and it silenced Olivia even as it drowned her.

He let out a gagging gasp and sank back when it was done, and if he had not been securely sunk into the wall he would have fallen to the floor.  Strengthless, she fell with him, still sheathing his now-flaccid member.  After several long minutes, he brought up his arm, gathering her against him with ridiculous tenderness, all things considered.  He even stroked her hair.  “We’re done for now.  You have a little more time to find release, but it will be a far more dangerous flow, so beware of who you choose to lie with.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she stammered and burst into tears.

He seemed genuinely distressed, rubbing her back and shoulders.  “I can’t answer that, Olivia.  I am as much a tool as you.  The Water Woman demands that the eyes of the Great Spirit be blinded, and that, somehow, is what we are doing.”

She started to ask another weepy question, but he silenced her, climbing down the wall and setting her on her own feet.

“I was twenty-four years old when I left for my Journey,” Logarr said, reaching down for his belt and loincloth.  “An old rite…mostly forgotten.  Pointless.  But Vorgullum had just become tall and he was younger than me, you know, and I had it in my head that the old leader had sired me.  I was bitter and angry and foolish most of all, and I went on a Journey because it was all I could think to do to make Vorgullum bend his neck to me.  I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think it was the spite that attracted her because I had not been out of the mountain long when I had a sense of being drawn. I did not resist.  It is a flattering thing to know that spirits see you, want you, when you are young and know no better.”  He paused, eyeing her.  “And I am done with storytelling for now.  You have no time for it.”

“What did you mean when you said you were blinding the eyes of the Great Spirit?”

“I won’t tell you.  Not now.”  He turned away to dress.  “I said you had more time tonight, but that doesn’t mean you should waste it by asking me questions you know I won’t answer.”

“What are you putting in me?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly.  “I can only tell you where I got it, but not tonight.  Meet me again in three days,” he repeated, turning away from her.  “And I will tell you of the River.”

Olivia stumbled out of the room, down the chute, and into the tunnels.  She orientated herself with some difficulty, and set off.  She reached the mainway just as she was beginning to feel undeniably aroused, but not uncomfortably so.  She turned towards the commons by reflex, then jerked herself around.  None of the lanterns lining the tunnel walls were lit and that meant it was night. No one would be in the commons; she could think of nowhere to go except home and she was afraid to do that, afraid that this awful power would not just hurt Sudjummar this time, but kill him.

So she walked, aimless, only struggling to keep moving as the first cramps and flashes of heat began to rock through her body.  The thought that she might die here, alone in the tunnels, burnt from the inside out by her own raging power, rose in the back of her mind and would not be dislodged.  But wouldn’t that be better, really?  Wouldn’t that be preferable than to kill a tribesman?

Her vision had already started to cloud when she passed the baths and her feet, moving almost of their own accord, pulled her in.  She was on the verge of falling when there came a massive splash and Doru’s broad body exploded out of the largest bathtub in a spray of hot water and steam.  He rubbed at the base of his horns, humming under his breath, then dunked back under.

Olivia’s feet were walking her calmly towards him.  Olivia’s hands were peeling away her clothes in jerky, agonized movements.

Doru splashed up again and scrubbed at his fur, chanting in thickly-accented English about devil-women with skin the color of mocha, entirely unaware of Olivia creeping up behind him in a haze of sexual sickness.

She laid her hand between his wings.

He let out a roar and snapped both wings straight out, knocking her sprawling over the wet stone.  She landed on her back and curled up away from him, rubbing in agony at her sex.  She could scarcely see anymore.

“Jesus Christ, you scared me!”  Swift silence, spray of water and clatter of claws on stone.  “Olivia, did I hurt you?”

He touched her.

Her power, a sullen, smoking volcano, erupted.  Whatever else he had intended to say was consumed in an instant.  His hands were on her, his body was against her, and then he was in her and all was relief.

He thrust six times in rapid succession.  That was all it took.  He came hard and she came harder, venting all the force denied her in her union with Logarr.  He rocked back from it, his whole body brick-hard beneath his damp pelt, and she dropped beneath him, her powers utterly depleted.

She thought he would fall over her, broken, since that seemed to be the going pattern.  She had enough presence of mind to be surprised when he shook himself off and lifted his head.  His eyes were still a little dazed, but they focused.  He gathered her up and rocked back on his knees, cradling her carefully in his huge hands as he lowered his mouth over her breast.

“Ohhhh,” she breathed.  Her hands fluttered up to brush lightly across the back of his head as he teased her nipple erect, rolling it between his teeth, sucking first gentle than hard, finally biting down so that she arched into his mouth and cried out with pleasure.  He licked at the smooth skin between her breasts, put his mouth against the hollow of her throat and thrummed, hardening again inside her.

“Doru—”

“Hold on to me,” he murmured, and cupped her bottom with one hand and her hip with the other, pressing his thumb against the swollen nub of her clitoris.  “Let me move you.”

She snaked her arms through his horns and fell back, abandoning herself entirely to his control.  Her eyes were closed, locking out all the world to lavish in the sensation of blinding pleasure as he moved her, now fast, now slow, now up and down and in circles, and all the while his thumb pressed and rubbed in the most fantastic patterns.

She flung her legs out at the moment of orgasm and hung suspended, coming in endless waves of ecstasy, undulating helplessly against him and sobbing with the pure pleasure of release.  Then she let go his horns and dropped back into his hands and he cradled her against his chest for a moment, still rocking gently, keeping her at that height of sensation.

Then, slowly, he began to lift her off him.

“No!” she whispered, arching back at him in something approaching desperation.

He laughed quietly.  “Trust me.”  He pulled her apart from him and she shuddered and came even at the feel of his withdrawal.  Then she was turning in the air and he entered her again and twined his arms through hers to pull her back against his chest.  Unable to touch him, she could only ride the air, her breasts aching, as he moved and moved and moved and suddenly she came again and he bent around to swallow her screams with a kiss.

Now he released one arm to reach around and rub gently at her clitoris, still thrusting hard inside her.  He was swelling, his rhythm breaking, his breath coming harder and in tatters as he neared climax, until finally she felt his seed like fire burning in her womb.

He exhaled slowly, lowered himself to his knees and gently set her on the ground.

She was still shivering with tiny quakes of afterglow intense enough to almost qualify as orgasms.  “Where,” she panted, “did you learn to do that?”

“A man spends most of his life in a tree waiting for a deer to walk by, he gets to thinking.” He met her mouth, kissing her gently and thoroughly.

“No,” she said, smiling against his lips. “Someone taught you how to kiss.”

“Nope.  Heard about them, though.”  He entered her mouth with his tongue, explored her meticulously.  “They are fun, aren’t they?”  Then he leaned back, put his hands on his thighs and quirked a smile at her.  “You could have chosen a more romantic setting than the bath, you know.”

“You make it sound like I planned it.”  She sat up, still pleasantly flushed and relaxed.

“No.  I’m not sure how that happened, but I know it wasn’t planned.”  He grew serious.  “I know panic when I see it.  It wasn’t the noblest way I could have comforted you, but I couldn’t help myself.  Go home to your metal-maker, Olivia.”  He cupped her chin with his claws, drew her to him for a final kiss.  “And thank you.”

Then he stood and found his clothing, fastening it as he left.

3

Olivia came to the forge, afraid to find Sudjummar still lying broken beside the anvil.  He was seated on it instead, chewing something while holding a food-matted Somurg.  He glanced up, saw her, held up one finger and bent over the baby.  When he looked up again, he said, “Are you all right?”

“Are you?”

He quirked a smile at her.  “Crippled, not killed.  Did I scare you?”

“Yes,” she said honestly.

His smiled faded slightly.  “Sorry.”  He looked down at Somurg again.  “I’m very sorry,” he said.  “Because now I’m going to upset you, as well.”

She tensed as Sudjummar slipped off the anvil and put Somurg in a metal basin.  Without speaking, the smith mixed hot water from the forge with cold water from a pail and then set it down and knelt to bathe the baby.

“I took Hodrub his new pick,” he said.  “He says you look ill.  I took Torumm two knives and a new buckle.  He says you’ve lost weight.  I took Unnamman his spear.  He says Somurg looks ill.”

“They’re all wrong,” she said.

“That’s beside the point.  And the point is, there’s three of them.  I am releasing you, Olivia.”  Before she could speak, he said tensely, “Right now, right this minute, you are still my mate and so I am still leader of this tribe.  A leader must do what is necessary to keep his tribe together.  I know that if I refuse to release you, there will be blood.  There might be killing.  I won’t have that over a female, Olivia, not even if that female is you.  I am putting you aside.”  He poured a dipperful of water over the shrieking, splashing baby.

“It isn’t fair,” she protested.  “You’ve done everything a mate is expected to do.”

“I’m flightless and crippled.”

“Half the males here are crippled!”

“And how many have mates?”

She stared at him bleakly.

He lifted Somurg from the basin and wrapped him in a towel.  “What would you have me do?  Stand back and wait for someone to die?”

“I just wish…This isn’t fair!  Why is everyone being so damn mean?”

Sudjummar sighed and came to put his arm around her.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “The child that strikes his finger with a rock may warn his younger siblings to beware of rocks, he may do that…but he’s a lot more likely to hit one with a rock.  It’s no different from your kind to mine.  There’s just something in the nature of pain that can only be eased by being inflicted.”  He pulled back, searching her eyes.  “And we are in pain here, Olivia.  We are in terrible pain.”

“Sudjummar!” she pleaded.  She wanted to beg him not to throw her to the tribe like a bone, wanted to find some way to convince him to keep her, but she could see a hardness in his eyes that made him look so much like Vorgullum, that her words dried in her throat.

“I will release you,” he said quietly.  “But I…”  He looked down at the squirming baby twining his claws through his pelt and her hair.  His voice, when he spoke again, tremored with a despair her leave-taking had not been able to induce.  “I beg you, let me keep my brother’s son.”

She flung her arms around them both, making a tiny sound of negation, and he stood rigid beneath her embrace.

“Please,” he whispered.  “I will never have one of my own.”

“I have to feed him,” she said, and it wasn’t until she heard her shaking voice that she knew she was crying.  “I have to, Sudjummar!  I have to!”

“If I…If I bring him to you to nurse, it will look as though I hold a claim.  Olivia, please.  A baby can eat anything a grown man can eat, as long as it’s chewed—”

“Amy, then!  Take him to Amy!  Promise me, Sudjummar!  Don’t let him wean!”

He drew back and looked at her for a long time.  “I promise,” he said slowly.  He looked down at Somurg and a frown grew.  “I want to ask you why…but I am honestly afraid to know the answer.”

She touched the baby’s cheek with her trembling hand and felt his fur—still damp from his bath—as soft as otter under her fingers.  Somurg opened his eyes to frown his father’s frown at her, then closed them again.

“This isn’t fair!” she said again, and even she didn’t what she meant: being forced from Sudjummar’s side, Vorgullum being shot, the endless threat of challenges, Logarr, the Great Spirit, Bahgree, any or all of it.  It just wasn’t fair.

“I know.”  Sudjummar cupped her chin to make her look at him, then kissed the corner of her mouth.  “I’ll send your belongings to the tunnels…until you claim another mate.  Leave me, Olivia.  Leave me now, while I can still let you go.”

He backed up against the brace of her arms until she fell away from him, and then he turned his back and took her son away.

4

Olivia isolated herself from the tribe for days and saw no one, but she did not bother to hide from Logarr; when he called for her, she went.  They met in a different chamber, and as before, there were candles and a warm fire, but no bedding in the pit.  She did not speak to him, but went to the bench, hiked up her skirt, and lay down.

Logarr did not comment on her change of attitude.  He simply did what he intended to do, came to the same gut-jarring climax, and got up again, picking up the threads of his story.

“I came to a river, as I have said.  An old river, powerful.  There, I encountered what I can only describe as the shade of the woman that was once Bahgree.  Our legends are false, Olivia.  She is not powerless at all, she’s merely unable to work her power in a world of substance and form.”

“Shouldn’t that have made it impossible for her to change you?”  Olivia tried to rise, but couldn’t quite manage that yet.  She settled for another weak protest.  “You’re not even human, how could she touch you at all?”

He helped her sit up.  “The first time was a dream,” he told her, sitting beside her on the bench.  “Looking back, I think that if I had left after that, I would have been safe.  It was only a dream.  But I was young and I was stupid, and the sex had seemed very vivid,” he finished bitterly.  “So for the sake of that so-vivid sex, I went to the water just as I had done in my dream and performed the rites I’d dreamed.  I let her in, Olivia.  And once she had me, she kept me.”

She started to reach a sympathetic hand towards his knee, then remembered that he was doing something awful to her, that he was, in fact, the enemy.  Logarr watched her hand tremble in the air and then drop back to her own lap.  He looked away.

“She had me a long time,” he said.  “All day.  Many days, maybe.  She changed me.  And then she let me go, warning me first that the power she had put in me would demand release.  I had strength enough to stagger out of the water, and then I fell and was unconscious for some time.  When I woke, I tried to convince myself that I had dreamed the whole thing.  I was young and such dreams…well, they weren’t entirely uncommon.  After a moment or two, I began to think I had, in fact, been visited.  I leapt into the air, circling wildly in search of some life.  In my crazed mind, I was expecting a gulla female.  In a matter of moments, I was willing to take a cow.

“Well, as luck would have it, just as the most unbelievable pains began to wrack my body, I spied a road.  Roads always lead to humans.  I rushed along and found a house.  It never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if there was only a male inside.  As it happened, I crawled around the house, looking in windows, and found a female, sleeping alone.

“In retrospect, I realize she was young.  She had a woman’s shape, but there is something about age that weighs on a body, and it had not weighed on her.  I think she must have been in her own adolescence.  Certainly, she welcomed me with all the unquestioning passion of one who has had her share of hot, young dreams.”

“Welcomed you?” Olivia echoed.

“I slid open the window and crawled into her room.  She slept on a…like a platform, but soft and high and…flexible.  There was much bedding.  I pulled it off.  She wore pants of filmy fabric.  She woke as I was removing them, but I don’t think she really woke.  I think she thought she was still sleeping, because she put her arms around my neck and drew me down.  The pain stopped, pouring out of me like water off a mountain.  When it was over, I realized that I had been pounding the platform, or whatever it was, into the wall with a terrible noise and this poor girl was simply screaming with pleasure.  So out I went through the window.

“Every three days, Bahgree came and used my body.  Every three nights, I flew off to my human lover and used her the same way.  At the end of the fourth visitation, Bahgree pulled me down into the river’s depths and kept me.”  His jaw tightened.  He looked away.  “She kept me a very long time.  But eventually, I was released and sent back to await you.”

“But all this happened years ago,” Olivia protested.  “How did you know to expect me?”

“I wasn’t told your name, if that’s what you mean.  But Bahgree knew that the Great Spirit wanted a new vessel for her essence.  She knew that one like you would be coming someday.  She told me to watch for a woman, that I would know which it was by the spark of power inside her.  The Great Spirit would put it there so that he could rut with her, she told me.  And it was you.”  He looked at her; his eyes were deep and filled with pain.  “It was you.”

“So you have me now.”  Olivia stood up.  “What will you do with me?”

“Tomorrow, you will know more.”  He looked away, bent and tired.  “It’s nearly dawn.  Go and get rid of the stuff inside you.  You have more time to find a mate, but I warn you, it will be much more dangerous than it was before.”

Without further delay, Olivia left him.  If it was nearly dawn, the tunnels would be empty as the gullan retired to their chambers.  Most of them would be sleeping already.

Olivia didn’t think Doru would mind waking up for her.

She hurried down the passage as the first stirrings of need began to turn to pain.  She arrived at the correct passage, climbed raggedly up his entry chute, and started groping her way through his chambers.

There was a gust of manly laughter and Olivia stopped just outside his sleeping room, dismayed.  He was awake, but he was not alone.  She shivered, completely derailed.

“So where is she now?” Doru asked.  “Still in the women’s tunnels?”

“You can’t be serious.  No, I see that you’re not.”  Bodual’s voice, and Bodual’s deeply depressed sigh.  “The cry of severance was still hanging in the air when Warnn went and got her.”

“Warnn?”

“It could have been worse,” Bodual muttered sourly.  “She could have gone back to Augurr.  You know, I more than half expected her to.”

The sound of their voices fuzzed out beneath a wave of carnal agony. Olivia crumpled against the wall and tried to think of what to do as she rubbed futilely at herself through her clothing.

“—through her grief,” Doru was saying.

“I know what he means to work her through.  You know, I could count the number of times I coupled with her on both hands, and she could count the men who haven’t on one of hers!  She’s had them crippled, flightless…hell, castrated!  Damn me, I try not to let it anger me, but there’s nothing worse than knowing your mate would rather have any man but you.”

“Sure there is,” Doru said with a kind of bitter cheerfulness.  “There’s knowing that coupling with you drove your mate off men entirely.”

“Yeah, that would suck,” Bodual said, speaking the last word in clumsy English.  “I mean, imagine how bad that male would have to be at sex.”

“You can shut up now,” Doru said mildly.

“He would have to be just terrible!”

“Right now.”

“I mean, where was he putting it?  In her ear?”

Hardly aware that she was moving, Olivia stepped into the doorway and let herself be seen just as Doru, taking the last sip from a pop can, reached absently across and walloped Bodual in the side of the head.

Bodual fell to the floor at her feet, looked up and smiled.  “Olivia!”

She was amazed at how easily her next words came out.  “I couldn’t sleep.  I heard voices and thought…”

Doru had half-risen from his seat near the fire, and now he settled back and reached down to offer her a soda.  “Welcome to my lair,” he said.  “I’m all out of thumperjuice, but there’s plenty of this stuff.  There’s no bam to it, but it’s not bad.”

It was ginger ale, and Olivia popped the tab and took several deep swallows, resisting with every last shred of her will the urge to drop to her knees and masturbate furiously in front of them.

“So,” Doru began, crushing the can in his fist.  “How do you fare at the closing of this fine night?”

“Not well,” she said with a ragged laugh.  “You know that…that Sudjummar has put me aside.  To stop the fighting.”

The two exchanged troubled glances.  “We’ve heard,” Doru said.

“I’m…afraid to be alone,” she said, and did not have to affect the very real quaver that shook her voice at these words.  “And I’m afraid that if I return to Sudjummar, someone will kill him.  It’s stupid, but there it is.”

“There it is,” agreed Doru darkly.  “And it is stupid.  I’m sorry, Olivia.  I had hoped it would go better for you.”

Bodual made a quiet sound of concurrence.

Olivia set down her drink before she could start shaking hard enough to spill it.  “I’m afraid to be alone,” she said again.  “And I don’t want to be alone.”  She began to unfasten the catches of her vest.  “I want to be with you.”

Both their ears came forward at the same time.  Doru sat up a little straighter, his brows climbing; Bodual’s jaw dropped open and he spilled his soda.

“Can I stay?” Olivia asked, looking from one to the other of them with desperation that was all too real.

The only thing moving on Bodual was the frothy trickle of ginger ale onto the floor, but Doru’s eyes softened.  “Come here, Olivia,” he said, holding out his hand.  “Of course you can stay.  And you don’t have to—”

She caught his wrist and put his hand on her breast, ending his sympathetic words with a deep kiss.  She hummed against his lips, prompting an immediate response in kind.  When she took her hand away, his remained, cupping and gently kneading at her breast as he bent to tongue her nipple.  Olivia glanced over her shoulder at Bodual, who was uttering a ragged harmony to Doru’s mating thrumm.  “Come here,” she whispered.  “I need you both.”

He obeyed, taking slow, dazed steps.  “What do I do?”

“Take off my skirt.”

He reached around her waist, fumbling with the buckle.  A moment later, the fabric was pooled around her ankles and Bodual’s hands were on her hips, his mouth on her back and shoulders.

“Doru,” Olivia murmured.  “Lie down in the pit.  On your back.”

He nodded, unfastening his loincloth as he turned from them.

Olivia turned into Bodual’s arms, smiling at the anxious uncertainty she saw there.  “It’s all right,” she said, as though he’d asked her a question.  “I’m willing, but I need to make you ready.”  Her hands were busy, freeing him from his confinements, and when she had him naked, she lowered herself to her knees and touched her lips to the head of Bodual’s jutting member.  She stroked him with her hand, taking as much as she could into her mouth and running her tongue along the rest until he was hard and slick and groaning.

Doru lay on his back, his wings folded into wedges on either side, watching them and thrumming as he stroked himself in his fist.  Olivia glanced from him to Bodual, standing rigid and panting over her.  The power was screaming at her for release, washing out of her in waves, and they were ready.

Olivia stepped into the pit, and knelt astride Doru to lower herself slowly, reaching between them to take his cock and guide him into her.  She leaned forward, her hands resting lightly on his chest as he cupped and suckled her breasts.  She ground her hips in two tiny circles, and then bent over him, their tongues entwining.  She felt the bedding shift as Bodual entered the pit.

Her legs were folded along Doru’s flanks.  Bodual knelt beside them, between Doru’s thighs.  A second later, his hands spread her nether cheeks.  The slick head of his shaft pressed against her anus.  He pushed and she cried out as brittle bolts of pain crackled through the storm of pleasure.  He went slow, letting her push back at him as she rode Doru, and when she had him fully enveloped, he drew back and thrust all the way inside her again.

Olivia unleashed the power.

Logarr had warned her, but she couldn’t have prepared herself for this.  Moaning, rocking, the two males thrust at her in different speeds and different strengths; the power Logarr had put inside her poured out in two directions, circled and drove at her again in a cycle of pure ecstasy.  They ceased to be individuals, became a machine of sexual energy.  Bodual would push her forward, pinning her arms while Doru devoured her mouth.  Doru would hold her hips while Bodual brought her against his chest, cupping and kneading at her breasts.  Long after the flood of pent-up powers had ended, Olivia struggled to find a way to bring them all in sync, manipulating the others to her will, building them towards a final explosion.  The moment came on her demand, and then Bodual collapsed and she was crushed pleasantly between them.

“Doru, I really must thank you for a delightful evening,” Bodual said sleepily.  He got up, caressing Olivia in passing, and went into the washroom, still thrumming a little under his breath.

“Delightful,” Olivia agreed.  She stayed where she was.

“A man tries,” Doru replied, twining Olivia’s hair around his fingers.  “Are you tired?”

Olivia opened her eyes.  The sweat and seed of their spent passions had already been absorbed, leaving her with renewed strength and unexpected desire.  “I could be awake.”

Bodual reappeared in the sleeping room’s doorway, his hands still lathered with soap.  “Are you two serious?”

Doru peered over her shoulder and laughed at him.  “He’s kind of puny,” he explained to Olivia.  “Give him awhile.”  He cupped her hips and began to move her gently as he hardened inside her.  “In the meantime, I don’t mind having you all to myself.”

Olivia bent over him, her eyes closed, all her body open fully to the pure sensations he raised in her.  She rocked steadily, her hair brushing against his chest, emitting soft cries that quickly rose to a crescendo as she climaxed.

“There,” Doru panted, falling back into the pit.  “All yours, Bodual.”

“He’s kind of old,” Bodual explained as he gathered her up into his arms and retreated to a bench by the fire.  “He has trouble catching his breath.”

“Old?” Doru thundered, sitting up and glaring after them.

“You shouldn’t get emotional at your age,” Bodual said primly.  “Lie still, revered elder.  I’ll wake you when I’m done.”

Olivia arched her back lazily as Bodual’s hands found her breasts, his tongue found her mouth, and they were joined.  Three timeless orgasms later, Bodual brought her back to the pit and handed her to Doru, who was drinking Olivia’s ginger ale and sending dark looks at Bodual.  “Old,” he growled, fitting Olivia to the cradle of one arm and slipping his hand expertly between her thighs.  “Revered elder.  I’m six days older than you, you damn fool.”

Bodual snickered sleepily and dropped into the bedding, curling on his side.

“I only seem older because I’m so much more talented,” Doru added, nuzzling at Olivia’s neck as she clutched him and moaned with pleasure.

“May be something to that,” Bodual yawned, and lifted his head to watch Olivia buck and moan.  “Look at that.  That inspires a man.”  He yawned again and tried to say something more, but fell asleep instead.

“Youngsters,” Doru told her.  “No stamina.”  He rolled her gently over, twined his legs over and through hers and pulled her up taut against his chest as he penetrated her.  He pulled her wrists up over her head in one hand, holding her perfectly still as he rocked against her and traced complex patterns against her clitoris with the tips of his expert fingers.  She could feel her orgasm churning through her, but denied movement, all she could do was scream and shiver in its grip until she thought her whole body would catch fire from the friction alone.

She could feel him cumming inside her as he scraped his teeth lightly over the nape of her neck and lowered her face-down in the pit.  He continued to work his hand on her, never allowing her to fall back from the peak of climax, only driving her further and further out until she came again, clawing at the bedding and tossing her sweat-damp hair.  He kept her there, sometimes lifting her to thrust at her from behind until he came, sometimes turning her to taste her breasts and mouth, but always moving his hand over and in her, until Bodual finally woke up.

“Old,” he growled, and bent to take a final deep kiss from her.  Then he lifted Olivia, keeping all her weight for one incredible moment balanced on the hand that stole another shivery climax from her, and dropped her into Bodual’s waiting arms.  “Eight,” he said.  “Beat that, whelp.”  And then he stretched out with a cat’s yawn and pulled a corner of the bedding over his hips.

Bodual agreeably pulled Olivia down over his shaft and began to rock her hips in his strong hands.  “Can I count the three from earlier?” he asked.

“No,” Doru muttered.  “You slept in between.  You have to start over.”  Doru watched with slitted, sleepy eyes as Bodual coaxed the first from her, and then began to snore heavily.

All day long, they alternated in this fashion.  Sometimes there was only one, sometimes she had them both.  Sometimes they both slept and thought she slept beside them, but in reality, she sat and watched, power like a storm inside her, and waited for them to wake.

5

At noon the next day, Doru and Bodual reached their final joint climax, lying on their sides with Olivia squeezed between them in the pit.  Bodual sighed and hugged her while Doru kissed her shoulder.  Then they both slid away from her and she rolled onto her back and stretched luxuriously.  “We have to go,” one of them said.

“I know.  So do I.”  She sat up, watching them puzzle out whose loincloth was whose.  “I still can’t believe how good that was.  I could do it all over again right now.”

Bodual and Doru both groaned at precisely the same time.  Bodual finished dressing first and came back to the pit, pulling her up into his arms and squeezing her backside playfully as he kissed her.  “I came here last night because I was depressed,” he said, grinning.  “Today, I can’t even remember what that felt like.”

“Have a good night, Olivia,” Doru said, picking up his spear on the way out.  “Do me a favor and get some more fuel for the fire before you leave.”

Olivia heard the unmistakable sound of a heavy hand smacking into a furry body and Doru’s arched comment, “Old, huh?” as they receded from the pit room.

She washed herself off and dressed, feeling extraordinarily jubilant, not like a woman who’d spent the last fourteen hours having marathon sex with two partners.  She took up Doru’s bucket and jogged down to the women’s tunnels to pick up the fuel.  Some gullan were here, working, and a few greeted her as she passed them.  She filled Doru’s bucket, turned to leave, and saw Logarr waiting in the doorway.

“Not now,” she said, moving past him.

He caught her arm.  After checking to see that no one was close enough to hear, he dropped his voice and said, “Who were you with last night?”

She started to ask why that should matter to him, but he was already changing his question.

“Was it Sudjummar?”

“No,” she admitted, now more confused than affronted.

“I didn’t think you had time enough to go to him,” he muttered.

“What’s wrong?  Is he hurt?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking,” he said.  “But hear me, Olivia.  Sudjummar came to the mines for ore this morning very distressed.  He claimed that you were gone from his side when he woke.”

“When he woke?” she echoed, interrupting.  “I was gone from his side all night.”

“He says that you came back to the forge last night, in season.  That you and he coupled until mid-day without pause.  Now he thinks another male has taken you against your will and is holding you while you are in season.”

“But I’m not in season,” she said lamely.

They looked at each other.

“Go to him,” Logarr said, and she realized that he was very afraid.

“What am I looking for?”

“If it is what I suspect, you’ll know.”

Olivia dropped Doru’s coals off in the passage to his chambers, and then raced to the forge.  Sudjummar was not at work, but he was above in his lair, putting Somurg to bed in his cooler.

She spoke his name, hesitantly.

The reaction was immediate and baffling.  Sudjummar swiveled around, saw her, and leapt over Somurg’s cradle to get his arms around her.  “Are you safe?  Where you taken?”  He broke off his anxious babbling and inhaled deeply.  “You aren’t in season,” he said.

Olivia was staring into his face with an expression of polite inquiry and thoughts of absolute horror.

Something was inside Sudjummar.  Something with a woman’s face, buried in him like a ghost in a well, glaring out at her in jealous hate.

“I wasn’t in season last night, either,” she said with a laugh she hoped was both embarrassed and contrite.  “I was trying to mix one of Murgull’s potions and spilled some on me.”

The face inside him was screaming at her, the perfect mouth opening and closing with silent shrieks of rage and warning.  Sudjummar looked both puzzled and exasperated.  “Why didn’t you say so last night?  Olivia, I…I never would have been so…rough.  That isn’t me, Olivia!  That isn’t me.”

Olivia didn’t think about what she was doing.  She simply put her arms around his neck and drew him down to her, smiling.  “Well, I could have said something, but after I had you in my arms I thought that silence was more prudent and a lot more fun.”

The woman beneath his features was distorted with her own vicious malevolence, and now that she was touching him, she could hear, in the far back of her mind, wordless shrieks like the droning of distant bees.  Sudjummar himself wore an expression of reluctant misery.  “Olivia, you know I cannot have you back.”

“I know.  And I can live with that if I must.  But for now, let me take a memory to keep me warm.”  She cupped the back of his head and drew him down into a kiss.  She pressed her lips against his, and that was where her mortal self stopped.  A different aspect of her, one that had been charged beyond her previous limits by the morning’s activities, pushed further.  She bit down hard on the invader and sucked it violently inside her.

“I wish things were different,” said Sudjummar when she broke the kiss.  “Even the touch of your mouth makes me shiver.”  He brushed his claw along the curve of her jaw.  “But I feel better.  I was sick with fear for you.”  He stood back with effort, and might have said more except that Somurg chose that moment to start howling.  “Goodbye, Olivia.”  Sudjummar turned gently and deliberately away.

She smiled in what she hoped was fond farewell, and strolled towards the washroom.  Once inside, positioned over the running water, Olivia’s expression transformed into the look of a woman who has just realized that she is eating a batter-fried rat.

Bahgree was shrieking, filling her mind with obscenity.

Olivia unlocked her jaw without opening her mouth and bit with her physical teeth.  Power screamed out of her, forcing substance into the shade of the thing caught in her body.  She felt a gritty crunch, as though she were chewing intangible sand, and the furious screams became ones of agony.  Olivia’s jaws worked until Bahgree’s shade fell silent.  She leaned over and spat.

There was nothing physical in her mouth, not even saliva.  Nevertheless, something hit the water with a splash, and became a wad of disgusting, bloody filth.  “Bitch,” Olivia hissed, wiping her mouth.

Bahgree swirled down the crack in the floor.

6

Olivia took herself from the forge and went to the commons in search of Doru.  A young male she almost recognized tried to step in front of her and she ducked impatiently under his wings without looking at him and called the hunter’s name.

“Right here.”  He was leaning against the wall with Bodual and a can of Coors.  He watched her approach, flicked his eyes over her shoulder and bared his teeth meaningfully at whoever was standing there.  “What can I do for you?”

“I need a favor,” she said.  “A big favor.”

“Biggest favor in the mountain,” he said with a modest shrug, then handed his beer to Bodual and said seriously, “What is it?”

“I need to go away for a little while and think.  Can you take some things to a cave I know, and…and can you keep it secret?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.  “Lead on.”

Olivia took him by the hand and led him through the maze of uninhabited passages to the cavern she used to meet with the Great Spirit.  She could hear Doru fumble in his belt pouch and an instant later she was shielding her eyes as he explored it with a flashlight.

“My, this is out of the way, isn’t it?” he said mildly.  “What do you need?”

“A bench,” she said.  “Some furs, I think, or some other kind of bedding.  A cooler full of food that won’t spoil.  Enough water for, say, a week.”

He was nodding.  “Easily accomplished.  Give me one hour.  If you mean to isolate yourself tonight, you’d best go and tell Horumn.  I’ll be done when you return.”  He touched her shoulder, running his thumb along the curve of her neck.  “Is it… what happened last night that troubles you?”

“God, no,” she said, and laughed a little.  “I needed you last night.  You have no idea how true that is.  But there’s something I have to do…and this is the way I have to do it.”

“As you like it,” he said, and that was all he said as he went to find her supplies.

Olivia went to the women’s tunnels as he had suggested and found Amy giving Liz a tummy massage.  “I’m leaving,” she said.

“For good?” Amy asked, glancing up.

“No, but for a while.”

“Okay.  Bye.”  Amy returned her attention to Liz.  “I’m not a bit surprised, might I add.”

“Me, either,” Liz agreed.  “I’m sorry about you and Sudjummar.  He seems like a nice guy.”

“He is a nice guy,” Olivia said bleakly.  “And he doesn’t deserve this and neither do I.”

“Tough nipples, baby,” Amy said bluntly.  “If we all got what we deserved, I’d be living in a tower of gold with ten horse-hung harem boys licking butterscotch topping off my clitoris every hour of every day.”  She wiped off her hands, looked thoughtful and added, “Well, that or in jail for excessive lewdness.  Either way, I’d be gettin’ some.”

Olivia came to her friend and hugged her.  Amy hugged her back, patting her as though comforting a child.  Olivia said, “Sudjummar is keeping Somurg.  I…I’m not allowed near them, or it’ll cause problems.  Please!” she said, as Amy started to make her awkward sympathies.  “I need you to nurse my baby for me.  Even if it’s just once a day.  Please.”

“Sure, I guess.”  Amy drew back slightly, troubled.  “Dare I ask why?”

“I can’t answer that right now.  Please, just do it.  I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone, but I’m not leaving the mountain.  If something happens, tell Doru.  He knows where to find me, but he probably won’t act like he knows.  Okay?”

“Okay.  Heap Big Secret-Keeper.”  She held Olivia out at arm’s length, smiling faintly.  “Take care of yourself, kid.”

Olivia returned to her meeting place at nearly the same time as Doru entered, bearing a solid stone bench on his broad shoulders.  He had already brought the furs and provisions, as well as three lanterns and a 2-liter pop bottle filled with oil.  He set down the bench, draped a thick fleece over it, and stood back, rubbing his neck.

“Thanks, Doru.”

“Feh, it wasn’t hard.  Bam, as Tobi would say.  I only hope you find what you’re searching for.”  He gathered her up and kissed her thoroughly, then stroked her hair and left her.

Alone, the first doubts crept in.  The Great Spirit was the only one she could think to ask for help in breaking Logarr’s hold over her, and it seemed she’d lost the ability to call him to her.  If she wanted to talk to him, she’d have to stay here until he lost his patience and his temper and came in person to collect her.  This, so soon after she’d ordered one of his sacred sons castrated.

Olivia sat down on the bench to wait.  When she was tired, she lay in a sleeping bag on the floor.  When she was hungry, she ate.  When restless, she paced the confines of the little cavern.  She did not mark time.  She did not know days.  She tried not to think beyond the moment of now.

Olivia waited.

7

An explosion of light and sound shattered her sleep.  The Great Spirit took two swift strides towards the tunnel mouth, flames filling in the footprints he left behind him, then sensed her and swung around.

“Again you have lied to me!” he roared, advancing.

She leapt up and shouted, “I tried!  I called for you and you weren’t there!”

“You—” He stopped, looked at her intently.  Without warning, he lunged, seized her brutally by the chin and yanked her up to stare deep in her eyes.  The molten gold of his own began to darken until she stared into empyreal pits of blood.  The mountain rumbled beneath their feet.  “Who has done this?” he asked quietly.

She started to babble out a reply, but he had no patience for it.  Reaching out one claw, he tapped her hard on the forehead.

Her jaw snapped shut as she felt his presence enter her mind, invade her memories, and read them.  When he withdrew his hand, she sank back onto her knees and shivered, looking up at him.

“She knows,” he murmured, gazing at the empty wall.  “She knows everything.”

“How could she?  How could she know where to come?  And how could she do what she did to Sudjummar?”

“Questions.”  He cut her a swift, not unkind glance.  “You ask too many.  Why should you need to know these things, when I am here to protect you?”

Her temper snapped before she could catch her tongue.  “You’ve done a fuck-lousy job of it so far!  Where were you when Logarr took me that first time?  Where were you when this could have been stopped?  Don’t you dare pat me on the head and tell me not to worry when she could have killed Sudjummar!”

He seemed taken aback by the vehemence of her words, but had altered his tone and demeanor before making a wary reply.  “Undoubtedly, there is one like this Logarr in every tribe of my people.  She is connected to them through that power she placed inside them; when she felt it being used, she knew at once where to go.  As for how she may have arrived, the world is full of rivers.  Perhaps her essence was absorbed into the skies, released as rain upon this mountain, and melted down into the waters of your baths.”

“She had a physical form when she came to Sudjummar.  How did she do that?  You told me she was powerless!”

“Powerless to an immortal.  This I told you also.”  He looked slightly annoyed with her.  “I hardly think the how of it is important.  She entered his body because she believed he would enter yours when next he saw you, and while her power is not great enough over my children to do him harm, you are her daughter.  If you had not suffused yourself with power enough to see her there and bite her out, she would be wearing you now like ill-fitting clothing.”

“She did Logarr plenty of harm!”

The Great Spirit shrugged.  “She gave him only dreams until he gave himself wholly to her.  If she had made the same effort with your metal-maker, yes, I suppose she might have had the power to harm him, yet your Sudjummar is not the fool this Logarr would seem to be.  He might have fought her back and allowed some warning to come to you.  By taking your form, Bahgree was able to seduce him without enslaving him, but without resistance either.  A calculated risk.  We are fortunate it did not go in her favor.”

“What do we do now?  How can we fight her?”

“Fight her?”  The Great Spirit cocked his head curiously.  “You will fight her at the Binding Place, mortal.”

“But Logarr will want me again!”

“Then go to him.”

She shook her head, frustrated with him.  He had touched her, he was supposed to understand!  “I can’t do that and you must know why!  He says he’s blinding you!”

“He has already done so,” the Great Spirit replied, unbothered.  She started to protest and the Great Spirit silenced her with a wave of his hand.  “She knows I have chosen you to be the vessel of her immortal power.  By blinding me to you, she thinks you will not have enough of my essence to defeat her when we come to the Forgotten Waters.  She means to kill you.  She would have done so already if not for my influence.”  He shot her a glance that Olivia read easily as And this is the thanks I get.  “But Bahgree can take only so much of my sight.  I will always be able to see you when I stand in my own flesh before you.  I see no reason why you should not finish with her servant.”

“But he’s stronger than I am!” Olivia cried.  “He could be doing anything to me!  I can’t fight him!”

“Do not fight.  Give the River Woman her little victory.  You shall have your vengeance when you hold her essence.”  He regarded her without sympathy.  “You asked what you should do and I told you.”

“Right, go to Logarr,” she snapped, blinking back angry tears.  “When he’s finished with me, then I suppose you’ll ask me to come back to you.  You’ve got a few days before Urga comes into season, and you can always count on me for a good time, is that it?  You’re a pig, do you know that?  You’re a horny bastard and a lousy excuse for a god!”

He had been surprised by the explosive violence of her rage, but the more he listened, the angrier he got.  When she stopped to catch her breath, he filled the silence with his rage.  “You humans are all alike!” he spat.  “From the time your kind first crawled out of the water, you have subjugated and killed all other beings solely to further your comfort!  You are no different!  You resist this Logarr to spare yourself having to open your legs, and why?  What does it hurt?  It hurts your human heart!”

He flung out one arm and pointed out through the door, his rage flaring out from him in a visible aura of flame.  “My children are dying!” he roared.  “The son you bore is dying, and you, who can save them all, whine at me because the means are unpleasant to you!  My children are the verge of extinction, but if sympathy were spit, you could not fill a cupful!”

“You want sympathy?”  She spat a wad of runny saliva at his feet.  “That’s more than you and your whole fucking race is worth!”

He swung his arm and his palm cracked across her cheek with the sound of a thunderclap.

Olivia staggered back, struck the wall and stared at him, one hand pressed to the side of her face.  He waited, unmoving, as she sank to her knees and pressed her face against the floor, sobbing herself hoarse.

“I forgive you that outburst,” he said at last.  “And now I will remind you of your oath to me and demand your obedience.”

She shuddered against the rock.  “What do you want me to do?”

“Stand and face me.”

Her hands drifted over the stone; she pushed herself upright, and got first to her knees, then to her feet.  She looked at him with numb resignation.

He studied her in silence for a while, apparently finding no trace of deception or defiance.  “Go to Logarr,” he ordered.  “Do what you must and be rid of his influence, and then return to me.  No mortal could survive what he plans for you tonight.  Had you not lain with two, you would have killed your last lover.”

“I’ll die,” she said bleakly, and his expression turned dark and formidable again.

“If you do, it will be of pride, woman,” he shot back tersely.  “When he is done with you, return here.  I will remain.”              He paused to eye her, plainly expecting a furious response.  When there was none, he continued.  “I will learn the end of Logarr’s tale, and advise you further.  But know this, Olivia, and swallow it:  Your time here is nearly ended.”

She nodded once, submissive as a child.

“You are dismissed,” he said formally.  He folded his arms over his chest and watched her withdraw from the cave.

8

Olivia went to the baths and had both a long soak and a good cry.  When she was done with both, she went to the commons, arriving at the same time as the returning hunting party.  She heard her name muttered in tones of surprise, and then Doru’s strong voice hailed her with his usual good humor.  He and the other hunters fanned out towards the females, laden with satchels of meat and other, less pleasant but equally practical, animal remains.

Doru muscled an older male out of the way before that other could take more than two steps towards her, and unslung part of his burden for her carry.  “For you,” he said.

“Mighty hunter,” she said wanly, trying on a smile.  “What did you bring for my tribe?  An elk?  A bear, perhaps?”

“Greater prey than that, beautiful Olivia.  For you, I have stalked and slain the rare and perilous gulla-eating mountain hare.”

“And I helped,” Bodual called.

“He did,” Doru agreed.  “He tripped me with his spear so that I could fall on it and kill it.”

“I didn’t mean to trip him,” Bodual protested, coming up on her other side with another rabbit.  “I was trying to stab him.”

“Doru?” Olivia asked, feigning surprise.

“No, the rabbit.  Fortunately, he hopped out of the way.”

“The rabbit?” she echoed obediently.

Bodual gave her an exasperated grimace meant to disguise his delight at her apt delivery of her cues.  “No, Doru.”

“So besides crushing the rabbit and nearly killing Doru, did you bring anything else back yourself?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes.  I caught another she-goat to replace the one who got away two nights ago.  I personally have no idea what good it does for sparking women to drink milk, but Murgull—” he sighed, hooking at the air and rolling his eyes. “—Murgull always insisted on it, so that’s what we’ve always done.  Damn things keep chewing through the ropes and escaping.”

“You should build a pen,” she suggested.

“We’ve tried that,” Doru interjected.  “They either hop over it, or they chew through it.  Either way, we’re out another goat.  Fortunately for us, their innate ability to slip our bonds is the only real sign of cleverness they seem to have.  They may be hard to keep, but they’re easy enough to replace.”

“All in all, a productive hunt,” Bodual added.  “We brought down eight rabbits.  One of the others caught another goat, and Thugg snuck into an animal pen and made off with about ten big chickens.”

“You and I seemed to have been the only ones who couldn’t perform,” Doru added.  To Olivia, he said, “They’ve been teasing us all night.”

“Too bad they don’t know you like I do,” she said.  “I certainly had no complaints about your performance.”

Bodual flicked a glance behind them, but the other hunters were still hanging back, even if they were watching with some interest.  “I can think of a nice way to improve my crippled ego,” he remarked in a low voice, punctuating the suggestion with a friendly leer.

Doru gave him a light smack to the ear, but turned hopeful eyes on Olivia.  “You are always welcome, you know,” he said.

She smiled at them, feeling absurdly touched by the offer.  The warmth and genuine friendship flowing off them contrasted harshly with the scene she’d just had with the Great Spirit.  She fought briefly with tears and won. “I’d like that,” she said.  “You really have no idea how much.”

“Good.”  Doru dropped an arm around her shoulders, half-unfolding one wing to tuck around her.  “Then come to my pit,” he said, a little too loudly to be the intimate offer it seemed.  He turned around.

Logarr stood in the shadows just beyond the common cave’s mouth.  He looked at her and then at Doru, who gave no sign of even seeing the other gulla.

Not now, thought Olivia.  Later, please, but not now.

Logarr’s pale eyes came back to her.  Lust flared, sharp and cruel as a knife in her guts, and died away slowly.  He slipped back into the shadows and was gone, leaving nothing behind him but the echoing burn of his warning and a single word whispering through her mind:

Tonight.

9

Olivia was almost asleep when she felt Logarr calling her from somewhere in the caverns.  She opened her eyes, at once awake and alert, to lift her head from Bodual’s chest.  Doru muttered something—it may have been a question—and started snoring again.

She disentangled herself gently and stepped over them to fetch her clothes.  This time it was Bodual who woke and tried to crawl out of the pit, mumbling something chivalrous about walking her to the women’s tunnels.

“Go to sleep,” she whispered.

“As you command,” he said, and burrowed back into the bedding.

Olivia dropped out of Doru’s chambers and wandered through the empty passages, following the call of Logarr’s mind.  She found him in yet another unused room in an uninhabited tunnel, sitting on a bench and staring morosely into the embers of a new fire. He did not bother to greet or acknowledge her in any way.

“Is Sudjummar all right?” he asked after several long minutes of silence.

“He was when I left him.”

He nodded, gazing at the flame.  “I didn’t know.  It’s important to me that you understand that.  I didn’t know what she was doing, or even that she was here.  I am a tool,” he continued, speaking almost to himself.  “A man may use a pick to mine rock or to cleave another man’s skull.  The pick doesn’t know.”

“Have you sat here all this time worrying about it?”

Just when she thought he had not been listening to her at all, he shook his head twice, slowly.  “I wish I could say that I have, but no.  I have been looking my life over, trying to find the one place where I could have stopped becoming what I am.  There had to have been a point when I could have walked away, simply, safely.  I could have had a mate by now, a human like you.  When?  Where?”  He rubbed his face wearily.  “How?”

She crossed over to the bench and sat beside him.  Her arm brushed his, but that was the only contact and she hoped it was comforting.

“I killed her, you know,” he said.  His face, hollow-eyed and haunted, was bathed in sullen orange light.  “That little human.  I hurt her the first time I drove her mad the second, and I killed her on the third.  I shouldn’t have gone back to her, but I didn’t know where else to go.  She opened her eyes when I entered her.  There was a moment when I thought she really saw me, really knew it was no dream.  And then the power ripped out of me and killed her.”

Logarr leaned back and shuddered, his eyes closed against the memory.  “A male burst in on us.  I was in agony with unrelieved power.  I took his head off without really seeing him.  I heard a female scream—the little human’s mother.  Maybe, because she was older, she was stronger.  I don’t know.  She lasted…just long enough.”

He shook his head slowly, opened his eyes and stared at the fire without seeming to see it.  “Afterwards, I buried the bodies and burned the den.  The third time, the last time, I swore it was the end.  I swore I would rather die.  I could not defy the River Woman, but when she was done with me, I jumped into the sky and flew blindly away from the lights of the humans.  The pains came and I endured them until my wings seized up and I dropped out of the sky.  I landed on a road and lay there, unable to move, even to scream.  I am certain I would have died, if I had been left alone.

“I wasn’t.

“As I lay there, wrapped in my own wings, caught between two breaths of silent screams, I heard singing.  I could open my eyes, and what did I behold but a woman, stumbling down the road in a fog of drunkenness.  She might have passed me by if I had not been so horrified at the sight of her that I let out a cry to warn her away.  Naturally, she headed straight for me, her face the very image of concern and compassion.  She dropped beside me and tried to turn me over.  I do not remember attacking her.  I remember nothing at all until after I had finished with her, lying atop this…smoldering thing.

“But after many years, I decided these were things I could live with.  I told myself that I wasn’t responsible, that I’d had no control.  I told myself over and over that it could never happen again, that it was a secret I could keep.”

“And now?”

“I was certain you would be like that poor she-human I killed,” he said, but she somehow knew he was not answering her.  “I would hurt you, turn your mind to moonlight, then return and kill you.  When the third night came and went and you were sound, I feared to find one of my tribe dead.  That never happened, either.”

Logarr paused, then looked at her again, distantly curious.  “I suppose that you must be stronger than I am, or maybe you’re doing something with it that I can’t do.  I don’t pretend to understand this power, I only do what I must to be rid of it.”  He sighed, a sound of reluctant resignation, and stood up.  “That is as much as I am permitted to tell you of that.  All that remains for you to know are Bahgree’s words to me, her thoughts, from that dream of ages past.”

“You can’t just me tell me now?”

He shook his head, dismayed.  “Things are forbidden to me.  I am only a tool, and there is a hand upon me.”

“But you do regret it,” she said.  “You haven’t used any of your tricks on me tonight.  Instead, you chose to sit and talk to me.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders, his eyes dark with hopelessness.  “What does it matter if I speak to you?  When I touch you, it will be the same.”

To prove it, he put out his hand and caressed her hip through her skirt.  A ripple of sheer erotic pleasure flowed outward from that spot.  She closed her eyes, faint and flushed, and melted onto her back on the bench.

Logarr pushed her skirt up and straddled the bench between her open thighs.  “I wish you’d never come here,” he said.  “I wish I hadn’t taken that spiteful, stupid Journey when Vorgullum grew tall.  I wish that damn woman hadn’t picked that night to get drunk and go singing through the streets.”

Moving almost of their own accord, his hands roved over her body, periodically sending out those crushing mini-orgasms that rocked her to her core.  He spoke on, sometimes bitterly, sometimes fiercely, but always with sorrow and a deep sense of shame.  He thrust and rocked, and sweated against her, shouting out remonstrations in gasps and ragged breaths.

Olivia held on to him, but she couldn’t bring herself to concentrate for longer than a few brief seconds at a time.  Her body, independent of her sympathy or her compassion, drove her relentlessly towards the same, gut-wrenching conclusion.

He came with a sudden violent expletive, then heaved himself hard against her and locked into place.  Power coursed out of him, killing her own as it gushed through her.  She expected Logarr to get up when it ended, as he had before, continuing his story and finishing whatever work he’d begun with her.

Instead, the moment he took his first tortured gasp of air, he dropped atop her and banged his fist on the side of the bench.  He roared out a curse, then another, and then broke down into terrible, abrasive-sounding sobs, burying his head in the crook of her neck.

She rubbed the base of his horns to soothe him.  “It’s all right, Logarr.  I don’t blame you.  You tried, I know—”

“I tried to die,” he said raggedly.  “I tried to bleed out my life.  The knife went in, but it wouldn’t cut. My bones don’t break anymore. I can’t starve, Olivia.  I can’t drown.  I have nothing but pain.”  He reached up his bruised hand and wiped his face dry, then regained his feet and stumbled away from her.  “Bahgree told me that any young conceived by humans and gullan would never be accepted by the world.  They were born to die.”

“I know this.”

“But did he tell you the rest of it?” Logarr asked.  “Did he tell you about Urga’s curse?”

Olivia frowned.

“No, I thought not. Bahgree may be evil, but the evil that has been laid upon us did not come from her.  In as much as she can be innocent, she is innocent of that.”  Logarr looked away, and when he spoke again, it was in the low, inflectionless tones of recital.  “Urga destroyed Bahgree as much as she could be and the Great Spirit bound her powers in the pool where she had been made, and for a time there was peace.  Eventually, the daughters of Bahgree, seeking to reclaim their mother’s power, came to the Great Spirit while his mate waited in the sky for her hour to give birth, and he resisted them no more than he had resisted their mother.  One night, when the moon rose high, Urga looked down and saw her mate thrashing wildly with the daughters of the River Woman.”  Logarr laughed, a low, humorless sound.  “And because Urga had no power over her mate, she cursed the wombs of his children instead.  She did this, knowing our race would die.  She did this because she knew.”

“I don’t understand,” Olivia said.

“Each moon-span, Urga comes into our world to lie with the Great Spirit,” said Logarr, glaring at the blank face of the wall.  “Each moon-span, she conceives his child, and at the fullest of the moon, she births that child back into our world through a gullan female.”

A tiny chill sank into the base of Olivia’s spine as she recalled the Great Spirit telling her this was how his essence had passed into Somurg.  She thought of pregnant Urga floating down over her, into her, as she strained on the birthing bench, and how the goddess had risen slender and emptied to look back at her.

“These children, her children, she has blessed with health.  All others, she has cursed to carry the full weight of both parents’ weaknesses.  Barrenness, infirmity, withered limbs, foolishness, blindness, foaming fits.”  Logarr turned his head suddenly and spat.  “‘Let no young come save through me,’ she said, and so, among all our people upon all this world, there are but twelve born each year free of this hell which consumes the rest.  Our race began to die. The gullan raised their voices in desperation to the Great Spirit, and he went before Urga and commanded her to remove her curse. She refused and so long as Urga’s refusal stood, the Great Spirit left her.  For years, he did not talk to or touch his mate, and for years, all the world was barren.”

Logarr fanned his wings, staring into the fire.  “It frightens me to think how close my race must have come to death in that hour.  It must have frightened the Great Spirit as well.  He summoned Urga out of the sky and commanded again that she relieve her evil.  Again, she refused.  So he beat her.  Badly.  And finally, Urga submitted.

“She did not remove the curse,” Logarr said.  “But she did devise the cure.  She gathered up all the waters she had beaten out of Bahgree in their last conflict and poured them into a pool that stands outside of time.  She told the Great Spirit to give Bahgree’s power back into a human vessel and so make it possible for those offspring to belong to this world.  And then, in her fury and her jealousy, she spat out a portion of her own power into that pool, so that the sum of its strength would be greater than his own.  And then she returned to the sky and left the Great Spirit before a pool that seethed with enough power to destroy even him.  She left him, and the evil shade of Bahgree twined eagerly beneath his hand.  The Great Spirit could not unleash her on the world, and so he chose instead to watch all the children born to gullan wither and die.”

“Bahgree’s power has only to return to a mortal body,” Olivia said.  “Not necessarily to her.”

Logarr shrugged listlessly.  “It will make very little difference if Bahgree has the opportunity to enter you.  Even powerless in the way of gods, she is capable of much.”

“Are you putting her into me?  Is that what you’re doing?”

“No.  The scope of what I am doing is beyond me, but that much, I think, I would know.  But through me, she knows at last which mountain contains the Great Spirit’s intended vessel and so she was able to pour herself in and seek out your metal-maker.  No, Olivia, I am not giving you to the River Woman, but I’m doing damage enough.”

She stood and took a small step towards him.

He turned away.  “In thirty years,” he said, facing the dark wall, “you were the only person to take my hand.  Do not forgive me, Olivia.  I don’t think I can survive that.  Just go.  And don’t…don’t ever touch me again.”

10

Olivia returned to the cavern where the Great Spirit awaited her.  He was still standing exactly as he had been when she left him—facing the open doorway, arms crossed, horns lowered.

“You are done with Logarr?” he asked curtly.

“I’m done.”

He unfolded his arms, crossed swiftly to her and put his hand up her skirt, thrusting one finger deep into her body.  He growled, scowling over her shoulder at the wall.  “So.  More potent than anticipated.  The ages have indeed strengthened her.”  He withdrew his hand, looked around at the bench and said, “Enough talk.  It is time to begin.  You may lie down, if you wish.”

Olivia felt her temper fraying.  “Don’t you even want to know what he said?” she demanded.

“What he said—”  The Great Spirit took her arm and pulled her toward him.  “—is not what will kill you if it is not answered.  Lie down, woman.”

“You don’t even care, do you?  You don’t care about anything as long as you get to fuck!”

His eyes narrowed.  He touched his claw to her forehead.

The feeling of spiritual invasion blanked out any other sensation.  She fell back, vaguely aware that he had caught her, and closed her eyes, trying to force his alien presence out of her brain.  She felt a distant thump as she was set none-too-gently on the bench and then a flare of pain and heat as he penetrated.

Abruptly, the sensation left her and she fell painfully back into her body, gasping as the rush of blood and beating of her heart crashed into her, screaming as the Great Spirit’s blistering cock tore her open and burned her with the endless acid of his cum.

“There,” he said evenly when her screams receded.  “Now I know everything.  Does that console you?”

Olivia couldn’t answer.  The power that Logarr had implanted in her was spinning out of her wildly, making her body come alive in ways she could scarcely comprehend.  The male entity working methodically inside her did not absorb the power as much as overwhelm it with his own, devastating her with the need to climax.  The Great Spirit listened to the tiny, frantic cries that escaped her, realized the source of her distress, and made a noncommittal grunt.  His hand dropped to form a complicated caress over her belly.

Suddenly, every thrust elicited a galvanizing orgasm.  Olivia let out a volley of torturous shrieks, writhing and flinging herself at him as he continued to undulate and watch her.  Her body was climbing towards an inhuman register of pleasure beyond the physical ability to contain it.  Olivia beat her fists hysterically at his face and chest, but none of the blows seemed to be landing.

His hips pumped.  His hard belly slapped against hers.  He continued to ignore her efforts to dislodge him, and he continued to wrack her body with orgasms until the shockwaves of pleasure became a single scream of pain.

“Now,” he murmured, and ejaculated once, bringing her to a violent, ranting climax as a kind of coarse harmony.

Olivia seized two handfuls of thick hair, let out a harsh cry, and fell back against the bench.  The last thing she heard was a rumble of contentment in the Great Spirit’s chest as he raised her hips to bury himself even deeper.  Then, oblivion.

11

Olivia came around to the comfortable grumbling of the Great Spirit and the sensation of pain as her back rubbed steadily against the stone bench.  Disorientation momentarily overweighed annoyance; she checked her watch first.  It was half past three in the morning, which was impossible, as she hadn’t even gone to Logarr until a quarter of six.  This meant it was tomorrow at the very least and was probably even the day after.

Now she was annoyed.  Olivia smacked her palms into the god’s shoulders as hard as she could and snapped, “Get off me!”

The cozy rumbling ceased, although the steady rocking did not.  The Great Spirit lifted his head just enough to see her face and gazed at her coolly.

“I mean it,” she said tersely.  “Get off!”

He growled warningly in the back of his throat, but he threw three quick, hard pumps into her, ejaculating each time, and stood up.

Olivia sat up slowly, feeling a thousand aches, withdrawing from her physical self long enough to convert some of his energies into healing for her battered womb and worse, the wounds that came from ceaseless rubbing against the stone bench.  She ran her hands experimentally over her back, wincing as she felt the raised welts of raw flesh slowly mending.  There was blood on the bench behind her, blood in tiny trickles that ran all the way to the floor.  This was the Great Spirit, whose divine love for all creation ended as soon as it was possible for him to fuck an unconscious girl until her back flayed.

He was watching her, trying to be patient in case she should change her mind and agree to fling herself on her back.  When she glared at him, he apparently misread her fury as passion of quite another kind, and held out his hand expectantly.

She smacked it away.

The Great Spirit studied his arm at the new angle where her blow had left it, and then looked at her, his expression thunderous.  “Did I not spare your life, woman?” he demanded.  “Did I not spare the lives of the mortals you surely would have destroyed with your union?  Am I not entitled to some measure of gratitude?”

“I should be grateful?” she demanded, and pointed furiously at the blood staining the bench.  “Do you see that?”

He spared it a glance.  “You healed.”

“It still hurt!”

“What is pain to an immortal?” he asked, rolling his shoulders in a shrug.  “It is done, it is forgotten.  Quarrelsome woman, to snap and rail at phantoms of injury you can no longer feel!”

“Excuse me if I think that’s just a little more important than you getting your endless rocks off.  And what about Logarr?” she demanded.  “Isn’t he one of your children too?  Couldn’t you have taken five minutes out of fucking me to save him from Bahgree?”

“He is beyond my power to save,” the Great Spirit said coolly, watching her.  “He was no Mojo Woman, to invoke what he did not understand.  He opened to her and lay with her willingly.”

“He didn’t know!  You said you knew everything he said to me, how could you have missed that?”

“Ignorance is not innocence.”  His molten eyes narrowed slightly.  “And such is your concern, woman, that you would rather stand and vent your rage at me than wonder what harm the River’s influence might even now be inflicting upon myself.  Did you never think that the copulations of the past night and day were no pleasure to me, but a sacrifice?  A pain of my own, and far more damaging than any fleeting and insignificant spill of mortal blood.”

She drew back and looked at him, one hand falling unnoticed to her belly and gripping there, as if she could cup and hold the parasite of Bahgree’s power even after she had already poured it into him.  “Was it?”

“No,” he said.  “But it might have been and you never thought to inquire. It would seem your outrage is far more precious to you than concern.  Remember that when next you are tempted to revile me for my lusts.”

She could feel heat crawling in her cheeks as she ducked her eyes away from his piercing stare.  After a long, heavy silence, she said, “Is it hurting them?  The men that I’ve…gone to?”

“Bahgree’s magic was of a most particular sort, meant to shield the light of your soul from my perception.  It has washed in, as the tides wash over the shore, erasing all marks, and washed out again.  To a mortal without the means to translate divine energies, such a tide can easily prove deadly, yet you have chosen your victims well.  They have survived and Bahgree’s fell waters can do no further harm to them.  Of course, I am now blinded to them as much as I am to you, but this is no great sufferance.”  He regarded her while she breathed a low sigh of real relief, then held out his hand again.

She looked at it, and then at him.

“It is not yet day,” he said.  “You have passed the night in my company and may as well pass the last hours before dawn.”

“What is wrong with you?” she exploded.  “You’ve had me all night, mostly without the inconvenience of holding my interest.  Anyone else would be satisfied with that!”

“It isn’t in the nature of an incarnation to be satisfied.”

“Beyond the obvious, I suppose,” she added caustically.

“The obvious?” he echoed, his brows drawing even further together as he sensed an insult.  “Explain yourself, woman.”

“Satisfaction,” she snapped, and then paused in the act of adjusting her clothing, eyeing him with a little caution when his apparent confusion only deepened.  “Satisfaction with…sex.  You know.  When you finish.”

“Finish?”  He gave her one of his short, irritated laughs.  “What finish is there to be had in sex?  Enough of this!  Your oath is still mine and I am done with placating your human pride!  Down upon your back, woman!”

Olivia straightened, her surprise overshadowing her annoyance with him for the moment.  “You’re kidding,” she said.  “You’ve got to be.  Do you mean to tell me you’ve never…cum?”

He was still cross and the question appeared to anger him further.  “Come to what?”

“That’s amazing,” she said, staring at him.  “That’s…actually kind of sad.”

He tipped his head slowly to one side, looking as though he might easily work his way up to being offended.

“I mean…don’t you have pleasure?”

“Of course there is pleasure!”

“In release?”

He tossed his massive crest of horns.  “In the act.  What is there in release but the substance of my divine seed?  This is a pointless conversation.”

“I can’t believe you’ve never cum.”  She struggled with the concept while she rubbed her back.  “You’ve been with a lot of women.”

He grunted at that, with some bitterness and some humor and not enough of either.  “So you say.  There has been for me but Urga, and briefly Bahgree and some few of her daughters.”

“Few?  Some few?  That isn’t exactly what I heard.”

“The term is subjective,” he acknowledged.  “To view the species as a whole, I have taken a percentage scarcely worth the mentioning.  And for them,” he added pointedly, “there was little concern with trivialities.”

“Trivialities,” she repeated, unable to keep her expression from showing her astonishment, even as she was aware of the god’s growing impatience.  “Most people would say cumming is the whole point of sex!”

“Sex is the point of sex!” the Great Spirit snapped.  “Possession!  Penetration!  The storm and the fury of it!  There is no finish!”

“Isn’t Urga interested in…that part of sex?”

The Great Spirit drew in a snarling breath to answer, and then abruptly sighed and merely looked down at her.  He took two broad steps and dropped onto the bench she had just recently vacated.  “Urga,” he said, and bared his teeth at his shadow on the floor.  “Urga is a part of me, nothing more than a buried aspect of a subconsciousness I expelled ages before her birth.  She is not an incarnation as I am, but rather, a shadow of my young self.  As such, she possesses great power and will, but no great depth.”  He paused, his eyes narrowing as he studied her.  “You may not believe I have depth.”

“I suppose you must,” she admitted.  “You’ve asked me to go on a quest for you.”  So that she could become immortal and he could keep fucking her.  As depth went, it wasn’t exactly a well, but it was there.

He first seemed startled, then pleased by that thought.  “Urga, however, exists only to breed by me.  She has no other thought, no other desire.  She enters her season, comes to my arms, and we couple.  At the moment, the exact moment,” he repeated harshly, “that she has my seed, she vanishes.”

Olivia considered her next words, fairly certain that things could not be answered as simply as she suspected.

The Great Spirit, watching her, curled his lips in a rueful smile.  “So simply withhold it, hm?  You’ve been beneath me enough to know that I can spend seed as easily as crook a claw.”

“The thought had occurred.”

“And so it is clear you still do not understand my nature.  It is like breathing, Olivia Blake.  You can choose to take a breath, choose to hold it a while, choose to release it as a pant, a sigh, a word or a whistle, but whether you choose to or not, you still have to breathe.  And if you do none of these things by choice, you will breathe anyway, do you see?”

“I think so.”

“Good.  So try to imagine how it is with me.  I must wait for her all that while, and mere minutes after she arrives, she is gone.”

“Minutes?”

“At most.”

Olivia wasn’t exactly warming up to him, but she found a tiny kernel of sympathy for him all the same.  “Why don’t you just find another woman?”

“Urga exists to bear my children,” he said curtly.  “It is her purpose and hers alone.  In her mind, all those who lie with me seek to rob her of her sole function, and she would take a terrible revenge.”

“She knows about me,” Olivia argued.  “She was the one who told me I had to submit to you.  I don’t think she cares that much.”

He gave his horns a toss and glowered at her.  “Urga knows that you and I must have union, but she does not like it.  If my will were a little weaker, or hers a little stronger, you would be killed in the most gruesome manner that she could imagine.”

“Have you tried to take another lover?”

“Several.”

“How can she stop you?”

“She doesn’t stop me,” he answered vehemently.  “Urga is mother to all gullan.  It is through her body that all souls must pass.  It is but an idle thought to take back one of those souls.  If I lie with a female, Urga knows, and Urga kills her.  If I possess a male’s body to share his passions, Urga kills them both.  And if I dare to seek out one of Bahgree’s get—”

“You made her,” Olivia interrupted.  “Make her stop.”

He buried his face in his hands.  For a long time, he said nothing, only sat there, breathing slow.  “Olivia,” he said in a muffled voice.  “If you insist upon asking questions, I must insist you listen to the answers.  Hear me again. Urga was part of me once, but was expelled.  I am her mate, and she obeys me, but she is my shadow, my equal in power.  I cannot force her obedience.”  He straightened suddenly and pierced her with his stare, saying, “But as you were told this night, Bahgree’s essence has become a power greater even than my own.  When you have consumed them and are made immortal at my side, then you will challenge Urga and defeat her. Then you will be my mate and, if you like, I will take many lovers.”

“How very considerate,” she said.

His gaze turned briefly dark, but he chose to forgive the sarcasm.  “I have answered all your questions.  Lie back for me now.”

“Are you serious?” she protested, mentally wincing at the whining quality of her words.  “It’s nearly dawn!”

“It is hours until dawn,” he countered, drumming the fingers of one hand on his knee.  “You have nowhere else to be, you have sworn to be my consort, you require my seed to strengthen your power, and if you do not agree at once in spite of these reasonable arguments, I will throw you down and take you anyway.”

“Oh, all right,” she said, standing.  “But this time, you lie down.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.  “Why?”

“Because you’ve already scraped my back up once tonight,” she said crossly.  “And once is all you get.  If you want to do this, then you lie down.”

He regarded her suspiciously, not moving.  “You,” he said, “are trying to trick me.”

She blinked at him, pulling her skirt up.  “What are you talking about?”

“Males do not lie down,” he stated.  “It cannot be done that way.”

She stared at him.  “Are you serious?” she asked at last.

His only answer was a silent, furious snarl.

To distract him, she undressed rather than simply lift her skirt.  “It can,” she said, standing naked before him.  “Would I lie to you?”

He flicked his gaze up from his open appraisal of her flesh and glared at her.  “Yes.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and coaxed him around, then pushed him back on the bench.  It took quite a bit of pushing, and all the while, he glared reproachfully up at her.  “I warn you now that if you think you can incapacitate me here and then flee, I shall run you down and oh,” he finished, as she swung one leg over him and eased slowly over his jutting member.  He frowned, obviously flustered, pushing himself up just slightly on his elbows to watch her fit them together.  “Just so.”

Olivia bit her lip and bore down, using her power to assuage the pain of his entry, but gaining little ground.  “Help me,” she said at last, and rushed to add, “Slowly!” as he immediately seized her.

He eyed her with mild puzzlement, then lifted his head to study the join of their bodies.  He lifted her, shot a hot rush of semen between them, and levered her down again, pulling on her hips like handles.  “This is…different,” he remarked.

In exasperation, Olivia combed through the pelt of his chest, discovered a nipple, and tongued it while simultaneously stabbing at him with a knife of her power.

“Unnngh!”  The Great Spirit’s head flew back to crack on the bench and his hips thrust fiercely upwards as his hands clenched, slamming their bodies together with a brutal slap.  He thrummed once, then noticed where her mouth was at and curiosity briefly replaced the look of lust on his face.  He reached up to hunt out his other nipple with one claw.  “I have these?” he marveled.  “Why would I have done that?”

Olivia slipped her hand beneath his and rolled the hard nub between her fingers, catching the one in her mouth between her teeth and blowing on it lightly.

The Great Spirit shuddered, clenched his hand on hers.  “Perhaps this is not entirely unpleasant,” he said.  “I will indulge you in this.”

All in all, not a very impressive reaction, considering what it had done to other gullan.  Olivia studied him from the corner of her eyes as she lashed at him with her tongue, and then decided to try something different.  She pulled back from her body, but remained where she could see herself.  Honing all the power at her command, she began to manipulate herself and him: undulating and gripping him with her body, running her hands across every exposed part of him, applying her teeth and tongue to all the places most sensitive to touch.  She raked her nails across his thick hide, then caressed him tenderly, arched and rocked and circled and ground, and all the while she used her power to amplify the sensations she inflicted on him.

Her mind floated, surveying her puppet body with a certain smugness as she worked.  Although she did not concern herself with so menial a concept as time, she was vaguely aware that she was siphoning energy out of him in a constant stream, using it to soothe the damage he inevitably did to her physical body as the minutes ticked by into hours.

She came to herself abruptly at the onset of a strange, unfamiliar sensation—a relentless coiling of white-hot power, emanating, not from her, but from the Great Spirit.  After a moment of worried confusion, she recognized the signs of strain and realized he was rising towards the cusp of an orgasm.  She sensed that she could push him higher, but that his cumming was going to be an ordeal for them both, and this was the limit of her mortal body.

She satisfied herself with that, overlapping their sexual wavelengths, and bringing them to a sudden, violent joining.  Sensation slammed into her, trailing raw power behind, a fiery comet with a tail of ice.  She cried out, but the sound was lost in his deafening roar.

Olivia’s mind scrambled back from the black tide of his climax, her spirit self working desperately to keep her physical husk alive in the grip of the god.  From this frightened distance, she could sense herself undergoing the single most painful moment of her existence; she knew instinctively that it could have killed her to be wholly there, and would have surely made her insane.

Olivia saw herself rise smoothly into the air as he arched off the bench, still roaring.  He came for what felt like an eternity, and then dropped back onto the stone with a jarring thud.  Her puppet fell limply atop him while her spirit remained hovering out of mental range, watching.

He put a hand on the small of her back, panting.  His eyes were closed.  His pelt was spiky with sweat.  He was done.  For the first time in his timeless existence, he was done.

Olivia’s consciousness stuck a toe into her body, decided it was safe, and dove back in.  She jerked, groaned, and tried to crawl deeper into his flesh.

He put the other arm around her.

The little heat she’d begun this enterprise with was now a roaring bonfire, and even so, it was having difficulty consuming the deluge of energy she’d stolen from the Great Spirit.  She could feel it throbbing inside her, feel a kind of burning itch all over her body as though she were sweating it out from her pores in an invisible aura.

Olivia shuddered, eliciting a sleepy-sounding murmur from the male beneath her.  She sympathized; she had been keyed-up before, but she was exhausted now.  “I have to go to sleep now,” she mumbled.

“Then do so,” he replied, and yawned.  His hands were still clasped around her.

She could feel herself dozing off at his suggestion, but roused herself with some effort.  “I have to go home to sleep,” she clarified, pushing herself into a sitting position.

His locked hands slid to her hips.  He watched her lazily through pleasure-slitted eyes as she stretched and yawned and tried to keep her own eyes open.  “Sleep here,” he offered generously.  “I will hold watch over y—”  He broke off, his eyes widening by slow degrees until he was gaping outright at her.

Instinctively, she checked the doorway, but found it empty.  Puzzled, she returned his stare.  “What?”

He seized her hips and lifted her into the air, sitting up in the same fluid movement to stare at his flaccid penis.  He made a sound, one just a little too tight and strangled to be a true scream.

Olivia, her hands resting over his and her toes dangling over the ground, finally realized what he was fussing over.  “That happens, you know,” she said mildly.

“This is normal?”  He prodded at himself, dumbstruck.

Olivia disguised her sigh as another yawn.  “When a male orgasms, he ceases to be hard.  It’s totally natural.”

“But—”

“Relax.  If I gave you ten minutes, you’d be on me again.”  She broke off when she saw the gleam in his eye.  “But I’m not going to give you ten minutes,” she said sternly.  “I know you don’t care or anything, but I’m tired.  I want to go home and go to sleep.”

He didn’t look as disappointed as she expected.  He set her down on her feet and watched her dress.  “Strangely, I find that I do care,” he said after several minutes, when Olivia no longer remembered what had prompted the ambiguous comment.  “More now than ever.  Tell me, did you help me to arrive only because I never had before?”

“Arrive?”

He furrowed his brow in thought.  “Is that not what you called it?”

“Oh,” she said, bewildered.  Then, as she realized what he meant, “Oh!  Actually, I didn’t expect you to cum at all, I was just trying to…see how far I could push you,” she finished, after a brief pause in which she decided that, ‘make you hurry up and get off me,’ wasn’t the most considerate way to end the conversation.

He acknowledged this with a grunt and stood up, resuming his towering posture over her and lowering his impressive horns.  “You mean to leave me now, then.  This is not wise.  Unless you stand before me, I am no longer able to hear your calls.  It would be better that you remain with me until it is time to begin our journey.”  He paused to study the dismay that surely flooded her face, then grunted again.  “Far better.  And yet I am pleased by your service to me this night.  We shall hold to our bargain, Olivia Blake.  You shall return to me often to strengthen your power, and I shall await you.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly.  The risk of being trapped here with him, never to see any face but his until he carried her off to fight Bahgree hadn’t even occurred to her.  “I’ll be certain to come back when I’m in season.”

“Yes.  And you will bring me to arrival during our coupling.  A compromise,” he concluded triumphantly, and sat down on the bench to wait.

CHAPTER SIX

LAST DAYS

1

Olivia went to the women’s tunnels and stayed there.  She helped out in the clinic as much as she could, and when there wasn’t enough to do, spent her days hard at work with the gullan females.  If the tribe needed directing, she sent Horumn to deliver her orders.  Now and then, Doru dropped by in his role as chief hunter either to bring meat or ask—for diplomacy’s sake alone—her permission to fly a night hunt.  She didn’t try to see Sudjummar even when he came to bring the odd tool, but sometimes Amy slipped in with Somurg and let her hold her son.  It didn’t help the way she’d thought it would; when she looked down into his scowling face, a part of her already seemed to be leaving him.

She slept very little, but tried to put her insomnia to use fulfilling her obligations with the Great Spirit.  It was on one such night as she was wearily making her way back from his embrace that she stepped out into the women’s tunnels and promptly crashed full-length into Thurga.

They went down in a tangle of arms, legs, wings, and blankets and Olivia began to apologize ceaselessly in both languages as she tried to sort out whose limbs belonged to whom.  At last, Thurga picked Olivia up by the shoulders and sat her bodily back at arm’s reach so the gulla could roll onto her knees and find her feet.

“No harm, Urgarna!  No harm, for the spirit’s sake.  You’d think you’d ripped both wings free and fed them to me, the way you act.”

Olivia picked up one soiled blanket, then another, and then a third before their meaning set in.  “What is this?” she asked, somewhat alarmed.  The only reasons gullan ever replaced so much bedding at once were due to either a birth or a death.

But Thurga only shrugged.  “Washing the Beast.  She’s taken to pissing in the pit rather than ask for a basin.”  Thurga grunted sourly.  “Nuisance.”

Olivia experienced the same blend of pity and anger and sorrow she always felt whenever Cheyenne was mentioned, and as usual, she said nothing.

Thurga, having successfully bundled her clean bedding back into an easily managed armload, took two steps further towards the women’s tunnels, then turned slowly back.  “There is…another matter.  Can you come?”

“Of course.”  Olivia bit back a yawn.  “What’s wrong?”

“It is Sarabee.  She hasn’t been well for many days.  Tina says there is nothing wrong with her or the baby…”  Thurga trailed off, looking at once anxious.  Tina’s expertise with the healing arts had surely been proven a hundred times over, but to many gullan, the only true healer would always be Olivia.

Olivia reached out to give Thurga a consoling pat on the arm.  “It’s probably nothing serious, you know.  It’s just being pregnant.  I cried a lot, too.”

Thurga nodded, but didn’t look convinced.  “Poor Sarabee.  She’s never liked it here, and now that her time is nearing, she does nothing but weep.  So many of your humans have resisted the idea of taking another mate,” she ventured.  “Perhaps Sarabee fears to be taken by a male other than Burgelbun.”  She seemed to study her own words as they hung in the air, openly perplexed.  “But I didn’t think she cared so much for Burgelbun.”

“Humans are funny that way, I’m afraid.”

Thurga shrugged her wings, stealing a glance at Olivia from the corners of her dark eyes.  “We would help her if we could, but she has never spoken to us, you know.  Some of us fear that she may hurt the baby.”

Olivia stopped walking and put a hand on Thurga’s arm to halt her.  “Do you really think so?”

“Well…”  Thurga scratched at her throat, shifting her load of bedding awkwardly.  “Not to hurt with malice.  I don’t think she’d strike the baby or smother it.  But I don’t think she’ll love it either.  She has a name for it already, and I don’t think it’s very pleasant.”

“What name?”

Thurga frowned and spoke the word as though she feared Olivia would slap her on hearing it.  “Tumor.”  She watched Olivia’s face intently.  “Was I wrong?  Is it a good name after all?”

“Not…really.”

Thurga’s shoulders slumped.  “I feared that.  Sarabee says to Tina, ‘When will the Tumor come?  When will I be rid of the Tumor?’”  She shrugged her wings again, now openly uncomfortable.  “And I know it upsets you to hear such things, but what male will want her, weeping all the time?”

“Someone surely will,” Olivia said, and could not quite keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“Yes,” said Thurga softly.  “Someone will.  But no good man will be eager to take a female who despises him, and who will that leave?”

“She’ll stay in the women’s tunnels.  I’m sure that’s what she wants anyway.”

“With a baby?  She will not be allowed to do so.  A unmated female such as Sarahjay is one thing.  A female with a baby must be provided for.  She must have a mate!”  Thurga hesitated, then said, “If we offer to take the child when it is born, will she be offended or relieved?  Will she refuse even to give suck if this is all we ask of her?”

“I…”  Olivia realized she had no idea what Sarah B. would think of such an arrangement.  “I’ll talk to her,” she finished lamely.

Thurga sighed and nodded.  “And tell her, since she will not speak to us, tell her that we mean her no harm.  After all this time, it should be evident, but tell her anyway.”  She shifted her load of bedding and began to walk again.

Olivia let her go to do the washing and went alone to Tina’s clinic.  Amy was already there, rubbing Liz’s legs and humming the theme from Have Gun Will Travel.  She didn’t look around when Olivia asked her where Sarah B. was being kept, but she pointed the direction with her chin.

“Hang on a sec, though,” Amy said, when Olivia turned to go.  “I know you wanted to wait for Tina to come back, but I think Peanut here wants out.”

Olivia turned back reluctantly and bit her lip.  “Well, you’re right about one thing:  I did want to wait.  She’s still early, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, by about six weeks, but for all we know, Tina might not be back for months.”  Amy shook her head, her hands working calmly on Liz’s swollen ankles as she spoke.  “The drugs aren’t working like they used to.  Liz is going into labor practically every morning.  I mean, what do we do, double up on her dose?  And what happens when we run out, send you to another hospital?”

“I say go for it,” Liz announced.

Olivia frowned.  “Honey, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying I’m about to have a premature baby,” Liz replied, and her smile faltered, showing the true face of her worry beneath.  “Tina’s talked to me about the risks, you know.  I think…I think it’s maybe a better thing to do it now and save the rest of the levonal for someone else, someone where one shot might be all they need, rather than use it all up on me and still have to give birth early.  I mean, I know that every day improves my chances and all, but…there’s always going to be a risk because this is not a normal situation.  Not even as normal as, you know, whatever normal is for a gulla-human baby.  So I say go for it.”

“And I second the motion,” Amy added.  “In these enlightened days, a lot of doctors are actually inducing early on purpose.  Supposed to be less stressful for mama if she can pick the date and time and so forth.  And who are we to argue with the logic of obstetric science?”

It behooved no one to observe that in these enlightened days, doctors induced from the emergency rooms of the maternity wings in some very enlightened hospitals, and seldom as early as this.

Olivia nodded slowly.  “All right.  I’ll send someone in to sit with you and I’ll be back as soon as I…clear a few things up.”

“You heard the woman,” Amy said, “You’ve had your last shot, kiddo.”

“Yee-haw.”

“Okay then, that’s one down.”  Amy stood up, slapping her hands briskly, and faced off with Olivia.  “Now what’s your problem?”

Olivia made a futile gesture in the air with one hand.  “Thurga wants me to talk to Sarah B.  Do you know what the problem is with her?”

Amy’s expression had become a mask as soon as Sarah’s name was mentioned.  Now she considered the question as seriously as if it were a mathematical one.  “Maybe.  But I don’t want to discuss it in front of the baby.”

“Hey!”  Liz looked up, wounded.

“Hey yourself.  Can I help it if you keep bringing the little tyke within earshot?  Step into my parlor, o fearless leader.”  Amy took Olivia firmly by the arm and led her out of the clinic and a short distance down the tunnel.

For a long time, Amy only stood with her arms crossed, glaring at Olivia’s left shoulder.  When she spoke, her voice was low and angry.  “There are some things we just don’t want you to know.  I hate having to be so blunt, but there it is.  You do a really good job being leader, and honestly, there’s nobody here I’d rather see with the job and I’m pretty sure that opinion’s unanimous, but you…you still put Carla in here and you still cut a man’s balls off.”

“I—”

“I know you didn’t want to,” Amy said.  “But the fact remains, so I’m not going to apologize for not telling you about this sooner.  I just hope you don’t hate me too much when you hear it.”

“I think my ego can handle another secret meeting,” Olivia said.  “Could you just skip to the part where you start explaining things, please?”

“Okay, then, fair enough.  Here goes.”  Amy brought her eyes around to meet Olivia’s.  Impassively, she said, “Sarah B. wants to kill herself.”

“Wh-What?”

Amy sighed and scratched lightly at the hollow of her throat in unconscious imitation of a distressed gulla.  “I came into the baths when she was about two months along, and I was already feeling big as a damn house.  You remember how they used to keep spare clothes and stuff on the other side of the baths?  I was just on my way to trade up to a larger muumuu.  She was trying to drown herself.  I jumped in and saved her.  You’re gonna think that’s ironic in a little bit.”

Olivia felt a shiver trying to claw up her spine and suppressed it.  Amy had gone back to staring fixedly at Olivia’s left shoulder.  Her voice was calm; if not for the fury in her eyes, she might as easily have been discussing algebra.

Amy said, “She and Burgelbun never really caught on, you know.  And that Mojo Woman business made it pretty clear that, well, she didn’t come first in his eyes, so she quit trying.  She doesn’t hate him…I don’t think she hates him…but she hates this.”  Amy glanced around the cavern as though panning a mental camera across it.  “She hates all of this,” she mused.  “You can tell in her eyes…how she tends to fix her gaze about two feet in front of her and never really look at the floor or the walls.  You know how Carla is sometimes, how she doesn’t really think she’s here unless she’s getting hurt or…whatever?”

Olivia nodded and Amy shrugged.

“It’s like that with Sarah B, a little.  Once I got her out and into a towel, she started begging me to let her die.  And then she said a supremely disturbing thing.  She said, ‘Sometimes I wonder if this is even happening.  I don’t remember seeing any of you before. I think it’s just possible that this is one fuck of an acid trip.  In fact, there are times when I’m almost sure of it.’”

Amy repeated Sarah’s words in a childish singsong, but her face remained detached, impassive.  “I started to say something to the effect that I never dropped acid in my life, so the probability of group hallucination was slim, and she just talked right over the top of me.  ‘For instance, have you bothered to consider that these gullan should, by all laws of nature, be incapable of flight?’”

“Bumblebees,” Olivia stated.

Amy rolled her eyes.  “Honey, who are you talking to?  Little invertebrate insects on gossamer wings are hell and away from a humanoid species weighing an average of just under two hundred pounds, flapping effortlessly through the sky with a wingspan of approximately ten feet.  That is complete bullshit.  When you factor in that nobody’s ever seen these things despite the fact that they were living less than fifty miles from a good-sized town, and the fact that they are fully sexually compatible with humans, you have a mind-fuck of galactic proportions.”

Olivia opened her mouth to argue, to say what she had no idea, but to argue anyway because that…that just made too much scary sense.

“Don’t,” Amy said.  “Do not.  Seriously.”

“But just because we don’t know the physics of—”

“Even without factoring in the enormous density of gullan muscle and bone, you’d need wings more than thirty feet long even to glide effectively, let alone fly.  But wingspan is not the biggest issue, baby.  Let’s talk about how they just happened to grow wings and arms.  Or how, attached where they are, off the shoulderblades, their bodies ought to be dangling down like a kitten in its mother’s mouth.  To balance a body like that, they’d need a braincase full of friggin’ plutonium and a breastbone that stuck out about four feet.  I’m not even going to mention that whole bit where they can drive their claws into solid rock because that’s just too silly.  There is no way,” Amy said, very clearly and firmly, “to explain these people without using the word ‘magic’.  And magic, real magic, is just not something that everyone can deal with.  I mean, I tried.  I started blabbing some peppy Chicken Soup for the Captive Soul about how things would get better, and Sarah listened and came back with one question: Would this ever end?  Well, no.  Then it ain’t getting better, is it?  Um, no.”

“Go on then,” Olivia said.  “What’s the punchline?”

Amy dropped her eyes to the tips of her toes and frowned.  “The punchline is, I said I’d help her go, if she promised to have the baby first.”

Olivia said nothing.

“What was I supposed to tell her?  What right do I have to make her live?  Some people can deal with it, Olivia; for some people, it really doesn’t matter if the man they go to bed with has horns and wings and fangs and fur, but my God, for some people, it does!  So yeah, I said I’d help her if she had the baby, and she said she would and you have to admit that was a humanitarian gesture on her part because heaven knows all she had to do was go home and put a spear in Burgelbun and Vorgullum would have taken her out in a second.”

“All right,” Olivia said quietly.  “All right.”

Amy glared at the floor, scratching at her throat and baring her teeth.  “Listen,” she said at last.  “It might not be completely hopeless.  Who knows what’ll happen once the baby actually gets here?  Sarah may change her mind.”

“Do you think so?”

“No,” Amy answered without hesitation.  “I think she’s going to have the baby and come straight to me.”

“What are you going to do?” Olivia asked.

Amy looked angrily back at her. “I’m going to make it look like she got sick, just like Judy.  I’ve talked to Tina.  Liz brought plenty of stuff that would do the trick nicely.  It won’t hurt.  It’ll be just like going to sleep.  If she asks you, you can tell her that.”

Olivia looked away.

“So go talk to her if you want to,” Amy said, and started back for the birthing room.  “Tell her everything will be all right.  But just remember when you do that some people can take it.  And some people can’t.”

Olivia watched her go, wanting nothing but to leave the women’s tunnels entirely, even if meant going back to the Great Spirit and his endless erection.  At least he made it easy to forget about everything for just a little while.  But she was leader, wasn’t she?  And being a leader meant doing things you hated, meant doing things that made you hate yourself.  She’d lived with Vorgullum too long not to understand that.  So in the end, she went to the chamber in the clinic where Sarah B. was staying.

Sarah was on her side in the pit, while the two female gullan who were watching over her sat together on the far side of the cavern, stitching gullan robes and gossiping in low voices.  The subject matter, Olivia was irritated to hear, seemed to concern itself with which of the many suitors Olivia would take as her mate, now that Sudjummar had set her aside.

“Hodrub has said he means to court her.”

“Hodrub had best hurry up and do it, then.  Torumn is hunting his lone elk for trophy.”

“That didn’t impress her when Thugg presented her with the same.”

“That was when she had a mate.  Now she has none.  I think it may thaw her blood some to receive trophy again.”

“Of course you both would know by now,” Olivia interrupted, “that I have Doru to keep me free of suitors?”

Neither gulla remotely guilty to be caught gossiping.  Sarah B. rolled over with a tired smile, though, rubbing at her distended stomach.

“We’ve heard,” one of the gulla answered.  “But we’ve also seen that you are in no hurry to leave these tunnels and fly to his arms.  I think you’re a friend who seeks the appearance of a mate, and Doru is a strong male loyal to Vorgullum.”

“I’ll be sure to pass that on, the next time we’re coupling,” Olivia said.

The gulla snorted cheerfully.  “The last night you slept in his lair, you came out with no scent of seed on you at all.”

In English, Sarah B. said, “They’ve been talking about you for days.  It’s like a soap opera—at first the relentless banality irritates you, and then it kind of hypnotizes you.  Pretty soon, you can’t live without your morning dose of The Days of Our Olivia.”

At the sound of the human-speech, the two gullan exchanged glances—trying to share a What-did-I-tell-you? moment, but clearly a little hurt—and excused themselves from Sarah’s pit.  They did not leave the chamber, but did retreat to the wall to continue their gossip, pointedly not looking in their direction so that the humans would know they could speak freely.

Olivia sat down in the pit and began to rub Sarah B.’s shoulders.

After a moment or two, Sarah sighed and said, “I suppose you think I’m a bitch, huh?  Not talking to them.”

“We all have our coping mechanisms.”  Olivia followed that with a short, tactful silence, then said, “They’re worried about you, you know.”

Sarah B. shrugged, but the shoulders under Olivia’s hands stiffened.

“How have you been?” Olivia asked softly.  “Really.”

“Really?  It’s awful.  Amy said I was due three days ago, but nothing’s happened yet.  You brought back everything from that stupid hospital but a shot to get this damn thing out of me.  I just want to get it over with!”

“It’s going to be okay, Sarah.”

Sarah B. laughed shrilly.  “Okay?  How do you figure that?”  She was quiet for a little while, leaning back into the gentle massage.  “I could just deal with it if only I wasn’t pregnant.  I’m not happy, but I could be okay, you know?  God, isn’t that awful?  I can live with them, but I can’t…can’t deal with the…It’s like it isn’t even a baby, not a real baby.  It’s just something huge and ugly and awful bloating up my body and making me sick all the time.  I hate it!  I hate having to lie here and feel it swelling up like…like a cancer.”

“It’s almost over,” Olivia said.  Her hands moved gently, calmly.

“They used to kill witches in the Middle Ages by making them swallow rocks until their stomachs burst.  That’s what this feels like—like a big, hot rock that’s ripping me open.  Sometimes I think I can feel myself getting heavier.  I want to puke and puke until I sick everything out of me and run away skinny.”

“Oh, Sarah, it won’t be so bad.”  Olivia groped for something comforting to say about sixteen hours of labor.  “They’re little and fuzzy, and kind of cute.”

Sarah B. uttered a thin species of laughter that held very little humor, but Olivia was encouraged.

“Thurga says, if you want to, they’ll take the baby and do everything to raise it, if you’ll only nurse…?”

Sarah B. closed her eyes, her face a mask of anguish.  “Does that mean they’re going to make me touch it?”  She began to cry, quietly, helplessly.  “If I asked them nicely not to?  If I begged them?  Oh Olivia, make them find someone else, okay?  I don’t want some horrible little thing gnawing at me!  I don’t want to have to go home and let it—”

She reached up and clamped both hands over her leaking eyes, as if she could push back her tears with bodily force.  She dragged out several breaths until she was calm again, then cut her eyes across the room at the two gullan, both of whom were very deliberately not looking at them.  “Those poor furballs,” she said.  “They haven’t seen a healthy baby in a hundred years, and all I can do is cry about mine.  You must think I’m horrible.”

“You’re not horrible,” Olivia protested, but it was a weak protest and she knew it.  “Please, Sarah.  It’s really not that bad.”

“Of course it’s that bad!  Of course it is!  I don’t want to be here for the rest of my life!  Things would be so much simpler if that stupid Mojo Woman was still around.  If you hadn’t killed her, Vorgullum would have, along with all her followers, and me.  I was hoping for that.  I was counting on it!”  Sarah B. made a face and twisted into the bedding.  “Is it just me?  Am I the only one who remembers how awful all this really is?”

Olivia thought of Cheyenne.  “No.  But…Is it Burgelbun?  I mean, would you maybe consider—”

“Someone else?  Oh yes.  That’s so much better.  Instead of lying there while Burgelbun rubs on me with his hand, I can lie there with a complete stranger.”  Sarah B. laughed a little.  “No, it’s not Burgelbun.  And I don’t hate him, you know.  It’s just that…I came home once and found him with Carla, and I didn’t care.  After she left, he asked me if it was all right.  And it was.”  She sounded vaguely surprised by this.  “I mean, I didn’t feel like he was cheating on me or…or anything.  I asked him if I could think about it for a while.  I spent two nights trying to drum up some feeling for it.  I couldn’t.  It was just…all right.”

Sarah B. rolled into an upright position.  She took Olivia’s hand and searched her face.  “You were hurt when Vorgullum left, weren’t you?  Even though you kind of liked Sudjummar, you were hurt.  And I don’t think you love him, either, but at least you seem like you feel something.”

“I can’t live here for the rest of my life without feeling anything,” Olivia said honestly.

Sarah B. nodded, but sadly, as though it were bitter but not unexpected news.  “Neither can I,” she said.  “But everything I feel is awful.  I don’t want the baby, Olivia.  Make them give it to someone else, okay?  If I have to see it… or feel it…gumming at me…”

“All right,” Olivia said and looked away.  “All right, I’ll find someone.”

“And tell Amy when it’s out.”  Sarah B. lay back in the bed, both hands on her stomach and lightly pushing, although she did not seem to be aware of it.  “Tell Amy I’m ready.  She’ll know what that means.  I want to get it done before Burgelbun gets back so he doesn’t have to, you know, care.”

“All right.”  She stood numbly to go.

“I’m ready,” Sarah B. said again.  Her hands flexed over her stomach, pushing as her face twisted.  “Just as soon as it gets out of me.  I’m so ready.  Just…Just get out!”

2

Olivia could think of nothing to speed Sarah B.’s pregnancy along, but Liz gave her a delivery to think about the very next morning.  It went smoothly, all things considered, much more so than Olivia’s own, but she was very grateful to have several gullan mothers with her as the labor progressed.  It was right there at the end, as Olivia knelt between Liz’s thighs and cupped the emerging head of a very small baby, that one of them excused herself to answer a summons in the tunnel and returned to say, “Doru has come.  He says Wurlgunn has returned with Tina.”

Olivia started, took a moment to recover from the force of unexpected good news for a change, and then grinned.  “Oh thank God, send her in!”

“Oh yeah, sure.  But you say there’s nothing wrong, right?” Liz panted.

“Not that I can see.  Keep pushing.”

Amy, wiping Liz’s face, remarked, “That Tina.  Excellent sense of timing.  Is she going to be pissed, or what?”

“You can blame me,” Liz offered.  “I don’t think she’ll hit a lady with a baby.  Unnnhhh!”

“One more like that,” Olivia urged.  “We can quick get it born and hide it before she gets here.”

Amy found that very funny.  She was still laughing when Tina and Tobi came together into the birthing room.

“What the hell!” Tina said with a snort, already scrubbing her hands.  “I turn around for two seconds and you’re sneaking babies out of people.”

“I told them not to,” Liz gasped.

“Here it comes!  Bear down, bear down!”  Olivia let out a little cry as the baby slid into her hands, and in the very next instant, Tina was there to take him away.  Before the cord had been tied and cut, Tina had flipped the baby, swabbed its mouth, and started it wailing with a few expert pats to its back.

“It’s a boy, Liz,” Tina said, examining the baby with a critical eye.

There was a collective gust of relieved breath, followed by Tobi’s cheerful, “What’s his name?”

“He’s a little small…grip’s okay, pulse is strong…sure doesn’t seem to be much wrong with his lungs.”  She dried the damp pelt and cradled him in the crook of her arm, inspecting the tiny face.  “I want you both to stay here for a few days, just to be safe, but I’m thinking maybe he’s not quite as early as we thought.  Maybe only two or three weeks.”

“Can I hold him?”

“Give me a second with him first, okay?”

“What’s his name?” Tobi asked again, peering over Tina’s shoulder.

“I haven’t even met him yet,” Liz protested weakly.  “Oh, look at him.  He’s kinda cute.  Where’s Rumm?  She’ll want to see her nephew.”

Amy trotted off obediently and returned with Rumm just as Liz was finally taking her son into her arms.

“He looks just like you,” were Rumm’s first words, a remark that caused the humans present to exchange a group glance.  “What will you name him, since Gormuck is not here to do so?”

Liz stared at her infant son as though expecting him to answer for her.  At last, she looked up again with a lopsided smile.  “How about Levonal?”

“Fitting,” said Tina wryly, as Amy and Olivia laughed.  “Very fitting.”   She withdrew from the birthing bench to allow the gullan to crowd in a little closer, and crooked a finger at Olivia.  “A private word, o exalted one?”

They retreated to the women’s commons and sat down together on a convenient bench.  Tina immediately bent to unbind the thongs on her leather foot-wrappings.  Freed of them, she stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes with a sigh of relief before getting down to business.  “Vorgullum is all right, but all bullshit aside, he lost a lot of blood and got one hell of an infection.  No fault to Tordurk, who got the bullet out like a champ with nothing but his own claws and an awl to use as a probe, but I about killed the damn fools who were tending him afterwards.  One does not wash bullet wounds with bear fat and lye.  Thank God for you and Doru and all that stuff you brought back.  We probably saved the man’s life with a five dollar tube of Neosporin and a couple Tylenol.”  Tina rubbed her eyes and smiled faintly.  “Anyway, he’s sitting up now, walking around a little, which means the risk of pneumonia is a lot lower.  He’s young and in damned good health.  I think he’s going to come out of it good as new.”

“Thank you.”

“You bet.  How are you holding up?”

“I’m coping.”

Tina looked at her without speaking for a long time.  Quietly, she said, “Tobi tells me you’ve taken up with Doru.”

“Informally.”

“I don’t blame you for wanting out of the meat market, and it ain’t too likely anyone else will bug you with Doru hanging over you, but don’t hurt him, okay?  I’m kind of fond of the big guy.”

“So am I.”  Olivia half-shrugged and smiled helplessly.  “I mean, if I’ve got to hide behind someone, it might as well be Doru.  I like him.”

“Okay.  Well, now that we’ve got that out of the way…”  Tina took a deep breath and looked distinctly uncomfortable.  “I promised Tobi I wouldn’t tell Doru this, but she didn’t say I couldn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what?” Olivia asked.

“Tobi’s about three months along.”

Olivia stared at her, stunned.

“Don’t look at me like that.  I didn’t know until just now.  I mention it solely because the dumb bunny’s been going hunting.  Like I say, she made me promise, then she told me, and now I’m telling you.  I want her grounded.”

“I’ll mention it.”

“Casually.”

“Right.”

“But quickly.”

“Tonight.”

“Thanks.”  Tina slapped her thighs and stood up.  “So I guess I’m gonna be a mommy, too.”

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah, thanks.  I’m more nervous about it than I thought I would be.  God, I hope it takes after Doru.  Can you imagine a furry little Tobi hopping around?”  Tina shuddered, and Olivia didn’t think it was an affectation.  The healer raised one hand in mingled farewell and dismissal, and then headed back to Liz’s birthing room, where a growing group of females was collecting.

Olivia went out at once to announce the birth and greet Wurlgunn.  She found him in the commons with Beth and Anita, looking panicked as the women worked with obvious fortitude to comfort him.

“Not…like Tobi?” he was saying, his hands clasped comically before him, his eyes darting hopefully from one to the other.

“No!” Anita half-shouted, apparently for the umpteenth time.

“No, silly,” Beth sighed.  “Just to keep me company and keep her out of the women’s tunnels.”  She rolled her eyes, caught sight of Olivia, and waved her over.  In English, she said, “Would you please tell this walking shag carpet that I’m not gay?”

“What?”

Anita shook her head, rubbing at her temples.  “I’ve been living with her for about a month now.  Wurlgunn just found out.”

“What happened to Truunal?”

“Some big idiot picked a fight with him and Truunal lost.  I marched myself off to the tunnels, where I fully expected Truunal to come and get me.  Imagine my surprise when he didn’t.”  Anita permitted herself a small scowl, then quickly waved it off.  “Like I can blame him.  Truunal is about two hundred years old, and frankly, he made the one attempt to get some sugar going and then gave up.  I mean, two hundred years old!”

“They can’t all be Kurlun, I guess.  But he didn’t come and get you?”

“Not with six or seven younger males prowling around just waiting for him to do exactly that.  And I’d have been horrified if I’d had to watch him get the snot knocked out of him twice…two hundred years old!  I gave those ladies my best shot but I just can’t work that hard!  So I asked Beth if I could move in with her until Murk came back.”

“You mean Beth’s still living in Wurlgunn’s cave?  On her own?”  Anita’s tale notwithstanding, Olivia found the idea of dainty little Beth flying in the face of gullan convention even more impressive.

“I never left it,” Beth admitted, blushing.  “Wurlgunn kind of forgot to line up a fella for me, and I sure as heck didn’t remind him.  I tried to keep a low profile for a while, but…”

“She’s young enough to scare most of them off anyway,” Anita added.  “But Ullnath called her on it after Wurlgunn left the second time.  She had a fantastic defense.  She burst into tears, dropped to her knees, and begged him not to take her from her Wurlgunn.  Ullnath was so horrified, he threw food at her just to shut her up and went sprinting back down the tunnel.  I was impressed and I asked if I could move in with her.  And how will our returned hero deal with this news?  Let’s watch.”

Wurlgunn had withstood the English dialogue manfully.  Now, only half-convinced of Beth’s sexual orientation, but clearly optimistic, he slipped his arm around his mate’s shoulders and said, “I suppose if Olivia doesn’t mind, I don’t mind.  Call me before the tribe.”

Olivia ascended the center stone, received silence, and began by announcing the birth of Levonal, son of Gormuck and Liz.  After assuring the gullan that Levonal was indeed early, but healthy and under Tina’s care, she promised to present him as soon as the tribe’s healer allowed.  After a lengthy pause for cheers, she called for Wurlgunn.

He jumped for the rock, lost his footing, toppled over and knocked himself briefly unconscious.  There followed a groan from Beth and a series of mutterings and sighs from the gathering in general.  Beth eased herself down to her knees with a long-suffering expression, and began to pat his face until he opened his eyes.

“Did I say it yet?” he asked thickly.

“No, sweetie.”

He rocked onto his side, crawled onto his kneels, and then ascended the rock carefully.  “This is Anita,” he said, pointing.  “I take her as my mate until Murk’s return.”  He nodded once and began to climb carefully down.

A number of males exchanged glances before Ullnath stepped forward and laid his hand on Wurlgunn’s wing.  “Have you forgotten something?”

Wurlgunn glanced at the hand restraining him.  “No.”

Ullnath released his hold and stepped back, eyeing first Anita, and then Beth.  He licked his mouth, mostly, thought Olivia, as an excuse to bare his teeth.  “It is customary to put aside the one before taking the other.”

Wurlgunn reached out and Beth came in under his arm at once.  “I have no intention of putting my Beth aside.”

“But—”  Somewhat derailed, Ullnath backed up before pursuing the issue.  “But you will take two when the rest of us have none?”  He looked around for support from the elders and encountered Damark, grinning hugely.

“That’s my son,” Damark growled, and fanned his wings flirtatiously at Amy, who snickered.

Ullnath rolled his eyes and made the mistake of sending his next appeal to Olivia.

“I was under the impression the female always has the right to choose,” she said evenly.

Ullnath growled, looked despairingly at Doru in mute supplication.

Doru, leaning against the near wall, shrugged one massive shoulder, an idle gesture belied by the keen gleam of his eyes.  “I don’t see the problem here.  Wurlgunn can take two mates or twenty for all I care, as long as he can feed them.  When was the last time I saw meat on your spear?”

Wurlgunn tried to snap his wings out, with only partial success as he cracked his left one into the wall.

“Down, tiger,” Beth sighed.

“Come with me, Anita,” Wurlgunn huffed, rubbing his wing.  “I’ll carry your things.”

“It’s okay,” Beth was saying as they left.  “Not even Wurlgunn can break a blanket.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” Bodual muttered, coming to stand behind Olivia.  “I’d trust Wurlgunn to find a way to fall off the floor.”

“Poor Anita,” Olivia agreed.  “She’s going to regret this the very first time he steps on her head while getting out of the pit.”  She allowed one hand to drift back and through the soft pelt over his lean chest while she spoke.

Bodual leaned into the touch, fanning his wings slightly.  “And speaking of pits,” he began.

“Hush.”  Olivia gave Bodual’s chest fur a slight tug, then removed her hand to her lap and frowned.  One of the males was moving quietly towards her.  When he saw her watching, he stopped, considered her, and then moved away.

“Want me to stomp on him?” Bodual asked, flexing his talons.

“Only if you’re trying to make her laugh,” Doru interjected, easing into place at Olivia’s side.  “Want me to stomp on him?”

“Not right away,” Olivia said after a moment’s thought.  “We humans have a saying—Give him enough fishing line and he’ll hook himself.  Or words to that effect.”

“Nice saying,” Doru commented.  “I take your meaning exactly.”  He faded back and vanished into the crowd, an impressive feat for one so big.

“What should I do?” Bodual asked eagerly.

“Get back and look unattached.  Doru’s going to handle this one.”  Olivia leaned back on the bench and rubbed at her eyes as if tired.  She was vaguely aware of Bodual’s retreat, but after that there was such a long period of quiet that she thought her would-be admirer had sensed what was coming and abandoned her.  Eventually, however, she realized that someone was crouched in front of her, waiting.

Warily, she looked up just enough to meet Hodrub’s eyes.  “What do you want?” she asked, just as if she didn’t know.

He straightened, reached into his belt pouch and drew out what her mind first tried to see as a piece of bark, then as a strip of dried meat.  At last, she recognized the writing on the face of it and realized she was staring at a Hershey’s chocolate bar.  Sounding faintly smug, Hodrub said, “Take this, Olivia, and come with me.”

Sarah J.’s voice sounded at once—“Do it!”—and was hushed from several sides.  She looked around, cross.  “I’d do it!”

Olivia forced her eyes off the offering and made herself glare at Hodrub.  Behind him, she could see a huge, dark shape striding silently and evenly forward.  “No thanks,” she said.

Hodrub’s mouth widened in a smile.  “I am paying you court,” he explained patiently.  “Take this—” He offered the chocolate with greater confidence.  “And come with me.”

One massive hand closed around Hodrub’s entire shoulder and spun him around.  Very calmly, almost nonchalantly, Doru took Hodrub by the throat and lifted him a good two feet off the floor.  “And where,” he inquired, “are you thinking to take my mate?”

Hodrub stared at him, kicking a little, then rolled one eye back at Olivia.

She drummed her nails on her knee and looked expectant.

“…sorry,” wheezed Hodrub.  “…my mistake…”

“Damn right it is,” Doru said conversationally.  “And it’s the sort of mistake that gets a gulla killed.  Good thing I’m not a jealous man.”  He thumped Hodrub back on his feet, then turned him around and gave him a shove towards the far end of the room.  As an afterthought, he reached down, picked up the fallen chocolate bar, whistled for Hodrub’s attention, and tossed it at him.

Hodrub caught his gift, frowned thoughtfully, and then cast a hopeful eye back at Sarah J.  He cleared his throat.

Sarah J. was on her feet in an instant to give Hodrub a winning smile.  “That a Hershey bar in your belt pouch, or are you just happy to see me?”

Doru took a seat beside Olivia as Hodrub began his opening argument.  He was still making the salient points as Sarah led him from the cave, gnawing on her chocolate as she went.  “What a cute couple,” he remarked.

“Thanks, Doru.”

“Well, I understand the experience with Sudjummar has probably soured you on the subject of mates…and this isn’t the way you’d want such a thing announced anyway.”

She dropped her hand over his and squeezed lightly.  “I said, thanks.  That means you get to sit quietly and look protective.”

Doru swelled his chest, fanned his wings, lowered his horns, and growled with mock menace.  Several males slid back from both of them.  Doru chuckled as he watched them retreat, then put an arm around her.  “If you like those little brown things, I can bring you some,” he said.  “What are they for?”

“For fun.”

“Hm.”  He laughed.  “Truth, Olivia, I’ve been working so hard at feeding this crowd, I can hardly imagine eating anything just for fun.”

“You’ve never wanted to sink your tooth into something sweet just for the taste of it?”

“Not really.  I mean, I like those meat-stick things, but they’re more salt—Hang on, that was a…a come-on, wasn’t it?”

“You idiot,” Bodual said disgustedly, coming up beside him.  “Of course it was.”

Doru shot Bodual an affronted glare before returning his attention to the human snuggled against him.  “Well, I can still…come back, can’t I?”

“‘Fraid not.”  She closed her eyes and leaned into his chest.  He wasn’t Vorgullum, he didn’t lean back, but he was warm and safe and welcome.  “We humans have another saying: Opportunity taps only once.”

“Well, damn it.”  He sounded mildly, but genuinely, aggrieved.

“But we’re done here, right?” Bodual looked from one to the other of them and then out at the few gathered gullan remaining in the commons.  “Nobody’s stomping anyone tonight?”

“No, but speaking of stomping on people.”  Olivia sighed and got to her feet so she could look him in the eye.  “Doru, a brief word?”

“What’s the word?” he asked amiably.

“Pit?” suggested Bodual.  “Bedding?  Bench?”

“Tobi.”

“Tobi?”  Doru scanned the commons, failed to find his former mate assembled, and frowned.  “There must be another word involved.  What is it?”

“Hm,” said Bodual.  “Bam?  Hunt?  Um…La Vida Loca?”

“Baby,” stated Olivia.

Doru’s face underwent a gradual darkening.  “Impossible.  I haven’t coupled with her for more than three moons.”

“What a coincidence,” Olivia said.

He was on his feet in an instant, hackles raised and wings fully spread—the same demon that had charged so impressively through the Midvalley Midwifery building, only now he was facing off against her.  “She is three moons gone with my child?” Doru demanded at a roar.  “She was hunting moose just yester—”  He broke off, lowered his voice to a growl and smacked his rock-hard fist into the flat of his palm.  “I’m going to chain her to the damn wall.”

“Relax.  Tina just got back, so she’s in for the night at least.”

Doru’s expression became even blacker.  “She knew?  Tina knew?  And she said nothing to me?”

“She only found out today and Tobi made her promise not to tell you.”

He took a moment to think about that.

“Very well,” he said, growling between clenched jaws.  “But if Tobi thinks she’s leaving this mountain tomorrow, I have a surprise for her.”

She had never seen him really angry, and she had a feeling she wasn’t seeing it now, either, but this was as angry as she ever wanted to see him get.  A defusing of the situation seemed appropriate.  She stood up and slipped against his chest suggestively.  “Gee, Doru,” she purred, slipping her hand unobtrusively against his loins.  “Is there a surprise in there for me?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, his jaws loosening in a thin smile.  “Woman,” he said, “I am working up a good rage, here.  Go bother Bodual.”

“Yes,” Bodual agreed.  “Come bother me.”

Olivia turned and leaned back against Doru’s body, rolling her hips in a smooth, graceful dance, exploring the hardening contours of his figure.  “Bodual can watch,” she suggested.

“That’s good, too.”  Bodual fanned his wings out slightly and folded his arms, giving every impression of being prepared to stand there all night.

Doru caught the low thrumm before it could fully escape his throat and put one hand on Olivia’s shoulder, no doubt to propel her firmly away.  She caught him by the wrist, turned her head and sucked lightly at the tip of his finger.  Doru withstood this treatment for a few seconds more, then shook out his horns violently.  “Oh what the hell,” he said cheerfully and tossed Olivia over one broad shoulder.  “But I warn you, woman, my passions are not so easily appeased as my wrath.”

3

Doru lifted his head sleepily off the pillow he’d made of his left arm and said, “Whoever has their cold feet on my back, please roll over.”

Olivia woke up as much as necessary to ascertain that he wasn’t talking to her, poked Bodual in the side, and crawled just far enough to reach the can of flat cola she’d left near the pit a few hours earlier.  She took a few sips, passed it around, and tossed the empty can at the coals.

Bodual tucked his wings in and flopped heavily on his back.  He was becoming quite adept at that.  Running his claws lazily over the flat slab of his stomach, he said, “Would either of you mind if I moved in with you?”

“Nope, feel free,” Olivia yawned, sliding back between them.

“By all means,” Doru agreed, mumbling into his arm again.  “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Olivia is shortly due for her season, would it?”

“A happy coincidence.”  Bodual put his arms around her waist and snuggled against her shoulder.  “I was going to ask anyway.  It’s just that I’ve been meaning to ask and I keep getting distracted.”

“You both ought to know that I plan on spending my season in the women’s tunnels.”

Doru and Bodual both grunted.  “I had begun to wonder,” Doru said.  “Gullan females are nearly as crazed as the males when they are in season, but you humans seem scarcely aware of it.  I don’t suppose you get much out of it.”

“Not entirely true,” she countered.  “I get brutalized.  But go ahead, Bodual.  The more, the merrier.  Wait, Doru.  Shall we put him up on the rock and ask if there’s another female who wants him?”

Doru snorted.  “Why subject him to humiliating silence?”

“Hey!”

“Olivia, what time is it?”

She checked her watch.  “Eight thirty.”

“Day or night?”

“No idea.”

“Useless machine,” Doru grumbled, and roused himself with a little effort.  “I suppose I should poke my head out long to be sure no one’s gone and died while we were madly mating.  Does anyone want anything?”

“Food,” Bodual said.

“Food,” Olivia agreed.

“Right,” Doru muttered, hitching his loincloth on and buckling it down.  “Food, fuel, more water, anything else?”  When nothing was forthcoming, he withdrew and left them alone.

Olivia had started to drowse off again when Bodual nipped at her shoulder and said, “Did you mean it when you said I could stay?”

“I wouldn’t have said so if I didn’t.”  She woke up a little and rolled over to face him.  “Is there a precedent for this?  Three together, I mean.”

“Sure.  Look at Wurlgunn.”

“Wurlgunn isn’t coupling with Anita.”

“You’re probably right, but as long as she lives with him, she might as well be.”  He yawned, revealing cat-like teeth for an instant before his jaw snapped shut.  “Two males with a single female is less common, but we have stories, so it must have happened once.  And just think,” he grinned, “I’ll be the envy of the whole tribe.”

“Doubtless.”  She snuggled into his side.  “And I’ll be the envy of every female, as if I weren’t already.”

“You know,” he said, “every male wants to be with you in the pit, and that part is nice, but I’m glad that we’re friends.  I could lie beside you all night, just to listen as you talk.”

“You have lots of friends, Bodual.”

“Well, I have Doru anyway.  But I’d rather spend the day cuddling with you than do just about anything else with him.”  He thought about it.  “Not that there’s anything wrong with the way Doru cuddles.”  He thought about it some more.  “Actually, Doru cuddles pretty damn well.”

“For an old guy,” Olivia said, and snorted laughter against the bedding.

“I’ve known Doru for years and years,” Bodual continued contemplatively.  “And I never knew how well the man could cuddle.  Of course, that’s not really the sort of thing a man brings up, even to his friends.  ‘By the way, Bodual, I just thought you’d like to know that I’m a pretty fine cuddler.’  That would just be awkward.”

Bodual broke off abruptly, flipping onto his hip and sitting up.  A second later, Doru came into the room, holding a bundle of food in one hand, a jug of water in the other, a stack of fuel logs riding high on one forearm, and an especially grim look on his face.

“We need to stop sneaking off like this,” he stated.

“What happened?” Olivia asked quietly.

“Some idiot attempted to challenge Damark for Amy.  Damark refused to fight, Amy refused to yield, and Horumn dragged her off kicking and screaming to the women’s tunnels.  When Damark went to fetch her out, the same idiot challenged him again.  Three times this happens in the course of two hours, and at the end of it, there was blood.”

“Bound to happen to someone,” Bodual remarked.

“Yeah, well, it happened to Damark, who now has a very unpleasant scar across the full length of his chest.  And believe it or not, he won.  His opponent was knocked unconscious for more than three hours.  I understand it took three females to hold Amy back during the challenge…and I can’t believe there is a male in this mountain stag-headed enough to believe that Amy screaming violent murder was a human love call.

“Meanwhile,” he continued, passing out balls of rice, “Sutung marched into the commons and ordered Hodrub to give him Sarahjay.”

“Carla’s Sutung?” Olivia asked, surprised.

“Not anymore, if you’ll recall.  According to Crugunn—and if there’s a lick of gossip to be had, it’s had by Crugunn first—Sutung and Sarahjay have been meeting in secret since the moon was last full.  I don’t know why he thinks that gives him some proprietary claim when she’s been mateless since Sung left with Vorgullum, but he heard about the chocolate and entirely lost his temper.  Hodrub released her at once, and Sarahjay hauled off and hit him.”

“Sutung?” Olivia remembered with real unease the frustrated way he had clawed gouges in the wall outside the forge.

“No, Hodrub.  For passing her off without a fight.”  Doru took a long drink of water, poured a little over the top of his head and shook it off again.  “Then she hit Sutung.”

“Oh jeez.”

“And Sutung hit back.”

“Oh Jesus!”

“They fought their way back and forth across the commons for a while, but for whatever reason, when it ended, she was following him back to his lair.”

“Are you serious?”

Doru shrugged.  “And she’s still there, so who knows?  Bad as that was, it couldn’t be any worse than what Carla was doing to him.  Oh, and Ummnan tried to challenge Mudmar for Ellen and got his rib cracked for his trouble.”

“Oh ouch,” Olivia said.  “Is he all right?”

“Tina says so, but this came very quick after the business with Damark and I get the feeling she’s thoroughly disgusted with all of us.  Let’s see, what else…Augurr asked if he could fly tonight’s hunt under me.”

Bodual snorted.

“And I said yes,” Doru finished, giving Bodual a black stare.  “I’ve lost Vorung to this foolishness and only just got Wurlgunn and Huuk back.  As far as I’m concerned, if he can hold it point-end up, he can fly with me.  What else?  Tina says Gormuck’s baby is doing well.  Cheyenne and Sarabee both still aren’t speaking to anyone, and Logarr killed himself.”

Olivia choked on a mouthful of water.  “What?”

“Did he really?” Bodual said without surprise.  “How was it done?”

“Drowned himself.  No one’s seen him for a few days, but then, he’s always kept to himself.”  Doru shrugged again, now looking uncomfortable.  “Someone noticed a smell.  They found him face-down in a piss-canal.”

Olivia’s last bite was like ash in her throat.  She swallowed hard, looked at the skin of water in her hands, and said nothing.  I am a tool, Logarr had said.  And someone had just discarded him.

“Ugly way to die,” Bodual commented, helping himself to an apple.

“I’d feel for him more if I knew him better, but he worked too hard at living apart from us.”  Doru seated himself in the pit and offered Olivia a loaf of bread.  “Sudjummar asked after you.  He wanted me to tell you that Somurg looks and sounds strong and is still suckling.  He wishes you well.”

Olivia thought of her son, then swallowed her sorrow with her food.

“Anything else?” Bodual asked.

“Well, let me think.  A few of the males are complaining about Wurlgunn and Beth and Anita, but Anita’s made a point out of praising his talent in the pit, despite the fact that there’s not a sniff of him on her at any given time, and Wurlgunn is equally adamant about bringing in food enough for ten mates, so there’s been no trouble.”

“More babies?” Bodual pressed, sipping from the water jug.

“Not yet, but any day with Sarabee.”  Doru ran his eyes over the room, head cocked.  “I don’t see any of your things here, Bodual.  You don’t expect us to move into your lair, do you?”

“No, but I do expect you to carry my belongings,” Bodual replied.  “I shall stay here and keep your lovely mate occupied.”  He fanned his wings covertly, the gullan equivalent of wiggling eyebrows and a wink.

“She’s spent enough time indulging your little whims,” Doru returned, stressing the word ‘little’.  “Move your own possessions.  Olivia, how would you like to learn how to hunt?”

She blinked, looking up from her half-consumed meal.  “Really?”

“I need another hunter, and I don’t see any reason why you can’t.  You’ve certain athletic qualities.”  This time, he fanned his wings.  “You’ll want your own spear eventually, but you can use mine for tonight.”

“You have natural talent with a man’s spear,” Bodual added solemnly.

4

“You’re gripping it too tight,” Doru said.

“It won’t stay up.”

“Trust me, Olivia, it will.  Relax your hand.”

Olivia reluctantly obeyed, and the heavy spear immediately overbalanced and pointed to the ground.  “Dammit,” she snarled.

“Well, it is a bit long for you.”

“It’s too heavy.”

“Well, let’s pass by throwing technique.  Anyone can use a spear to stab with.”  Doru hopped onto the top of a stump and then into the air, his wings a blur of black motion.  He soared out of sight.

Olivia dropped to a sitting position, grumbling under her breath and beating the spear against the ground.  She had been working with Doru for five hours.  The spear was a lot more complicated than it looked and even Doru’s patience was obviously being tested by now.

She had to admit, however, it was a beautiful night for it.  The moon was full, the skies were clear, and the air smelled fresh and sweet.  Pine needles carpeted the earth, making it slippery beneath her leather-clad feet, but a welcome change from solid stone.

As she nursed these thoughts, the beating of wings announced Doru’s return, and he skidded to a clumsy stop behind her.  She scrambled to her feet, using the spear as a cane, as he set what she initially thought was a corpse up against a tree.  After a moment, she realized it was a dummy, made of human clothes and stuffed with dry leaves.

“Where did you get that?” she wondered.

“Sarahjay made it to practice her throws, but I don’t think she’ll mind if we use it.”  He finished securing the dummy and motioned for her to pay attention.  “Now, the spear is a heavy tool.  When stabbing, hold it at the center of its weight and thrust up.  The weight of a falling body will always push it down, so thrust upwards and let it impale itself.  Whenever possible, let the prey do the work.”

He stepped behind her and put his hands over hers, adjusting her grip until she had it right.  “Up,” he said, demonstrating.  The spear slashed in a lazy arc, piercing the dummy at the belly and driving up to the throat.  “Look behind you.  Not at me, at the haft of the spear.  See how near it is to the ground?”

She nodded.

“When you face a large animal, like a deer or a bear, it’s best to catch it head-on.  When you thrust up, brace the haft against the ground and get out of the way.  Even if it doesn’t impale itself fully, it usually tears itself up trying to knock the spear out.”

“What does it do against the deadly gulla-eating mountain hare?” she teased.

“Just makes them mad,” he deadpanned.  “The only way to be sure with the mountain hare is to have a trusted friend trip you so you can fall on it.”  He pulled the spear from the dummy’s body and backed away from her.  “Now, you do it.  Pretend that’s a bear.”

She drove the spear into the dummy, thrusting up and bracing the haft on the ground.  “I was taught to pretend I was dead if I ever met a bear.”

“Really.  I was taught to get my scrawny ass in the air.  I suppose that’s why bears regularly eat humans and gullan get away.  Bend your knees, Olivia.  Keep your feet apart.  Posture is important.”

“I can’t imagine you with a scrawny anything,” she said, amending her stance and attacking the dummy again.

“You never knew me when I was a boy.  I could fit six boy-Dorus into this body.  Your grip is too tight, Olivia.  Go easy on that spear.  When Bodual and I were fledging, he was the big one.”

“What happened between then and now?”

“Manhood.”

“Is that all?”

“Blood may have something to do with it.  My father was huge.  Just enormous.  He tried so hard to hide his disappointment of me.  When we stood together, it was like pairing a weasel with a mastodon.  Olivia, can you try very hard and keep your knees bent?”

“I am bending them.”

“Lean forward a little.  Pretend it’s a bear, and you’re about to spring away.  What was I saying?” he added, and then said, “Oh!  My father.  Yes.  So when I was just sixteen, he made me come hunting with him.  It was the first time I had ever held a spear before in my life.”

“Was it terrible?” she asked, ready to be sympathetic.

“I was a god,” he replied.  “That’s good, Olivia, that’s fine.  Give me another one, just like that.”

She demonstrated two perfect attacks, then said, “Was he proud of you?”

“I think he was too shocked to be proud,” Doru said, and laughed.  “On my first day, I felled nearly every animal taken.  I speared the fish from the lake.  I dropped a running buck from the air a good ten body-lengths away.  I tell you, it was like breathing for me.  Knees, Olivia.”

She bent them, leaning forward and thrusting her spear viciously up and into the dummy, earning a word of praise from her picky instructor.

“So over the years, I became the chief hunter.  I built up this body without even realizing it.  One day, standing up to my knees in cold water, waiting for fish, I discovered my reflection and could scarcely believe it.  I was built like a mastodon.  I was unreasonably thrilled by the thought.”

“Unreasonably?”

“My father had been dead for two years by then.  But it mattered to me.  It mattered that I—knees, Olivia—that I had the body I’d always wanted and not the disappointment I’d always had.  As I recall, I took myself straight home to try it out.”

Olivia laughed, attacking the dummy.

“Let’s see,” mused Doru.  “I had my first taste of thumperjuice, my first coupling partner, my first early ejaculation, my first slap in the face, and my first hangover.  All in all, an eventful evening.”  He watched her strike at the dummy.  “What about you?”

“Me?”  She stopped her maneuvers.  “What about me?”

“When did you become a woman?”

“Oh gosh.”  She thought about it.  “I guess when I was in college.  I never had a dorm, but in my second year, I moved out of my parents’ place and into my own place.  God, that place made High Hill look like paradise.”  She glanced at him, then gave her head a self-deprecating shake.  “You’re not getting any of this, are you?”

“I think I get the taste of it.  Go on.  You were alone for the first time.”

“We humans like that, you know.  I mean, we like friends and we like family, but we also like knowing that we can survive by ourselves without needing to be rescued.  So I was extremely proud of myself for surviving.  I felt like I was in control.  I felt confident and strong, like I could do anything.” She pushed the memory to arm’s length and studied it, smiling.  “So I went to a gathering where the thumperjuice flowed freely, and since I was so in control and could have any man I wanted, I threw myself into the arms of a stranger.  ‘Make me a woman,’ I said.”

He kept a tactful silence.

“No,” she said, as if he had spoken.  “It was not pleasant.  It was quick, it was messy, it hurt, and he threw up on me afterwards.”

“Oh, Olivia.”

“I was drunk enough that I didn’t take it too personally,” she admitted.  “But it did set me back on the idea that I was a survivor.  I don’t think I ever thought of myself as being quite that strong or capable again.”  She thought about it, stabbing the dummy, and then laughed.  “Until I got here.  Being taken like that has a funny way of refining a person’s character.  None of us are who we used to be.”

Doru continued to be quiet for several long minutes.  Finally, “Olivia, do you know what Vorgullum is doing at Hollow Mountain?”

“Yes,” she replied calmly.

“How do you feel about it?”

She drove the spear through the dummy and into the tree.  “Angry,” she said, and turned to face him.  “But resigned.  Everyone seems to feel that your lives are somehow more important than human lives.  I don’t pretend to like that, but I do understand that your race is dying.  You need us, or think you do, and I suppose you might even be right.  But I don’t like it, I don’t approve, and I won’t lie and say I do.  You can’t possibly know how it feels to have your life stolen in such a terrible way.”

“I admit this,” Doru said evenly.  His eyes were full of pain, but his voice was steady.  “But Olivia, you can’t know how it feels to hold a living child in your hands and see it die of the deformities you have helped to sire in it.  My son.  Two daughters.”  He broke off and looked away until his eyes were dry.

“The old leader tried to breed us, not in a natural way, but as…as humans do with their animals.  He put the healthy ones in pairs and told us to couple.  And we did,” he said after a short pause.  He looked away, his hand flexing on the haft of his spear.  “I didn’t know the females, any of them.  One of them died in the birthing chair.  We were told it was preferable to finding another tribe or taking human mates.  I remember agreeing with him.  But it didn’t work.  Nothing worked, so then what?  Our elders were dying and there were no young.  And then came Vorgullum and yes, he ordered us to do something terrible, but it is the only thing that has worked.

“I’ve held three infants, Olivia.  My blood was in their misshapen bodies.  I won’t tell you it’s worse than the death of your freedom, but believe me when I say it was the worst that I could feel.  I took my Tobi away from her family, friends, and tribe.  I robbed her of freedom, of choice, of her native tongue.  I felt her sobbing in my arms when I brought her to my pit and I hated myself for doing it, but I would do it again a thousand times.  None of that pain is equal to watching my child take only one breath.”

They looked at each other.  After a moment, Doru came forward and took the spear out of the tree.  He stood with his back to her and his wings fanned against attack.

Wordlessly, she laid her hand over his arm.

He said, “I know I don’t have to tell you how it feels to have your mate leave you.  I liked Tobi.  I still do.  I had no idea she was in love with Tina until she asked me to release her.  I would have taken them both for my mates if I thought for a second they’d agree.  Now she will have my child, a fine healthy child, and I will not be permitted to raise it for my own.”

“I’m sure she’ll—”

“Oh, she’ll let me see it.  She’s no Beast, to say I’ll never touch it, never hold it.  But she wants the rearing of it herself and she’ll have it.  That’s her right.  My Tobi,” he murmured.  “I confess, I’m curious to see which of us it will most resemble.  She’s so quick and scrawny, like a little snake.  She always made me feel oversized and awkward.  And she had a snake’s fangs when she was frightened or angry.”  He shook his horns to dissolve the memory.  “A useless point to ponder since she doesn’t want me at all.”

“Her loss,” Olivia said, running one hand through the thick pelt of his shoulders.

Doru hopped back onto the stump, the spear in one hand, and reached down to pull her up beside him.  He caught her by the waist and let her hold him around the neck.  “Maybe that’s why I care for you so much,” he mused, flexing his claws in the wood.  “I’ve never known a woman so enthusiastic about being with me.”

He bent his knees and threw out his wings.

“Well, me and Chugg,” she said.

He uttered a croaking cough, aborting the flight and nearly falling off the stump.  “Chugg,” he shuddered.  He glared at her, an impressive sight this close to him, and leapt into the air.

She waited until they had gained enough altitude that he couldn’t drop her and said, “What about Karen?”

“Never coupled with her,” he replied.  “Despite the fact that she once crawled into the bath with me and applied her lean body to mine in the most astonishing manner.”

“Well, that sounds fairly enthusiastic.  Why didn’t you?”

“She was Bodual’s mate.”

She laughed at him.  “He couples with yours!”

“Only when I’m there!”  He grinned at her quickly, then returned his attention to the mountain up ahead.  “Besides, that’s different.  She was throwing herself at every male in the tribe. I think the only reason she came after me so fiercely was because I was Bodual’s friend, because she thought that would hurt him the most. But she was doing more than simply sneaking around in dark places behind her mate’s back.  She pressed that bare body against mine with complete abandon, but she never asked my name.  I couldn’t get out of the bath fast enough.”

“Perhaps she didn’t find an exchange of names to be very important.  How long was it before you told a human yours?”

“That was different.”  He thought about it for a moment.  “Three moons, I think.  And only after Vorgullum admitted you knew his.  We’d have done it sooner, but that Mojo Woman’s madness put a lot of us off.  Imagine trying to trap a man’s soul in a candle just to frighten him.  And humans are already so terrifying.”

Olivia regarded him with some amusement.  “Sure we are.  The little bald defenseless ones.”

“Defenseless, hell.  Every time I come to your pit, I think I’ll never rise from it.  I’m not a superstitious man, but sometimes I feel as though you’re drawing out a part of my soul.  Sometimes I think you could kill me if you wished to, and with damned little effort.  If I didn’t trust you so much, I’d never dare to sleep beside you.”  He considered his words.  “Of course, I have no idea if I could resist you, if you really meant to have me.”

Olivia could think of nothing to say so she mock-growled and bit at him in a parody of mating madness.  Doru laughed and growled back.

Olivia said, “You make me feel sorry for Karen, though.  She’s not like Carla.  She’s just looking for someone she can live with.”

“She may not hate herself, but she doesn’t like herself much either,” he replied.  “And you’re right, she’s not quite as bad as Carla, but it’s a damn near thing.”

“Sampling the goods, eh?”

He barked out a laugh and landed close to the women’s entry shaft.  At this hour, the mountainside was empty, but she could see patches of worked soil that proved someone was at least thinking of recreating Hollow Mountain’s garden.  Doru took a moment to scan for trespassing males (or perhaps just for game; he was never really turned off in that regard), before returning his attention to her.  “What do you want, Olivia?  A list of the women I’ve coupled with?  You’ll be disappointed.”

“You could never disappoint me, o mighty spear-carrier.”

He eyed her with a faint smile and an expression of reluctant acquiescence.  “Well, let’s see, as humans go, there’s been only Tobi and only you, Carla and Karen’s efforts notwithstanding.  As for gullan, there were the females I was bred to, but I’d rather not count them at all.”  Doru tapped his claws against his spear haft, staring pensively at the moon.  “Furluu, of course, on occasion.  Chugg, the once.  Ugh.  My first, who suffered me once and never spoke to me again, understandably enough.  And there was one female, now dead, who met with me in secret for several years before she caught the sour cough.  I buried her.  I think that’s it…no, there was one time with Golgun.  She beat me in a riddling contest.  Pity, that.  I stood to win a whole box of thumperjuice.”

He glanced at her, then smacked the haft of his spear against the stone.  “Well, out with it, woman.  Tell me yours.”

She blinked, then took a fraction of an instant to decide on how much to tell him.  “After my first, there was another man and we were together almost a year, but we lost touch after he left college.  That’s it for me and humans, but there were some near misses.  Vorgullum, of course.  And…Kodjunn.”

“The sigruum?”  Doru looked impressed.

“Sudjummar, which you know.  Logarr, after the challenge.  And you and Bodual.”  She debated briefly, not wanting to sound either bragging or blasé.  “And the Great Spirit.”

“So, let me see,” he said, counting them off on his hand.  “You’ve lain with the leader, the sigruum, the metal-maker, the chief hunter, the chief hunter’s best friend, a blood challenger, and a god.  That’s impressive as hell, Olivia.”

“Any recommendations for my next conquest?” she inquired wryly.

Doru leaned on the spear and considered it.  “No,” he said at last.  “You’ve already won the biggest, strongest, most important male of all—me.”

“Well, if you want to keep me,” Olivia said, “you had better make yourself worth my attention.  A woman doesn’t live on a man’s spear alone.”

“But it sure passes the time,” he added, tossing his to the ground and seizing her by the waist.  The tenderness of his kiss belied the sheer strength in his hands, but then he released her and took up his spear again.  “Training is over,” he said apologetically.  “I need to be doing something to put meat in our stores.  You can climb down by yourself, can’t you?”

“Sure.  Bring me back a bear,” she teased, slipping on her climbing claws.  “I want to wear the teeth.”

He eyed her intently for an instant, then flew off.

5

Shortly after dawn, Wurlgunn strolled into the common cave with a ferocious gulla-eating mountain hare in one hand and pleasantly said, “You aren’t going to believe this.”

There were several dozen tribesmen gathered already, most of them females setting optimistically about getting the hearth-fires ready for a victorious feast.  They all looked up expectantly as two other hunters arrived, lugging an enormous bundle of meat between them.

“Damark!” Amy cried, leaping up.  “Is that an elk?”

One of the litter-bearers shook his head.  “It’s a bear,” he panted.

Olivia’s jaw dropped.  She was not alone.  For a moment, there was absolute silence, and then a tremendous communal howl of pleasure rang out from the throats of the gullan.

“Bear fat broth!” Thurga bayed, and jumped to help the hunters with their burden.

Doru appeared in the doorway, his chest swelled with pride.  He beamed at Olivia, spear in one hand, belt-pouch in the other.  “My people,” he said grandly.  “There sits my worthy mate, who bid me hunt a bear.  Her love was my only armor, and I stand before you without a scratch.”  He held out the belt-pouch.  “The teeth,” he said.

“Teeth?” Thurga gasped, the lure of the bear’s fat forgotten.  “You took the beast alone?  For trophy?”

Quite suddenly, Olivia remembered that the only time any gulla was permitted to take display trophies from a kill was if that hunter had stalked and killed the beast without aid.  She looked wide-eyed at the bear meat still being brought before the tribe and realized this was no yearling bear, but a full-grown male.  Her legs turned to water and she dropped back onto the bench, staring at Doru with a curious blend of admiration, horror, and awe.

“Alone, I paced the forests,” Doru began, crouching theatrically.  “Alone, I found the first tracks.”  He stalked the imaginary bear, spear held at the ready.  His eyes lit on Bodual, who was helping to spit the first haunch of meat.  “And then I found him!”

Bodual yelped and took off running.

Doru took two bounding leaps and landed in front of Bodual, a damned impressive movement, catching his friend in one hand and thrusting the spear between Bodual’s arm and ribs.  Bodual staggered back dramatically, moaning, groaning, rolling his eyes, and holding the spear in place with both hands.

“Such a battle commenced, I am astonished you could not feel the thunder the beast made when at last it dropped to the earth,” Doru continued.

Obediently, Bodual tossed the spear away and fell over on his face.

Doru strode towards Olivia and dropped to one knee.  “It could never be glory enough for you.  Command me, Olivia.  Ask me for a lion.”

The tribe was dead silent.  The only sounds were the snapping of coals and spitting of juices from the roasting meat.  Olivia could feel the eyes of every jealous female, the incredulity of every male.

“No lion has a chance against you,” she said, smiling.  “If there were mastodons left in the world, I would ask you for that.  It might keep you busy for all of two days, and that includes the time it would take to make me presents of the teeth.”

He smirked at her, and then stood up again.  “Well,” he said, in a normal tone of voice.  “Let’s not forget Wurlgunn.”

“I caught a rabbit,” Wurlgunn said brightly.

“You’re so brave,” Beth said with a smile.

Doru dropped onto the bench beside Olivia, cast the clothing she’d been sewing a dismissive glance, and said, “Bodual got a rabbit, too.  So did Damark, for that matter.  Lots of rabbits out there tonight.”

“And one less bear,” she agreed.

“What did you want with the teeth, anyway?”

“I wanted to string them together and wear them.  I didn’t expect you to actually get them for me.  You really killed the bear yourself?”

“Well, I didn’t think I could get him to stand still long enough for me to pull them out,” he said with a smile.

She opened the belt pouch and looked at the bloody teeth.  They were very big.  “Good heavens, you’ve got the claws in here, too.”

His chest swelled and he smiled broadly at her, but the smile soon faded.  “Do you know what my first thought was when I realized it was dead?  I thought, ‘Wait until Vorgullum hears about this.  He’ll want to rush out and do the same for his mate.’  And then I remembered who his mate was.”

“I asked him for the same thing, once,” she remarked, pulling out one bear’s tooth and peering at it in the firelight.

“I know.  He spent three days trying to find one before he had to give up and hunt for real.  When he sees you wearing those…”  Doru sighed and glanced over his shoulder at the roasting meat.  “Great Spirit, give me the strength to let you go again.”

Without thinking, she said, “You’re strong enough to beat him in a challenge.”

“I’ll admit it crossed my mind,” he replied, showing no surprise at her comment.  “But I’d never hurt you that way.  You should be free to choose.  Since you aren’t, I will do as much as I can to keep from hurting you.”

“You really are noble, aren’t you?”

“Too noble,” he agreed sourly.  “The Great Spirit only knows where I get it from because my father was an ass.”

Hodrub, lugging a huge billow of bloody bearskin in both arms, crept cautiously into the room and cleared his throat awkwardly.  “Doru?”

Doru straightened, lowered his wings and took up his spear with an air of resignation.  “Yes, Hodrub, what is it?”

Hodrub licked his lips, took a deep breath, and said, very quickly, “I just saw Tobi scrambling down the mountain with her claws out.”

“I took those away,” Doru said, startled, and then shook that off and roared, “How in the hell did she get out?  Never mind.  I want a guard at the entry shaft day and night from now on, and one in the women’s tunnels as well.  I am going to get that bird-brained little idiot back and if she gets out again, I’ll have someone’s hide for a pit cover!”  He stomped off, his hand clenched dangerously around the haft of his spear.

Bodual sat down beside Olivia and hooked a claw into the belt pouch so that he could peer at the claws and teeth.  “Easily the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen,” he said calmly, “was Doru baying for us to join him while he stood over that mountain of a dead bear.  Not to sound jealous or anything, but how am I supposed to top that?  I couldn’t even give you the rabbit ears, because I needed help to corner the little nuisance.”

“Well, I guess you’ll just have to overwhelm me with your magnificent pit-presence.”

“That I could d—uh oh.”

She looked a question at him, but he was staring past her.  With a sinking heart, Olivia glanced around and saw Huuk making his way towards them.  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.  “Only an idiot would make a play for me as I sit here with a handful of bear’s teeth, when the whole damn tribe knows who got them for me.”

“He’s not kidding and Doru’s not here for the moment.  And he is an idiot, but in a minute, he’s going to be an idiot demanding that you either yield or take yourself to the women’s tunnels.  He’s going to pound me into mash.”  Bodual started to stand up, fanning out his wings.

Huuk stopped in front of them, deliberately ignoring Olivia to focus the intensity of his attention on Bodual.  He was not a big male, but he was bigger by far than lean Bodual and he had the scars of past battles proudly displayed on his chest.  “Your mate?” he inquired menacingly.

“Stand off.”  Bodual lowered his horns.  “We have too few hunters for me to kill you over a woman.”

Huuk snorted.  “I think the tribe could make do without another rabbit, and I promise not to cripple you for life if you concede to me now.”

“Sit down, Bodual,” Olivia said suddenly.

Both males looked at her in surprise.  Bodual’s shock turned slowly to hurt.  “Olivia,” he began.

“Sit down,” she said again, glaring past him at Huuk.  “You’re not going to fight him.”

Huuk showed his teeth in a broad smile, holding out his hand.

“You’re not going to fight him,” she said again.  Olivia shrugged out of her jacket and stood in her leather vest and skirt, cracking her hands into fists and feeling the white-hot core of her power blaze out of her in rage.  “I am.”

6

Huuk’s smiled wavered slightly.  The cave had gone still, and he looked around, plainly wondering if anyone was going to step up and inform her that this was not an option.

No one did.  Bodual seemed as if he wanted to, but he must have seen something in her face because in the end he stood back and waited with the rest of them.  He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t try to stop her.

Huuk, having failed to find a mediator in the crowd, looked again at Olivia.  “You surely don’t mean to do this,” he said.

“The hell I don’t.”  She had used her power against Logarr once, had thrown him across a cave and into the wall with it.  She could do it again, and right now, after so much fighting, after losing Sudjummar and her son, she wanted to.  She advanced on him, and he gave ground until they stood together in the center of the cave with the others in a curious ring around them.  “Come for me, if you’re coming at all,” she said.  “Fight me or concede!”

Huuk blinked several times, hesitated, and took a half-hearted swipe at her.

Olivia brought a surge of heat up and out of her to glove her hand; she caught his wrist, twisted it violently back to bring him forward and down and punched him in the throat.  Huuk yanked his hand out of her grip and stumbled back, gagging.  He slapped out at her again, and it was considerably less hesitant a blow.  She ducked under his arm, spun on her heel and sent her foot like a piston in the armor of her power directly into his midriff.

This time, he flew backwards, drawing in his wings with a hoarse cry of alarm and crashing to the floor.  He rocked to his hip, leapt to his feet and turned on her, horns lowered.

She waited for him, channeling her power along her arm like an invisible spear.

He lunged; she struck.

Huuk’s entire body lifted off the ground in a single, brutal convulsion.  There was an electric snap of discharged energy and he was flung violently the full length of the room to slam against the wall.  He was on his feet with a blind howl of rage and he sprang at her with claws at ready, no longer pursuing a female, but prepared to kill an enemy.

Olivia deflected him with a burst of power, then seized him by the horn as he staggered away and threw him to the ground.  He toppled over, bent his wing, screamed with pain and sprang up again.  She ducked behind him, balled up her fist around a pulsing globe of inner light, and punched him in the back of the head.

He executed a clumsy somersault, his whole weight crashing down on his horns.  There was a brittle crack and he jerked crookedly to one side.  He managed to get his hands beneath him and look up groggily; his left horn was split lengthwise from the tip to the base, where thick black blood welled out around his scalp.  Huuk reached up, took a streak of this onto his fingers, and looked at them without comprehension.

“Holy God,” someone said.  It sounded like Anita.  “Stay down, you idiot!”

“Concede, Huuk,” Bodual called.  He sounded worried.

The words seemed to bring the light of clarity back into Huuk’s eyes.  The gulla looked hard at the broken shard of bone on the ground, and then up at Olivia.  She could see him considering the idea of conceding blood challenge to a female.  He stood up, spread out wings and claws and roared at her.

“Come and get me,” she snarled back, pushing sheaths of power out over both arms.

Huuk leapt, talons first, aiming for her chest.

She visualized a jet of power like a shield bursting from her body and a moment later, Huuk was thrown back by it, twisting his wing under his body and yelping with pain.  She raced her puppet after him, seized him by his remaining whole horn and threw him full-length, face-first into the wall.

He struck, bounced, and dropped.  This time, he lay still.

Olivia stood over him, tensed to spring if he tried to catch her ankle, but he only opened his eyes, looked at her through a glaze of pain, and closed them again.

“I concede,” he groaned.

Olivia dropped back into her body, resisting the urge to haul back and kick him in the head for good measure.  She swung around to face the crowd, her eyes blazing.  “Now I am done!” she shouted.  “The next male that comes for me, I kill!”

Even before the echoes of this threat had faded, Doru’s deep bellow overrode it.  “What in the hell goes on here?”  He charged into the thick of the commons, hauling Tobi by one arm.  He saw Huuk, swelled to his full height and turned to search the crowd for Bodual.  Seeing him whole and entirely undamaged, Doru stood back and demanded, “Who is responsible for this?”

Bodual pointed.

Olivia crossed her arms and looked back at Doru defiantly.

Doru blinked at her, looked back at Huuk, then down at Tobi.

“Bam,” Tobi said, staring at the bloody heap of gulla.  “Remind me never to piss you off.”  She looked back at Olivia.  “Are you going to make him yield?” she asked curiously.

Olivia could feel herself wanting to smile at that.  “Let go of her, Doru.  Tobi, get Tina and tell her there’s been an incident.”

Doru obediently released his grip and Tobi ran off towards the women’s tunnels.  Slowly, as if shaking himself from a daze, he looked around and asked the room at large, “Olivia did this?  By herself?”

“Unarmed,” someone said.

There were murmurs of assent, then silence again.

Doru turned back to Olivia.  “Remind me never to piss you off,” he said, impressed.  He moved to get a hand beneath Huuk’s arm.  “I’ll bet you’re almost wishing I was here,” he added.

Huuk muttered something thick and incoherent as he was settled on a bench.  He reached up gingerly to explore the damage to his left horn, wincing as he touched the exposed nerves near the base.

Running footsteps from the corridor resounded immediately before Tina’s voice could be heard.  “All right, let’s make this quick, I’m trying to deliver a Jesus Christ what happened here!”  The healer raced to Huuk’s side, unslinging her pack and dropping to her knees.  “Tobi, get a light on him!  Someone get a towel!  Who did this to you?”

“It’s not so bad,” Huuk grumbled, but flinched when Tina’s hand rose towards his head.

Tina glared over her shoulder at Doru.  “Goddammit, people, learn some self-restraint!”

Doru folded his arms and looked mildly amused.

His placidity appeared to infuriate her.  She whipped around, uncapped a bottle of alcohol and poured it liberally over a cotton ball, then took a swipe at Huuk’s head.  When he hollered, she grabbed his good horn and put him in a headlock, cleaning his wounds with curt swipes of her arm and snarling between clenched teeth: “You know, I am trying very freakin’ hard to respect your ways no matter how messed up they are, but if I see just one more male with his head or his hands or his wing bashed in because of this ridiculous pissing contest you people keep starting, I am goddamn well going to let you sit there and be crippled because I have had it!  I have four pregnant women, one lady in labor, and one early baby in addition to all the aches and pains of a normal population of giant freakin’ bat-people, and I don’t need this testosterone-spitting, swinging-dick bullshit!”

“I hope you’re listening to this, Olivia,” Doru remarked.

“The next time, the very next time, someone asks me to drop what I’m doing and run off down the mountain to wrap some idiot’s head, I am going to flat-out refuse, so you just better deal with it your damn selves!”  She reached for bandages, then paused and shot Doru a puzzled glance.  “What do you mean, ‘I hope you’re listening, Olivia?’”

Doru waited for realization to sink in.  Tina’s eyes widened first with disbelief, then with shock, and finally she turned and stared again at Huuk.  “You let a girl do this to you?”

Huuk scowled, but winced when someone in the crowd laughed out loud.  His head dropped and he muttered something too low to be heard.

Tina looked up at Olivia, still struggling towards comprehension.  “What in hell for?” she asked.

“I’m getting pretty tired of the swinging-dick bullshit, too,” she said.

Tina traced her eyes over the full extent of Huuk’s injuries, and then glanced once, dubiously, back at Olivia.  “Well, okay,” she said, and then said something which made Olivia want to fling her arms around her and kiss her full on the lips.  “At least you went easy on the poor bastard.”

Doru’s smile slipped and a number of the closest gullan immediately stepped away from them.

“Little word of advice for you, you big dope,” she added, not unkindly, as she began to wrap the base of Huuk’s horn with gauze.  “You know everything you hear about Olivia and Amy and so on, where matters of the pit are concerned?”

He nodded warily.

“Did it never occur to you that this demonstrates that humans are hell and away much stronger than you are?”

Huuk rolled an eye at Olivia, considered her in silence, and finally shook his head.

“Well, we are.  Now we tolerate you, because for the most part, we like you, even the stupid ones of you, but I think, and you can jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, Olivia, but I think that we are good and fed up with some of you.  So the next time you find yourself tempted to grab you a one of us, ask yourself, Am I being a dickhead?  And if the answer is yes, ask yourself, Is she going to appreciate it?  And if the answer is no, back off!  Are we clear?”

“As water,” he muttered.

“Good.”  Tina rotated his wing carefully, prodded at his facial bones, and then stood up and patted him on the shoulder.  “Because if Olivia thinks it’s time to start fighting back, then that’s what we’re going to do.  Now,” she finished, shouldering her pack.  “If you don’t mind, Sarah B. is having a baby and I’d like to be there.”  She caught Tobi by the arm and marched away.

Olivia, very much aware of the eyes locked on her, deliberately crossed to the bundle of bear meat and readied a spit.  As she sat roasting it, she listened to the gradual commencement of normal activity.  Doru came to crouch beside her, looking at her with an inscrutable expression.

“Yes?” she said at last.

“Next time,” he said, “You get the bear, and I wear the teeth.”

7

Three days later, Olivia presented both Levonal and Sarah B.’s newborn son at the same gathering.  She brought Liz to the rock, helping her to climb it while holding on to her son, and then called his name to the tribe.  There was some confusion over the unfamiliar name, but once Tina explained it was the name of the medicine used to keep Liz from delivering too early, there was reluctant acceptance and subdued cheers of welcome.

Liz leaned over and whispered, “I thought about naming him Benjamin.  Do you think they’d have let me?”

“I’m not sure they could have stopped you.  Naming a baby isn’t tribe-business, it’s…”  Olivia trailed off uncomfortably.

“The father’s business,” Liz finished, not without a rueful sort of smile.  “Yeah.  Gormuck will be sorry he missed this, all right.  I never would have thought it, but I’m kinda sorry myself. I actually miss him. A lot.”

“He’ll be back pretty soon.”

“A month or so, yeah.”  Liz sighed, dipped her head to look at her baby’s sleep-contorted face.  “I’ve said some awful things to him.  I want to tell him how sorry I am.  I actually want….”  She laughed a little, turned to Olivia and said, “I want to give that man a hug.  Can you believe it?  I can hardly believe it.  When did that happen?”

One of the older male gulla stepped forward, touched his claw to Levonal’s swaddling blanket in welcome, and then dropped awkwardly in a crouch of supplication.

Olivia and Liz exchanged glances, plainly wondering who the intended recipient was meant to be.  On the grounds that, as leader, she was entitled to know everything anyway, Olivia said, “Yes?”

The male stood, and made a curiously emotive gesture with his hands.  “Liz,” he said hesitantly.  “I’ve seen you before.”

Liz eyed him expressionlessly.  “Yes,” she said after a moment.  “Your name is Hodrub.”

Her recognition seemed to strengthen him.  Straightening his graying shoulders, he said, “I’m one of the hunters left to provide for the tribe.”

There was some shuffling among the watching males in the crowd.  Hodrub snapped a hot, anxious glance behind him and growled.  Turning back to Liz, he fanned his wings a little, and then said, “I would care for you and your son until your mate returns.”

Liz gazed at him, then down at Levonal.  “Can I think about it?” she asked at last, tonelessly.

“Yes, of course,” Hodrub said.  He opened his belt pouch and withdrew a small cloth-wrapped bundle.  “I made this for your son,” he explained, handing it to her.  “It’s a gift.  Even if…you choose not to have me.”

Liz shifted Levonal so she could pick the bundle open with one hand.  Within was a doll-like figure no larger than a human hand, made of rabbit-fur, in the shape of a gulla.  She rubbed the soft fur, then sighed and tucked the toy into the baby’s blanket.  “Okay,” she said.  “Why not?  But just until Gormuck returns.  You have to promise you won’t fight him.”

“Then let the tribe witness that I do so promise.”  Hodrub’s face relaxed in a smile and he took Levonal from her and helped her down from the rock.  His horns high, he escorted her to a bench and handed her a bottle of Dr. Pepper.

Olivia watched them settle for a moment before gesturing to Tina.

Tina sighed, looked down into the swaddled bundle that was Sarah B.’s son, and climbed the rock.  She faced the tribe stoically and said, in English, “I’m not lying to them.”

“I’ll do it.”  Olivia climbed the rock beside her.  “Here is the son of Sarabee and Burgelbun!” She waited for the cheers, which were long and heartfelt, even if they did come with a lot of hooking motions.  The noise roused the baby long enough for a single half-hearted cry, before continuing: “Our healer says he is strong and healthy.  Unfortunately, Sa—his mother…his mother became fevered in childbirth and…and did not survive.”

There were some subdued murmurs, but not many.  Sarah’s grave had been dug the night before, and what little grief there had been for her passing had come then.  Death on the birthing bench was not uncommon and Sarabee, they all said, was not strong.

“His father is not here to name him,” Olivia finished.  “So, I’m open to suggestions.”

The gullan were openly startled by the proposal, but the gathered humans immediately began shouting out names.

“Michael!”

“Oh shut up, you can’t name a gulga Michael.”

“Shut up, yourself.  I’m named Anita and I’m friggin’ Chinese!”

“Furball?”

“That’s a little derogatory, isn’t it?”

“Not if he’s furry.”

“Sosara!”

“Oh, that’s original.”

“And it sounds like a girl’s name anyway.  Soburg?”

“Still original.”

“Michael!”

As the humans continued to toss out names and helpful commentary, Liz raised her hand as politely as a schoolgirl and Olivia called on her, fully expecting to hear the name Benjamin and prepared to grant it.

Holding Levonal, Liz stood up and cleared her throat.  “This may not be the time or the place, but I thought I ought to offer, you know, to feed him.”  She rolled her shoulders, either as a bracing gesture or careless shrug, and looked expectantly at her new mate, Hodrub.

Hodrub frowned at the baby in Tina’s arms, a look of far more deep concern than any helpless newborn ought to merit.

Tina and Olivia exchanged glances.

“Boy, that better not be a no I see brewing,” Tina murmured in English.

“No one told me there was taboo against raising the child of a dead woman,” Olivia replied, likewise.

“Nobody tells us any of their damn taboos until we break one.”

“Well,” said Liz, also in English, “if he says no, you can damn well sever this bond right here and now.  Someone here has to be horny enough to want me even if I come with a bad-luck baby.”

As they conferred, one of the older men fanned out his wings and crossed the room to stand before them.

“I am Borumn,” he said.  “May I address the leader?”

Olivia straightened slowly, placing one hand on the infant’s swaddles.  She nodded.

Borumn tossed his horns, apparently unsure how to begin, and said, “I have never taken a mate.  I am aging now…it is not likely that I will ever take a mate for my own.”  He studied the infant with an expression that strained for stoicism and instead revealed a deep and piercing pain.  “I would take this child as my son.”

Olivia started to speak, but Doru stepped up to put his hand on her shoulder.  In his mild, deceptively distracted way, he said, “And what would you feed him, Borumn?  I have seen you on three hunts since winter.  How will you provide for your son?”

Borumn half-turned to seek out Hodrub with a gesture of supplication.  “It is true my wings are not strong, like yours, old friend.  But if I came to your lair, we two together might manage the work of one younger man.  If your mate agrees to suckle my son, my kills are hers.”  After that, he only waited, lowering his horns, as if he expected to be sentenced to prison.

Olivia looked around at Hodrub.  “How do you answer?” she inquired.

His relief was immediately evident as he fanned his wings out.  Apparently, it hadn’t been Liz feeding the baby that made him uncomfortable, but the prospect of adopting it.  “I would find this arrangement acceptable.”

Olivia turned her eyes on Liz.  “What about you?”  Again, there was a muffled wave of whispers at this novelty of asking the female’s opinion.

Liz nodded.  “Hey, the more, the merrier.”  She glanced meaningfully back at Hodrub.  “At least until Gormuck gets back.”

Quietly, not so much as glancing aside, Borumn said, “The mate you take does not matter.  You will have the meat of my kills for so long as I live.”

“All right,” Liz said after a short pause.  “I accept.”

Tina bent and passed the infant into Borumn’s waiting hands.

The elder gulla cradled the baby, staring deep and long into the dark-furred face, squinted shut in infant’s intense sleep.  “My son,” he said.  “Sunnu.”  Sunnu.  Finally.

There were rousing cries of welcome from the humans and mutinous mutters from the gullan. Olivia spoke the name again to seal it and descended from the center rock to throw herself down between Doru and Bodual.

“Just when I thought you couldn’t get any stranger,” Bodual commented as she joined them.  “Imagine asking a gathering to name a baby.”

“What would you have done?”

“If I were leader?”  He tossed his horns.  “I’d have named it myself.  The children of the leader belong to the tribe and the tribe’s children belong to the leader.”

“Well, then why didn’t you do it?” she asked, somewhat exasperated.  “You’re my mate, too!”

Bodual started and blinked at her.  “I hadn’t thought of that.  I tend to think of Doru as tovorak.  I’m just the supporting pit partner.”

“All right,” she said and turned to Doru.  “Why didn’t you name him?”

He punched a hole in a can of Coors and shrugged.  “I thought you were doing okay.  Hell, I wouldn’t have minded a baby named Mykel, for that matter.”  He took a long drink, contemplated the can.  “What does it mean?”

She had to think a moment for the right way to explain.  “We humans have legends about a god, kind of like your Great Spirit.  This god has a…tribe of winged human-like warriors.  Michael was the leader of this tribe and the fiercest warrior.  His name means ‘spear of god’.”

Doru stared at her.  “That,” he said seriously, “is a good name.”

“Glad you like it.”

He drank his beer.  “Mykel,” he murmured.  “I like that a lot.  I wonder if Tobi would—”  Doru broke off suddenly and took a deep sniff.  “You’d better go,” he said in a tight voice very different from his usual tone.  “Your season is coming on.  Easy, Bodual.  Pour a little thumperjuice in your nose and sit down.  Don’t draw attention to her.”

Olivia left, trying to move quickly but without running.  A scattering of gullan saluted her departure and she forced smiles and nods for those who did, but her composure lasted only as long as it took her to get out in the open tunnels.  There, she stopped, indulging in a moment of useless wishing that she could hide in the women’s tunnels where everyone thought she’d be going, even if it meant working under Horumn in the kitchens.  But the moment didn’t last, and when it was over, Olivia picked up her feet and ran to her secret place.

She had a promise to keep.

8

The Great Spirit was exactly where she’d last left him, flat on his back with his arms comfortably pillowing his head on the bench, with the rather startling exception that he was again blatantly erect.  He glanced at her when she appeared in the doorway and sat up, showing his teeth in greeting.  His nostrils flared; his smile widened and took on a hungry gleam.

“Come to me,” he said, extending a hand towards her.

Olivia came, somewhat edgily, her spirit self tensed to flee her husk at the slightest provocation.  As soon as her fingertips brushed his palm, he closed around her and pulled her flat against him.  He turned his face into her hair and drew in a breath, released it in a thrumm, tasted the curve of her jaw.  He kept the hand that held her taut behind him, but reached out his other to slip beneath her skirt and between her thighs.

“You’ve been training,” he observed.  “I could not have imagined using this power as a weapon against a male.  Did you succeed?”

“He never touched me,” she replied.  “And I broke his horn.”

“Excellent.”  His laughter was like thunder, inordinately pleased at the mutilation of one of his self-professed children.  “Very well done, my Olivia.”  He released her hand, only to take hold of her waist.

“Wait,” she said.

He tensed, his claws flexing in the exposed flesh between her vest and skirt.  “Why?”

“Can you try to be gentle just once?”

He swept one brow upwards.  Otherwise his expression did not change.

“You hurt me,” she explained.  “You hurt me a lot.  I spend half the power you build in me just healing the damage you do.”

“You are ill-formed for coupling,” he stated, still without altering his features or the grip of his hands.

“No,” she countered.  “I’m not.  You are ill-schooled in tenderness.”  As his gaze began to darken, she reached up and unfastened her vest, drew it slowly free of her shoulders and let it drop to the floor.  He watched closely, obediently permitting himself to be distracted, but his eyes when they returned to her face had not softened in the slightest.

“You suggest the fault is mine.”

“The fault is yours,” she agreed, ignoring the warning in his voice as she put her hands over his.  “But it can be corrected.  I can teach you, I think, if you’re willing to learn.”

“I know all there is in all the universe,” he said, but did not resist as she helped him to unfasten her belt.  The skirt whispered over her thighs and lay in a drift over her ankles, but he spared her naked pubis only a glance before glowering up at her. “Certainly, I know all there is to know of sex.”

“You didn’t know a woman could be on top,” she pointed out.

His eyes narrowed.  “For a female so concerned with hoarding the time left to her in this mountain, you are brutally free with mine.”

“If you’ve got something better to do, by all means dismiss yourself,” she countered, and took her shirt off as well.

He frowned, and Olivia saw the air around him waver slightly, like the air above a hot highway.  “Would it surprise you,” he said, “to know that I am easily capable of taking what I want, however I want it?”

“Not in the least,” she said.  “But in words of one syllable or less:  If you please me, I will please you.  In other words, you may be able to take me how and when you want, but I won’t reward you by helping you cum.  Of course, you might not mind being denied such a triviality.”

He rocked his head back and considered this.  “Very well,” he said at last, his jaw scarcely moving.  “Proceed.”

“The object,” she explained, running his hands up to cup her breasts,  “is to give me pleasure.”

“Easily accomplished,” he said curtly and started to lower his hand to her belly.

She caught his wrist.  “Oh, it’s accomplished, all right.  But it isn’t real, and so it isn’t pleasurable.  It’s a purely physical response with absolutely no emotional or even sexual basis.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s one of the things you do really, really wrong.”

His frown deepened ponderously.  “I see.”

“Don’t get mad.  Put your hands here.  Be gentle.”

He obeyed, not without a low grumble of impatience, rubbing the ball of his thumb over her nipple until it hardened.  He checked her face for approval, grunted to himself, and leaned forward to sniff at her flesh.  The first experimental touch of his tongue was fire; she shivered and arched into his mouth as he traced the swell of her breast with the very tip of his tongue, lapped at the smooth valley between them, then moved to the other and repeated his treatment.

“That’s very good,” she whispered, running one hand between the massive sets of horns that crowned his head.

He growled, still licking.  “I am not deceived, woman.  This is nothing but your petty vengeance.”

“Vengeance?”

“To occupy me thus while your scent of season torments me.”  He glared up at her from between her breasts.  “Only one of Bahgree’s daughters could be so spiteful.”

“You can always move lower, you know.”

“Lower.”  He frowned at her sex and then at her, his eyes beginning to smolder again with anger.  “Do you ask me to kneel now?”

Olivia resisted the urge to roll her eyes and went to the bench instead.  She lay down on her back, her thighs opened and the pink of her pussy exposed to him.  “There,” she said.  “Now you can kneel and still be on top.  Happy?”

He did not reply.  His stare was fixed and burning, and every breath came with a thrumm of lust.  When he finally moved, it was with a snarl and a predator’s lunge.  He went to his knees without hesitation, shoving his snout against her hard enough to scrape her back on the bench.  He growled again, his breath blowing hot into her body, and then rose over her, gripping the brand of his cock in his fist as he caught her thigh.

She put a hand on his chest and gave him a jolt of power to get his attention.  “Gently,” she said.

The Great Spirit looked at her for a long time without moving.  Then he dropped back on his haunches and put his hands on his thighs.  He studied the V of her legs with brooding intensity, but not, she was relieved to see, obvious anger.  At last, he reached up, slipped one hand between her thighs and parted her labia with his thumb.  He considered her sex carefully, then leaned very slowly forward and touched his tongue to her inner folds.

Olivia closed her eyes and sighed as a lick of flame shot up through her body.  She could sense him watching her, and then his mouth was on her again, gaining confidence as he explored her.  She could feel him thrumming as he lashed at her, now sucking, now lapping, now biting very gently, but always open to her whispered praise and preferences.  When the tip of his tongue rubbed against her clitoris purely by accident, her sharp cry was the only thing that stopped him.

He drew back, cocked his head at her, and then peered closely at her pussy.  He touched her, rolling her clit lightly beneath his thumb as he had her nipple, watching with great interest as her hips bucked and her breath shortened.  “Interesting,” he said, and bent once more to taste.  His arms shrugged under her thighs, lifting her slightly from the bench and giving him the leverage to hold her still as he teased her.  Her hands found the tips of his highest horns and she gripped them, shuddering and kicking with mindless pleasure.  His mouth moved at once to penetrate her, tasting the juices of her release.

“I think,” she gasped, “you’ve earned your turn.”

“Silence, woman.  I will tell you when I wish to proceed.”  He took a breath, exhaled a bolt of flame and ice directly through her to her womb, and then went to work on her clitoris again.

Olivia’s conscious mind dissolved into a crescendo of screaming pleasure.  She writhed against him wildly, yanking on his horns to no effect, scarcely aware of her own voice as she knocked echoes from the walls.

At long last, he lifted her from his shoulders and lowered her down the hard length of his body, licking his lips with great satisfaction.  “I enjoyed that,” he murmured.  “Do you know how long it has been since I have enjoyed a thing?”  He fit her against the burning head of his shaft and she sheathed herself on him with a hot cry.  Cradling her in both arms, he bent until she touched the floor and then took his weight upon his arms and began to thrust into her, his eyes narrowed and golden with pleasure.

Olivia fell upwards and out of her body with a sense of real reluctance, taking the knot of sexual energy coiling inside her and turning it against the god.  He had been very gentle, and he’d definitely earned his reward.  It was all about compromise.

Olivia manipulated his sensations, watching the two flames far beneath her growing in brilliance.  She began the laborious process of his climax, but on a whim, she drew back and sent a thought:  I want to try something.

“You have earned my indulgence.  Do what you will, Olivia.”

She gathered her power and shaped it, not into a probe, but into something like a net, and lashed out with it.

There was a sudden exceptionally powerful impact.  The only comparison in her experience was of once reaching out and touching a wire she had been too young to recognize as part of an electric fence, of feeling the electricity like a club thumping down on the back of her neck.  Catching the core of the Great Spirit was like that, at once intensely physical and entirely intangible.

She could feel him now, both moving in her physical puppet and in her spiritual trap, and the sensation was enough to bring her to jarring orgasm in both places.  She rocked back and just hovered, feeling the shock of this strange dual climax, feeling the heat of the god blazing throughout both cores.

He was gasping in rough tandem with his thrusts, apparently just as surprised as she, and suffused with aftershocks of her own sensations.  “How… AAAGHH…are you doing this?”  He threw back his head and thundered a primal scream as he came ferociously to climax.

Olivia rocked with the force of its reflection, swam dizzily back to her senses, and then fixed both spirit hands into the imprisoned radiance of the god and beamed a wordless command of pleasure at it.

His roar seemed to shake the mountain itself, and seeing this was a god, she supposed that might be possible.  He came again, hard enough to rock her physical puppet frighteningly close to the point of death.

Wow, she thought, more than a little in awe of herself.

“Enough!” he shouted.  “Release me!  I am hurting you!”

Olivia drew her thoughts like a knife between them and felt the essence of the Great Spirit snap back into his control.  His light fell back from her at once and she began to flood her bruise-colored body with healing light until it was safe to return.

She opened her eyes and saw the Great Spirit staring at her with an expression she might have called superstitious terror if it had appeared on anyone other than a god.  “Are you okay?” she asked.

“I am not harmed.”  He drew back from her and gripped her shoulders.  “But I could easily have been.  How were you able to do such a thing?”

“I have no idea.”  She started to speak and stopped herself.

His eyes narrowed.  “What is it?”

“It felt…really good.  It felt like cumming all over again.”

He tipped his head back slightly and regarded her with open apprehension.  “So,” he said.  “This is how my power translates through the daughters of Bahgree.  I have been more right than even I knew to fear it.”  His gaze drifted over her towards the wall.  “Kodjunn, my host, means to return on the day Urga comes into her season.  I will meet with my mate in our coupling place of ancient time.  And then I will come to you, Olivia.  It is time for our journey to begin.”

He released her shoulders and stood up.

Olivia sat up, her heart hammering in her chest.  “On the day Urga comes into season?” she echoed.  “How long is that?  Where is she now?”

“She is still thick with child.  You have a little time yet.  I suggest you use it to make your farewells.”  He brought his gaze back to her with some effort.  His expression was fraught with concern.  “I had meant to wait longer.  Now I dare not.  If Bahgree learns of your strength, she will break this mountain apart to find and destroy you.  I think she has lost her one chance at defeating you, and wasted it to blind my eyes.  That alone will infuriate her.  You will stay here with me, Olivia, until Kodjunn’s return.”

“What, here in this cave?”

“Here,” he agreed, and paced restlessly to the mouth of the tunnel, lighting the darkness as he peered out at it.  “It is the only way I can be certain of your safety.”

“No.”

He tipped his head to one side and narrowed his eyes at her.  “I am not asking, woman.”

She turned away deliberately and started dressing again.  “You have the whole rest of eternity to keep me.  I want the next two weeks.”

“I do not care what you want.”

“Believe me, I know.”  She bit down on the rest of that pointless mood, and tried a more conciliatory tone.  “Give me the next two weeks to finish doing what I need to do here, to say goodbye to my friends.  If anything happens, if I feel that I’m in any danger from Bahgree, I’ll come straight here.”

He flexed his talons in the rock.  His horns lowered with obvious menace.  He closed his eyes and thought deeply.  “I accept this,” he said grimly.  “In the spirit of compromise.”

She softened her voice.  “I appreciate that.”

“Hm.”

She touched his arm.  “I do.  Thank you.”

He fixed his gold eyes on her again.  “I give the night to you.  Come to me again at dawn.”

She fought to keep her expression neutral.  “I have to sleep sometime,” she explained evenly.

“That means you will not,” the Great Spirit answered, looking away.  “How frustrating it is to be with you.  You submit to me only when I do not dominate you.  It is my right to rule over you, it is your privilege to be ruled.”

She meant to sigh and say something persuasive.  To her dismay, what she said was, “If you want blind obedience, get a dog.”

He nodded, unoffended, unsurprised.  “You,” he said thoughtfully, “do not want to lie down with me.  You do so only to keep me in good humor.”  He glanced at her with a small, crooked smile.  “It is a sacrifice and sacrifice pleases me.  I will be patient.”

“Thank you.”

He nodded, then gave her a hard, formidable stare.  “But know this, Olivia Blake.  I indulge you in this fantasy of free will because it is harmless and it makes you happy.  You warn me not to own you?  I own you already.  You are free only because I allow it.”

She cocked her head to one side, studying him.  “I’m going to ignore that because you were so gentle today, but for future reference, I don’t appreciate being scared into blind obedience.”

There was a pronounced silence.

“Ignore me,” he echoed.

“I don’t like to be threatened.”

“You’re going to ignore me.”

She sighed, exasperated.  “It’s too hard to ignore you.  I’m just going to ignore your threats.”

He took a deep breath, held it, and released it without striking at her, despite his very plain desire to do so.  “So be it,” he said finally.

She didn’t want to leave like this.  Olivia turned away from the doorway and came back to him.  She cupped the back of his neck, pulled herself up and kissed his unyielding mouth.  “You are being very patient with me,” she said.  “And you were very gentle and very, very pleasurable.”

One corner of his mouth lifted very slightly.  “Hm.”

“Very,” she repeated.

He threw back his head and growled out a long-suffering sigh.  “You are dismissed, Olivia.  I am not angry with you.  Return to me…when it pleases you to do so.  As you have said, I shall have all of eternity to enjoy the reward of your body.  I suppose I can wait a little while longer.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

FAREWELL

1

Olivia spent the next day in the women’s tunnels, working holes through her new bear teeth with a metal awl.  She broke two of them, but the rest came out all right and made a pretty impressive, if surprisingly heavy, necklace.  She received several admiring and envious glances as she put it on (she suspected most of the glances had more to do with the man who had given her the teeth than for the trophy itself), and after that she had nothing to do except sit around being in season and on Horumn’s nerves.

She tried to make herself useful, but Horumn had no patience for her and Olivia, her thoughts already morbidly fixed on the journey she was soon to take, gave her no reason to want to be.  After she was thrown out of the cooking space, she went to the clinic, but Tina and Tobi were absent, no doubt catching up back in their own lair.  The conspicuous absence of the other humans—particularly Amy and Sarahjay, who had always been good about helping out with women’s work—made Olivia think there was a feast in progress back in the commons, but she couldn’t risk attending while there was the slightest chance she was in season.  At last, desperation drove her to try Cheyenne’s company, but the other woman lay as still as if she were in a waking coma, her mouth open and dark eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.  Examining her for sores was too much like moving a corpse, and the clammy feel of Cheyenne’s naked flesh made her own skin crawl.  Olivia made a token attempt at conversation, but it seemed obvious that she was being drugged with whatever Horumn gave to Victoria, and so she withdrew to her own lair in the women’s tunnels.

The next morning, Olivia figured her season had to be over.  She went immediately to the baths, discarded her well-worn bra and rabbit-fur skirt for a T-shirt and leather breeches, and emerged feeling distinctly better, as well as warmer.  Her good mood lasted just long to arrive at the commons.  There, she found Doru crouching over a dazed-looking older male who had both hands clasped to his blood-matted scalp.

“What happened?” she asked anxiously.  And was it about me?

“Unar here tried to challenge Sutung for Sarahjay,” Doru said mildly.  “Without her permission.”

“She fought him?”

“She got her spear first, but yes, she fought him.”

Olivia looked past him at a scowling Sarah J., who stood close to Sutung with the spear in question gripped in her fist.  Sutung didn’t seem as though he had quite decided whether to be impressed or disturbed by this turn of events, but he had his hand on her shoulder.

“Is he going to be all right?” she asked.

“Tina says so.  He just needs to sit still for a night.  And  remind himself repeatedly that she could have given him the tip through his heart as easily as the butt to his head,”  Doru added pointedly, and the older gulla grunted and gave a grudging nod.  Satisfied that all was well, Doru straightened and faced her, smiling.  “And you.”

Olivia smiled back, her heart beginning to lift.  “Me?” she teased.

“I’ve been thinking about you all day.”  He turned and summoned his spear as if by force of thought alone.  “Let’s go hunting.”

She blinked at him.  “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“Too bad.  Your tribe is hungry and I have enough problems trying to feed them without leaving you behind me with one challenge already hanging in the air.  I want you with me tonight.”  He slipped an arm around her, took several steps towards the chasm entry, then stopped short and looked down at her.  “Unless of course, you really mean not to?”

Olivia didn’t want to, but his arguments were certainly pervasive.  And for the next two weeks, at least, it was still her tribe.  Doru was running himself ragged trying to provide for it and lead it as well, and her frequent absences couldn’t be helping.  She put out her hand.  “I’ll give it a try,” she said.

Doru beckoned to one of the males and a spear was brought.  He showed no hesitation giving it to her despite the dubious glances and mutters from the other gullan in the commons, but when they reached the entry shaft and he’d lifted her to make their ascent, he murmured, “You’re sure about this?”

“I doubt I’ll catch anything, but at least I’ll get some fresh air.”

When he reached the aerie, Doru set Olivia down, threw back his head and unleashed a deafening roar.  As the echoes rolled down the mountain, he tipped his head to the side and cocked his ears forward, listening.  “There’s Bodual,” he muttered after a moment.  “And that’s Mudmar.  Huh.  I wonder where the others are.”  Doru tapped the haft of his spear on the aerie and waited.

Shortly, Olivia’s eyes could make out moonlight on wing as two gullan swooped in out of the night.  Bodual landed lightly on her left; Mudmar sank his claws into the overhang and looked at them over his broad shoulder.

“Well?” Doru said expectantly.

“Hodrub and Augurr are away raiding a hive,” Mudmar said.  “Damark is showing Thurga and her crook-nosed little friend how to check and set traps.  The others are fishing.  Wurlgunn’s dropped his fool self in the lake twice already, but be damned if he hasn’t caught four fish.”

“Not bad.”  Doru glanced down at Olivia.  “Any sightings?”

Mudmar followed his gaze.  “For a human-hunt?  Nothing my way, unless you want to go after goat.”

One year ago, Olivia might have gone along with this, unaware of the true dimensions of a mountain goat.  However, she had seen goats by now and she was horrified by the prospect of hunting one with a crude spear.  She stepped back at once, both hands up as if the suggestion could be physically pushed away. “Absolutely not!”

“It’s a good time for it,” Mudmar said, shrugging his wings.  “They haven’t started rutting yet and the males are everywhere in small groups.”

“Hate to go after them so damn soon,” Doru muttered.

“Doru, they’re huge!” she protested.

“Big, but dumb,” Bodual agreed, and gave his horns a slight toss towards Doru.  “Like someone else I could mention.  Easy, Olivia.  Just about everyone goes after goat for their first hunt.”

They looked at her, all three of them.  Olivia gripped her spear in both hands and looked at Doru.

He raised a brow at her.  “It’s your decision,” he said.  “I could as easily drop you at the lake and let you spear for fish, or I suppose we could fly out on a wide-patrol and see if we can’t scare up something else.”

“But the goats are already here,” Mudmur inserted.  “I’ll take easy meat, even if it is early in the season, over a whole herd of maybes.”

Olivia sighed, her shoulders slumping.  “So would I.”

Doru gave her a clap to the shoulder and scooped her up.  “Let me clarify your role in this,” he said, leaping into the sky.  His wings caught the wind and he soared out over the mountainside, allowing Mudmar to take the lead.  “We’re going to circle the goats and drop you downwind.  Don’t worry about charging them.  This is your first time out and I don’t want you getting hurt in a ground fight.”

She didn’t like the sound of that—ground fight—and told him so.

“Goats aren’t as aggressive as, say, elk, but they can get plenty mean if they think they can get away with it.  At this time of year, they’ll be in small groups of males, and half-growns at that.  They’ll fight if they’re cornered, so stay back and keep your wits.”  He caught a hand-signal from Mudmar, nodded, and banked sharply.

Olivia looked down around his arms and saw a handful of white drifts like clumps of snow lying against the dark rock, motionless, perhaps even sleeping.  She shivered and clutched Doru tighter.

“Easy, Olivia.  We’ll take them from the air if we can. It’s not in the nature of large animals to look up.”  He landed and pried her off.  “Look, it’s very simple.  We’ll circle around and get them from the air.  If any of them come your way, stab one with the spear and get out of the way.”

“They’re enormous!” she cried.  “They’re bigger than cows!”

“It’s mostly wool,” he said.  “Remember, come in from below, stab up, and let the prey do all the work.”  He jumped back into the sky and quickly soared out of sight.

Olivia hunkered down, her eyes huge, her spear gripped tightly in both hands.  She waited.

There was a bleating scream, then another, and then a thunder of hooves headed straight for her.

Olivia braced her spear against the ground just as the first goat leapt over a jutting stone and onto the point.  She felt the crunch of its body as it was impaled, and then all its weight came down and knocked the spear and Olivia in different directions.  The goat fell over awkwardly around the shaft, landed on its back, kicked the spear out of its body, and stumbled away, bleating.

“Olivia!”  Doru vaulted over the stone and saw her.  He looked at her bloody spear, then at the receding shape of the wounded goat.  Grimly, he picked up the weapon and held it out.  “After it.”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“It’s suffering,” he said.

She stared at him, silently begging him to take the spear and finish for her, but he merely met her pleading eyes and waited her out.  And in the end, yes, it was suffering. Olivia took her spear and went after her goat.

She must have chased it for an hour.  The three gullan hunters followed at a discreet distance as she climbed over rocks, slid down slopes, and jabbed feebly at the terrified animal.  The fifth time she got close enough to hit it, it wheeled about and launched a back hoof at her.  She wasn’t quite fast enough to get out of the way.  The blow landed high on her chest and she dropped hard against the ground as the goat staggered clumsily away.

She lay there, wishing she could go home.  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Doru standing tensely nearby, ready to help if she were seriously injured.  She was tempted to let him think so, but only for a moment.

She got up and started after the goat again.  It took another two steps, gasping, then turned to fight.  Its head lowered, aiming the small spikes of its horns at her.  It charged, all its remaining strength rallied for one last attack.

If she’d thought about it, she would have frozen.  Instead, her mind a perfect blank, Olivia’s hands braced her spear against the ground and shoved the head in under its thick throat, letting it drive itself headlong into death.

It made a sound, an awful sound.  Its front legs folded underneath it and it slumped towards her.  The tip of her spear ripped through the back of its neck, parting the wool and turning it pink.  It glared at her with muddy, confused eyes.  “Bleh?” it said.

“Please forgive me,” Olivia whispered.

The goat kicked its back legs and toppled drunkenly over on its side.  Its bladder voided.  It died.

Olivia held onto her spear, not trying to pull it free.  She shivered.  She didn’t move.

Doru put his hand on her back.  She hadn’t heard him come up behind her.  “That’s as bad as it gets,” he said.

“Good,” she said tearfully.  “Because that was pretty goddamn bad.”

Doru removed his hand and turned to the others, standing quietly nearby.  “Clean it up,” he ordered.  “I’ll take her home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” she said, although she did.  “I want to see.”

He gazed at her closely, but seemed satisfied with what he saw.  “All right,” he said, pulling out a narrow, much-weathered knife.  “See.”

Olivia watched the animal be butchered.  The heavy pelt pulled free with a wet ripping sound.  The guts were separated into what was useful and what was not.  The meat was hacked free of most of the bones and wrapped in bundles to be carried back.  Very little was left behind.  Nothing was left that could be used.

Doru loaded up the last of the meat and sent it away with Bodual.  He turned, picked up Olivia’s spear, and offered it to her.  “It might not be what you want to hear,” he began, “but you did well tonight.”

“You’re right,” she said, taking her spear.  “I don’t want to hear that.”

His brow furrowed, not with concern, but with conviction.  “It’s important, Olivia.  You’ve helped today to provide for your tribe and the females that bear our young.  You respected the life you took and took it only from need.  Olivia, there is no shame in this death.”

He took her hand, leading her away from the bloody stain on the stones, to a place that overlooked the valley.  “Not everyone can do what you just did.  Liz would like to be a hunter, but she hasn’t got the stomach for it.  Wurlgunn would like to be a hunter, but he doesn’t have the eye for it.  If he weren’t needed so badly, I’d make him stop trying.  I won’t make you hunt again.”  He held her hand in his, looking out over a dark world.  “But a good hunter is new life for the tribe.  You could be a good hunter.”

“I want a bath,” she said.

He sighed, and then took her home.  The tribe was already gathered and the scent of roasting meat pervaded the caverns; there would be a feast and she should be there, but he led her on to the baths without comment and stood by while she stripped away her clothing and tried to wash everything away.  After a moment, he gathered up her bloodied garments and the spear and took them away.  When he returned, the spear had been cleaned and he was naked.

He put the spear down next to the bath and slipped in beside her.  He put his arms around her and leaned against the side of the tub, a tight squeeze for the two of them together.  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” she said.  “I just didn’t know it was like that.  I expected it to be clean and…”  She thought of the butcher’s section of the grocery stores where she shopped, and all those nice, plastic-wrapped pieces of meat, none of which ever looked like it had ever belonged to a living, breathing, bleeding animal.  “I didn’t know I was going to hurt it,” she said in a small voice.  “I’m sorry.  I know how stupid that sounds.”

“I never should have brought you along,” he sighed.  “But I’m desperate.  Tobi was one of our better hunters.  I need someone to replace her.”

“Oh, is that the only reason?” she said with a forced laugh.  “I thought maybe you figured that if you ran a deer over me, no other man would want me.”

“I’d have to run something a lot more impressive than a deer over you for that,” he grunted.  “Anyway, snapping Huuk’s horn off has pretty much made your position on mate-taking clear.  The smarter gullan I can trust to leave you alone.  It’s the dumb ones I worry about.”  He was frowning over her head at the steam rising towards the top of the cave, his mind obviously elsewhere.  “I suppose we have enough meat now that I won’t have to hunt for a few days.  You have a little time to decide whether or not to try again.  No one will blame you if you don’t, you know.”

“No one would dare,” she sniffed.

“That’s probably true.”  There was the faintest hint of a smile in his voice.  “There are some who think that every being is born with a single driving purpose—to be a hunter, a leader, a healer.  I don’t believe that, but I do think a man, or a woman for that matter, should do what he’s best at.  If he happens to be best at different things, so be it.  You are an excellent example.  You are a good mate, a wise healer and a strong leader.  It’s all right if you don’t want to be more.  It’s all right if you do.”

“Thanks,” she said, still thinking of the goat.

He nudged her discretely.  “You were supposed to say, ‘Oh Doru, you’re good at lots of things too,’ and then name them,” he explained.

“You cuddle very well,” she said.

He groaned.  “You’ve been talking to Bodual.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to stand tall and look formidable when your best friend is spreading rumors about how cuddly you are?”

“You don’t want to be the leader anyway.”

He disengaged his arm from her shoulders.  “You’re right about that.”  He glanced at her with a warm smile.  “But you seem to be feeling better.  I need to see that the meat is divided fairly.  You should consider joining the feast.  This was your first hunt and it was successful.  Others will want to praise you.”

“I don’t want to be praised for what I just did.”

He had started to heave himself out of the bath, but hearing this, he dropped back beside her, frowning.  Very gently, he caught her chin in his hand and turned her meet his eyes.  “My father used to tell me, the earth will have what the earth desires.  The earth desired my sister.  The earth desired that sweet female that shared my heart and soul for thirty years.  The earth desired the three sinless infants I was made to sire.  I have learned at last that it does no good to curse the earth.  I hear it calling for the life of my tribe, and I don’t question that call, but I do fight it and I fight it with blood.  Tonight, Olivia, you stood before the hungry earth and pushed it back, yes, with blood.  Now it is done, and here is the only wisdom that I know: The animal’s pain is over, your tribe is fed and the earth has nothing of yours.  There is comfort in that.  Small comfort, maybe, and bitter, but there.”

“I killed it, Doru,” she said bleakly.  “It was just a dumb animal.  It didn’t even know what was happening.”

He pulled her into his embrace and wrapped his wings close around her.

“Okay,” she said at last.  “Okay.  I’m done.”

He made no move to release her.  She closed her eyes and leaned into his body, savoring the warmth and kindness in his touch, savoring even the wet-fur smell of him.

He stroked his hand through her hair once or twice, then held her out at arm’s length and offered her a thin smile.  “Olivia, no one is starving now.  It’s all right to grieve for the life you took tonight.  But it’s all right to keep on eating goat, too.”  He studied her face closely.  “Will you come to the feast?”

Olivia shuddered, covered her face, counted to ten, and finally looked at him again.  “Yes.”

“That’s always been your greatest strength,” he remarked, and got out of the bath.  “Not just to do the things you don’t want to do, but to stand and face the consequences when they’re done.  Olivia, you may never be a hunter, but whatever you are fated for, you surely will be great.”

“Everybody says that,” she said with a sigh.

“Everybody does,” he agreed, pulling her out of the water.  “So you’ve been warned.”

2

Olivia did not hunt, but after that night, she put herself in charge of watching over the few captive goats which the gullan kept for milking, reasoning that every goat whose escape she prevented was one less that Doru would have to hunt down again.  Under Amy’s critical eye, and with the help of several gullan women, a pen was constructed, and as long as she kept their feedbox full and replaced any half-eaten slats, it seemed to be holding them.  It was not exciting work, but it served a purpose and more importantly, it got her out of reach of all males apart from Doru’s hunters, none of whom were any threat to her now that she was officially his mate.

And it gave her plenty of time to sit just as she sat now, gazing up into the night sky at the moon.  She did not move, had not moved, and at times the captive mountain goats forgot she was there and came close enough to brush against her before bounding away and bleating curses at her.  She didn’t notice.

The moon was full tonight.  In fourteen short days, the goddess’s season would be on her, and when she and the Great Spirit had met to conceive the next child, Olivia’s time would be over.  The thought no longer had quite the same sting that it once had.  She still couldn’t see the end of the journey, couldn’t imagine the battle that awaited her in the pool of Bahgree’s waters, or whatever fate came afterwards, win or lose, but she finally thought she would be able, at least, to begin.

A cloud crawled slowly over the face of the moon, and the thought came to Olivia that this was a signal, that Urga had delivered another child into the world, and somewhere among some unseen tribe, there was a new baby with a silvery crest down its perfect back.  “Congratulations,” Olivia said, startling a nearby goat.  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

The clouds grew thicker, dimming the sky, and when the reluctant answer came, silent in the night but roaring like blood in Olivia’s ears, she was not entirely surprised.

“A son.  The Great Spirit breeds only sons with me.”

“Chauvinist.”

“In many ways.”

“Do you love him?”  She was somewhat amused by her own sense of calm, as if speaking to a goddess wasn’t important enough to get excited over.

“He is mine.  My mate.  My creator.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“It is what I have answered.”

Olivia watched the captive goats graze and mutter at each other.

“Do you love him?”  Only the faint inflection made this a question; Urga’s voice was distant and cold as…as moonlight.

“No.”  She smiled faintly.  “Always a bridesmaid.”

Urga overlooked the nonsensical remark.  “Does he know this?”

“I’ve made no secret of it.  You ought to know better than anyone that he doesn’t exactly care what other people think.  I am not required to love him. To quote the man himself, I’m not even required to be conscious.”

“So it is.”  There followed a lengthy pause.  “Why is it then that you seek to give him pleasure more than he takes in his own course?”

“I think the greater question here is, why don’t you?”

Pensive silence.  The goats clacked over stone.

“He spoke of you when last we met.”

Olivia shifted on the rock, looking up to see that the clouds had now almost entirely blackened the moon from sight.  What little smudge of light shone through them only served to make the whole sky seem bruised and baleful.  Uneasily, she said, “I’m sorry about that.”

“Twenty-seven days I have waited with yearning for him, and when at last my eyes behold him, the first words he spoke were of you.”  Softly, meditatively, still without any hint of emotion.

“I’m a novelty,” Olivia said.

“Indeed.  But perhaps you are a novel threat.”

“Just because I can get an orgasm out of him? If that’s all it is, I could tell you what to do.”

“I should not need to concern myself with trivialities.  He has always taken pleasure enough from me in the past.  It will be enough in the future.”

“What about your pleasure?” Olivia asked, and felt the cool appraisal of the heavens.

“I am satisfied by the fulfillment of my purpose.”

“You can’t feel anything else?”

“I can feel vengeance.”

Olivia swallowed, her throat suddenly dry.  “Vengeance is more of an act, not an emotion.”

“Even so.”

“I help him cum because he bothers me less often if he gets more out of our time together and because it’s good practice for this power I’m supposed to be strengthening.  I’ll stop if it’s upsetting for you.”

“…”

“I mean it.”

“…Yes…I believe you do…”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Die.”

Olivia drew back, just as if recoiling another four inches made any difference in the distance between her and the moon.  Urga’s voice still carried no weight of emotion, no inflection of interest.

“But since my mate has commanded this should not be, you may do as you will.  Give him your human pleasures if it amuses you.  At the end of time, he remains my own, my mate, my master.  And you remain yet another of Bahgree’s enticing offspring, easily disregarded, easily destroyed.”

“I don’t want to be your enemy.”

“No, mortal.  You do not.”

“I don’t mean it like that.  I mean I didn’t want any of this to happen.”

Silence.

“If there were a way to lift the curse and save my son without taking Bahgree’s power, I’d do it.  I wasn’t given a choice in any of this!”

The goats bumped each other and grumbled.

“Urga?”

The clouds thinned out and the moon reappeared, broken, but whole and shining.

“Nice talking to you,” she murmured.

There was a rush of wind and the sound of wings.  Doru landed beside her, skidding several feet on the slanted stone.  He looked around, saw only goats, and gave her a curious look.  “Who were you speaking to?”

Olivia shook her head.  “Nobody, I guess.  How’s the hunting?”

“Could be worse, I suppose.  With the females tending traps, the hunters are at least spending more time in the air.  Damark and Borumn couldn’t manage the strain tonight, but Hodrub took three rabbits back to his Liz.  Wurlgunn and Augurr were going to see if they could kill a rua.  Mudmar took the others out on wide patrols.  Sarahjay and Sutung have made three raids on hives already and I think they mean to strike a fourth as soon as they’ve unloaded.  Oh, and I have this for you.”

Doru opened his belt pouch and fanned out a handful of Hershey’s bars.

Olivia made some wordless exclamation and seized them.  “You didn’t go all the way to town, did you?”

“Ha, not even for you.  Sarahjay gave them to me.”  He watched with detached interest as Olivia unwrapped one of the chocolate bars and broke off a square.  “I had one.  Not bad.  Not bam good, but not bad.”

“Bam,” purred Olivia, dissolving the chocolate on her tongue.  “Fucking bam, to quote the vernacular.”  She peered at him, smiling.  “What did you give Sarah J. in exchange?”

“Who says I had to give her anything?  I am tovorak.  She is tribe.  I demanded and she provided.”

“Sure.”  She savored another square.  “No, really, what did you give her?”

“I told her I’d get her a set of bear claws at the next opportunity.  She wants to edge her hunting vest with them.  Savage little beasts, are humans.”  He watched her devour the rest of her first chocolate bar and pocket the rest.  “Of course, there is the little matter of what you intend to give me,” he murmured, fanning his wings covertly.

Olivia reached out and scratched down the center of his broad chest.  “It bears thinking on.  I’ll let you know.”  She hopped up and prepared to descend the steep slope to the game trail below.

He caught her, as she’d known he would, hooking her by the back of her shirt and then sweeping it up and over her head before she had time to defend herself.  When she came back, jumping for it like a child being bullied on the playground, he caught her up and let her tumble them both carefully to the stony ground.  Then he only lay there, hands clasped around her back, which greatly complicated the simple act of pulling her shirt back on.

“Is this going to hurt your wings?” she asked, propping her elbows up on his chest.  “Sharp rocks and all?”

“I could be gravely injured,” he said solemnly.  “Never fly again.”

“Have to get lots of pit rest,” she suggested.  “As Bodual would say.”

“Mm.”  He lifted his head towards her, and she clapped her hand down over his mouth.  “Mm?”

“Not in front of the goats.”

He glanced at the captive beasts, rolled his eyes, and stood up, lifting her with him.  “Name the place,” he invited, catching the wind and cutting high out over the mountainside.

She wrapped her legs around his hips.  “How about right here?”

That caught him by surprise; he faltered on the wing, dropping several feet before righting himself.  “You’re joking, right?  This is a human joke?”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Where’s your sense of self-preservation?” he countered.

She nuzzled against his chest, rolling her hips against his groin and humming in her human imitation of a gulla’s thrumm of arousal.  Despite the broad expression of shock on his face, she could feel him hardening against her.  Any second, he was going to land and rip his loincloth off.

“Hm.”  Doru banked again, then abruptly changed course and shot almost straight up in a wide spiral.

“What are you doing?” she asked, startled.

“If we’re going to do this, I’d feel better if we had some distance between us and the ground.”  He moved one hand from her waist to cup her bottom, rocking her slowly against his hardness as he pulled her patchworked skirt up, up, and over her hips.  “We are going to do this, right?”

Olivia didn’t dare risk a glance behind them.  Instead, she stretched one arm over his shoulder to scratch at the sensitive patch between his wings.

He jerked in the air, then leveled out into a glide, slipping two thick fingers between her thighs to probe expertly at her sex.  Now it was her turn to gasp, thrusting back at his hand and then forward against his hips and the straining of his stiffened cock.  She could feel his fingers penetrating her, rubbing slowly together as they moved in and out of her.

Doru laughed in the back of his throat.  “I guess you weren’t joking after all.  Well, don’t I feel like a fool.”

“Oh,” she panted, her hips working harder against his fingers.  “Was I supposed to scream and demand you put me back down?”

His voice took on a distinctly ragged edge.  “Something…something like that.”  He clenched his jaws, pulled her closer, pumped his hand faster.   “Last…last chance to start screaming,” he warned.  His hips were shoving at her in swift, involuntary movements.

“Are you saying you want to stop?” she countered.

“Ha!  Get…Get me ready,” Doru managed.  His wings were shaking.

Olivia’s hands tugged wildly at the taut folds of leather tied through his belt until she had enough slack to work his cock free.  Trapped between their bodies, she could only grind her naked folds against his shaft, feeling his heat the hammer of his racing pulse throbbing up into her womb.  She rubbed her palm against his glans, slick with the oils of his anticipation, until, with a snarl, he yanked her up, fit her fast against him and buried himself inside her.

Olivia let out a scream for the wind of their wake to swallow as he drove into her, then wrapped her arms around his neck, hooked his legs with hers, and met his thrusts with inexpert vigor in the emptiness of the sky.  He moved her with both hands, sliding her rapidly along the length of his shaft, thrumming and growling and grunting as he flew, and growing ever more ragged  in his movements until he let out a roar of his own. His hips bucked ferociously, and then his wings folded and he broke and fell out of the sky.

They screamed as they fell, the wind howling through their braided voices and lashing them like whips.  She felt him start to cum, the ignition for her own explosive release, and for a few seconds, she knew nothing but the pure carnal bliss of biting, bucking, and clawing at him.  He came again as she came dazedly back to her senses, hammering a second jet of hot cum against her womb, took two fast breaths, and came a third time with a deafening howl.

Then his eyes flew open, his wings slapped out like sails, and they tacked hard against the pull of the earth.  Olivia clung to him, shivering, until he landed with a heavy whump against the sheer face of the chasm entry, his hard body crushing a final, fantastic orgasm out of her with the force of their impact.

They hung, still joined, both of them shaking slightly.

“Wow,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“That was—”

“Intense,” he finished.

They shivered together, pressed flat against the stone.

Doru laughed, a trifle shakily.  “Let’s not do that again anytime soon.”

“Why not?  That was incredible!”

“Yes, it was very nice, but I think we’re looking at the experience from two different perspectives.  Specifically, mine was the looking-down perspective.  You do not want to know how close we came to the trees.”  He eased back, glanced behind him, and jumped to the aerie.

While Doru made adjustments to his loincloth, Olivia dropped her skirt and smoothed it down, then opened her belt-pouch and quested inside.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I melted my Hershey bars.”

He burst out laughing.

“There you are!”  Bodual swooped in low and landed beside them.  “I had just about decided you’d both gone in for the night.  Where have you been?”

“Flying.”

“Yeah, but…”  Bodual trailed off, his nostrils flaring as he took in their mingled scents.  “Well, damn,” he said, hurt.  “Here I’ve been hunting.”

“Did you get anything?”  Doru shot Olivia a look of apology.  “Anything at all?”

“Last I saw of Mudmar and his patrol, they were all flying empty, but Hodrub went by not long ago with a young deer.  Sutung and Sarahjay are back at the hive, and Wurlgunn crashed into the side of a cattle den chasing rua ages ago and went home.”

“Is he all right?” Olivia asked, alarmed.

“Is he ever?  He didn’t get the rua, but no one saw him, so I count that a victory.  He ought to be impressing his Beth with the harrowing tale even as we speak.  I assumed Olivia was looking after the goats,” he added with a pointed glare.  “But it seems she was only looking after one goat-head.”

“You wouldn’t have wanted to be there,” Doru said, and Olivia favored him with an amused look.  “It was scary.”

Bodual’s ears pricked forward.  “Scary?” he echoed.

Doru started to say something and gave a bone-cracking yawn instead.  He looked mildly surprised at himself, and then shrugged his wings.  “Heh.  Scary and tiring.  I feel the way the sky smells after lightning cuts through it.”  He clapped Olivia on the shoulder, bent to kiss the curve of her jaw.  “Thank you, beloved mate, for a truly unique experience.  I am never doing that again.”

“Good night, Doru.”  She watched him make his descent, and turned to give Bodual what she hoped was an innocent smile.

His ears were still cocked at her and his expression was one of guarded interest.  “What did you do?”

“We were flying.”

“No, I mean, what did you do after that?”

“There was no after.  We were flying.”

“You were—” His eyes widened to show the whites.  “Are you serious?  You did it in the sky?”

Olivia yawned, bit her knuckles, and nodded sleepily.  “And I’m never doing it again, either.  I feel the way a tree looks after lightning strikes it.”  She thought about this, amended, “I feel the way a tree looks while lightning is striking it.”  She smiled broadly.  “Good night, Bodual.”

She drew her claws and turned her back on his incredulous expression.

He caught up to her on the chasm wall, keeping easy pace as she descended and staring at her until all light was shut away.  “Seriously,” he said.

She laughed.  “Seriously, Bodual.  Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“You could have been killed!”

“But what a way to go.  And don’t look so shocked,” she said. “You’d have been up there in an instant, if I’d offered.”

“The hell you say,” he replied, and he sounded sincere.  “I can’t count the number of times mating with you has knocked me unconscious, and that’s right here in the safety of my own lair.  You couldn’t get me in the air for it if you tied me to the shaft of a giant spear and threw me.”

She started to giggle, shaking on the wall.  “Okay, now you have to carry me,” she commanded.

His hands found her in the darkness and lifted her easily against him.  She wrapped him in her arms and legs and leaned her head on his shoulder.  He was small, for a gulla, and he fit her just right.  She hummed sleepily.

“Oh stop that,” he said, beginning to climb again.  “You and I both know you don’t mean it.”

She hummed louder.

“You humans think you can get away with anything just because you couple like demons.”

“We can.”

She dozed as they dropped down the length of the great chasm, sleepily content, glowing with the heat and rush of her airborne exertions.  She knew she could charge herself again with vitality simply by reaching out her power and trapping Bodual against her, but the thought of honest sleep in a warm pit beside Doru’s hot, solid body was overwhelmingly attractive to her.  She sighed.

“I didn’t hear my name in that,” Bodual remarked.

“In what?” she mumbled, wondering if she’d spoken any of her errant thoughts aloud.

“That sigh of sensual completion.  That was all Doru.  Big jerk,” he added affably.  “‘Come on, Bodual, time to hunt.  New mothers need meat if babies want milk.  I’ll go check on Olivia, you stand here and look for deer.’”

She snickered.

“Yeah, you laugh at me.  Go on, I can take it.”

“You can take lots of things.  Bodual Athagarr.”  Bodual the Enduring.

He swelled his chest immediately.  “Ha.  Damn right.”  He struck the ground and leapt back from the wall, setting her before him and taking her hand in the darkness.  “Olivia Issugul, Bodual Athagarr, and let’s see…Doru ya’a Ibnal.”  Doru the Damn-Fine Cuddler, roughly.

“He’ll hate that.”

“Aw, he just wants you to think he hates that.  He loves it, really.  You should see him when I’m teasing him.  ‘Such a fine cuddler,’ I say.  ‘Cuddles like a baby bear.  Big and warm and soft and cuddly.’”  He lowered his voice in a fair imitation of Doru.  “‘Enough of that, curse you.’  But then he struts.”

They could see the light from the common cave ahead, and Bodual released her hand.  He said loudly, “It must be gratifying to know that he’s good at something, since he’s turned into such an unreliable hunter.”

“That’s right, snap ‘em, you whelp.”  Doru’s cheerful voice emanated from within the commons.  “Jealousy makes your fur fall out, you know.”

Bodual and Olivia entered the commons to see Doru relaxing on a bench with a can of Coors.

“What happened to bone-weary exhaustion?” Olivia teased, falling beside him.  “I feel like I could sleep for ages.”

“Me, too, but I wanted to brag about it first.  Unfortunately, I don’t see Damark here and no one else would ever believe me.  So then I was going to head off to sleep, but there was only one can of my favorite thumperjuice left, and I didn’t want anyone who didn’t appreciate it to drink it.”

“I see.”

Bodual took the can out of Doru’s hand and took an experimental sip.  “I don’t taste any difference,” he observed.

“You are precisely the kind of inexperienced fool I am attempting to save this thumperjuice from,” Doru replied, taking his can back with an impressive swipe of his huge hand.

“Well, I don’t.” Bodual shrugged.  “It all tastes the same to me.”

Doru opened his mouth to expound upon the virtues of the various brands of beer, and there came a sudden volley of shouts rolling down the corridor.  He sprang to his feet, his wings snapping out and hackles raised as Yawa burst through the doorway, her eyes white with fear and panic.

“The Beast!” she screamed, pointing back down the tunnel.  “Hurry!  The Beast has killed Wurlgunn!”

3

Olivia had not managed so much as one running step before Doru seized her by the arm and swung her behind him.  Then he was running, spear in hand, shoving Yawa bodily into the wall as he passed her.  Olivia raced after him, dodging Yawa’s grasping hands as the gulla tried shrilly to explain.

She could hear Cheyenne’s defiant screams long before they reached the hide flap that separated the mountain.  The acoustics of the caverns were misleading; she knew Doru would take the wrong path towards the point he believed the sounds emanated.  She darted down the correct passage as he disappeared into the darkness, and ran to Cheyenne’s room.

The first thing she saw within the small cave was not Cheyenne at all, but Tina.  Olivia seized the doorway and stopped rigid as her horror-stricken mind underwent the queer defense of blocking out perception of the color red—for a long, frozen moment, she believed Tina was covered with milk.

Slowly, her senses melted back to normal, and Tina struggled with a writhing, gasping male, both of them painted with blood.  Olivia could still hear Cheyenne screaming, but the sound was distant, as if it came from a closed room at the end of a long hall.  She stepped stiltedly towards Tina, craning her head to see the face of the male.  She saw his opened throat first, the edges ragged with matted fur; she could see the meat of his body pulsing beneath a steady rush of blood.  When she could move her eyes again, it was to see the face of Wurlgunn, almost unrecognizable with contortions of pain.  He had chewed his lips to shreds.  His claws were sunk into the rock of the ground in a vain effort to be still, but he could not stop bucking.

“Now, goddammit, bring it now!” Tina shouted, and the world snapped back into focus.

Horumn ran to Tina’s side, holding a spool of fishing line and clutching a long bone needle in the other.  “It is the best I could find, healer,” she was saying, and that was bad, because it was the first time old Horumn had ever acknowledged that Tina was the healer.

“Hold him down!”  Tina reared back, saw Olivia and jerked her head crudely behind her.  “Thugg!” she ordered.  “Get Thugg!”

Olivia tore her eyes from Wurlgunn and saw, for the first time, the huddled form of another male, leaned against the wall with both hands clamped down over his thigh.  Thick blood poured in spurts between Thugg’s fingers; the whole of his left leg seemed soaked with it.

Thugg looked up at her through agony-slit eyes.  “What is tourniquet?” he rasped.

“I can’t leave!” Tina barked.  “Get his leg!”

Olivia shoved herself out of the doorway and flew across the cave.  She couldn’t have made it in one leap, but she didn’t feel her feet strike the ground.  She fell beside Thugg, reaching for his belt only to realize that he was completely naked.  “What—” It wasn’t important; he was bleeding to death.  “Doru!” she yelled over her shoulder.  “Give me your belt and come here!”

“Where in the hell are you?” she heard him roar, his voice black with frustration.

“Someone go and get him!” she commanded, slapping her hands down over Thugg’s.  His blood battered at her with physical force.

She sensed Doru without seeing him, and shouted to command his attention before he could lunge at Cheyenne.  “I need your belt!  Get over here!”

At once, he was there, pressing his belt into her hands.  “What do I do?” he asked.

Olivia wrapped the belt around Thugg’s thigh, snug against the join of the hip, stood up, planted her foot on his stomach and cinched it as tight as she could.  Thugg grunted, but the flow of blood between his fingers slowed visibly.  “Hold this,” she said.  “As tight as you can.”

Doru obeyed, pressing one hand over the wound for leverage, the muscles of his arm bulging and locking as he drew another two inches of slack out of Olivia’s tourniquet.  It stopped bleeding almost at once.  “He’ll lose the leg if we keep it this way,” he said calmly.

“He’ll lose his life if we don’t,” she shot back.

“I need…my leg,” Thugg groaned.

“I need bandages!” Olivia called.

“I need them first!” Tina shouted.  “And get that fucking knife away from her!”

Although conscious of Cheyenne’s screams, Olivia had not yet so much as looked for her.  Now, exchanging a startled glance with Doru at the word knife, she turned around.

Cheyenne had shoved herself upright against the wall, her legs twisted out uselessly before, good only to prop her weight back.  Her bare body gleamed with firelight, sweat and blood; her pregnant stomach heaved, casting shadows over the scarred and misshapen sticks of her legs.  She was holding onto a hunting knife with white-knuckled force, and Olivia remembered again the terrible strength in those arms.

When Cheyenne saw Olivia’s eyes on her, her face split in a wide grin.  She beckoned with the gore-striped blade of the knife.  “Come and get it, bitch,” she panted.

“No!” she shouted, not in answer, but to keep Doru from lunging for the pit.  She could feel his body tense beside her, but she dared not take her eyes from Cheyenne.  “Stay with Thugg.”  She stood up.

Doru’s wings struck out, an empty show of power.  “Stay away from her!”

She walked carefully towards the pit, both hands held up and palms out.

“Get back, Olivia!” Doru roared.  When she continued to approach the pit, he cast about for his spear, started to reach for it with his bloody hand.

She swept the weapon neatly aside with her foot.  “Doru, the babies.”

“Fuck the babies!” Tina snarled, throwing her whole body against her struggling, howling patient.  “Get that knife away from her!”

Cheyenne didn’t seem even to have heard Tina; her whole body had gone steel-rigid at Olivia’s calm voice.  Now she unlocked her jaws and unleashed a blistering shriek of rage.  “You stupid fur-fucking cunt!  Don’t you dare try to save me!”

Doru’s voice shook the foundations of the mountain: “Leave her alone, Olivia!  Someone give me my goddamn spear!”

Cheyenne’s eyes blazed as Olivia gained another step, but with frightening speed the appearance of rage became a ghastly mockery of good humor.  “We could have been friends, you know,” she said, giving her that furious, skull-faced grin.  “We could have helped each other.  We could have escaped.  But no.  You wanted to be the good slave.  You wanted to throw in with the furries.  Well, that’s just fine.  Did you say you wanted the babies?  Here you go, honey.  Let me get ‘em for ya.”

Olivia sprang, but the knife was faster, twisting in the air and punching through the swollen bulge of Cheyenne’s belly.  Cheyenne threw back her head, screaming with triumph and pain, her hand working like the treadle of a sewing machine, spurts of pale birthing waters washing the gore from her ruined flesh.

Olivia dove, her spirit flying before her from the force of shock alone, and once free of her puppet, saw the fire of Cheyenne’s soul still blazing even as it began to flicker and fail; she could see the twin-lights of unborn life, the spark of their life-force bleeding out through a dozen tiny wounds.

Dying.

4

Olivia put her puppet hands on the hard flesh of Cheyenne’s body, knocking them both to the softened floor of the pit.  She could hear a distant and unimportant sound, like the snap of wet wood on the fire; she could feel a dim and insignificant itching in her puppet’s back.  She flew further back, away from the range of physical sensation.  She ignored the purpling bruise that spread over her own radiant shell below, and braided together great knots of healing power, pouring it directly into Cheyenne’s punctured womb.

She might as well have poured a cup of water onto a raging house fire.  The light of life continued to fade.  There was a sound of wailing, helpless death, like chimes all around her spirit ears; she could feel the souls of the unborn straining to be free of pain.

Olivia channeled more in desperate panic, digging at the reserves of her power until she could feel herself weakening.  The light of bleeding life finally began to slow, but did not stop, and Olivia had given until she was pumping her own life force weakly into the ruined husk of Cheyenne’s womb.

She forced her puppet mouth to work, shaping words she could not hear:  “Someone take my shoulders!”

Dim light brushed against her puppet far below.  She shaped a net with her dying energies and slapped a great bolt of life free of her unseen partner.  At once, color and sound exploded through her spirit senses.  She threw out a patch of power, strengthening the unborn life, and shouted again, “Someone else!  Quickly!”

Two flames came to her.  She tapped them both, knocking them away, and finally stilled the slow bleed from the trembling light of the twins.

Olivia dropped like a stone, crashed into her puppet, and opened her eyes.  Someone sprawled unconscious beside her; two gullan were staggering back from the pit.  Cheyenne writhed slowly, her teeth bared and eyes staring, but all that Olivia could seem to see was the bloody chasm of her stomach.  “She’s dying!” she cried.  “They’ve got to come out!”

Tina’s voice was hoarse and brutal.  “I!  Can’t!  Leave!”

Olivia squeezed her eyes shut and saw, not Cheyenne or the knife or even Wurlgunn with his throat gushing, but the anguished, baffled eyes of a dying goat.  She opened them again, her heart no more than a scorched stone in her chest, and shouted, “I need a knife!”

She sensed more than saw the broad, black shape of Doru’s body as he leapt to the pit beside her.  He seized Cheyenne’s limply flailing wrist, snapped it (Olivia would have given anything not to have heard Cheyenne’s scream when he did so, to have known that she was still alive and aware enough to feel), and pried the hunter’s knife from her twitching fingers.  “Will this do?” he asked.

“It…It should be clean—” she began.

“What the fuck for?” Tina snarled, her voice cracking.  “Just get the babies out!  Yawa, get over here, goddammit, I’m losing him!”

Olivia unlocked one hand and took the knife as if it were something that could twist and bite on its own.  Doru slapped Cheyenne’s tossing arm away, planted his knee on her chest, and pressed her flat in the pit.  “Where do you want my hands?” he asked.

She could only look at him.

“Don’t try to cut,” Tina called.  “Skin rips.  Score the surface and have Doru pry her open.  Be careful.  Bring me the iron!  You!  The iron!”

Olivia put the tip of her knife into one of the wounds that now gaped, sluggishly leaking bloody fluids.  She drew the knife down a few inches, but there was no sense of resistance; the skin just seemed to fall open, exposing a pool of blood hemmed in by layers of yellow fat.

Cheyenne’s knee pressed up against Olivia’s hip, then shoved slowly forward.  She uttered a low, belching groan and Olivia froze, staring at her over Doru’s huge thigh.  She could feel her hands wanting to shake.

“Olivia.”

She looked at him, her mouth working.

“Open her, Olivia,” Doru said quietly.  “I’ll do it if I have to, but I don’t know how.”

Olivia wrenched her eyes back to the hard-swollen stretch of torn skin that separated her from the weak life beneath.  It heaved with Cheyenne’s fading breath.  She stared until it lost its meaning, until it became an inanimate obstructive layer, like a leather blanket, something she could cut and part without fear.  She drew in a deep breath, steadied her hand, and unzipped Cheyenne’s flesh in one smooth movement.

Doru’s hands flexed, opening the wound like an eye that wept bloody water.  Olivia stabbed the knife into the bedding and reached inside, her fear-cold hands burning in the grateful heat of Cheyenne’s body.  She found the sac of the uterus, probed until she found the ragged cuts of the knife, and slipped her hand inside, tearing the opening to admit her.  She felt hot mats of fur and faint movement.  She cupped a head, let her hand drift down over fragile bands of tiny wings, and drew the baby out in a wash of amniotic fluid.

“Take him,” she said, and someone snatched the baby from her and out of her sight.  Olivia reached again, aiming for just a glimpse of dark fur in the bloody soup of Cheyenne’s womb.  She found the baby, felt resistance as she pulled, and tracked the slow tail of the umbilical cord.  She could feel it pulsing in her hand as she unwrapped it from the baby’s neck and arm.

She heard an infant cry, and for a confused moment, thought it came from the cavity of gore before her.  She hesitated, felt the soft reality of a tiny body in her hands, and drew it carefully out.  It was a girl, limp and lifeless, her dark down streaked with silvery scars where the knife had pierced her.

“Give her to me.”  Doru put out his hands and Olivia laid in the infant in them, appalled by the difference in size between this child and her own newborn Somurg.  One of Doru’s fingers was longer than the baby’s entire arm.

Doru put his mouth over the baby’s face and sucked in sharply.  He turned, spat a wad of bloody mucus into the bedding, then put his mouth against her again and breathed—a faint puff of air—as his thumbs massaged the tiny body.  Olivia could see the roll of her ribs beneath the thin pelt, the swell of her chest as Doru puffed his breath inside her.

The baby’s fist jerked.  Doru lifted his head as the baby whimpered, kicked one foot, and put out a weak, unhappy cry.

Olivia felt herself sagging with relief.  She looked down, saw the hilt of the hunter’s knife thrusting up from the bedding, and took it to punch off and cut the cords still tethering the twins to the lifeless body of their mother.

Doru stared into the baby’s tiny face as she cried.  He stirred when Olivia started to stand, but only to release the infant into the waiting hands of a female.  He stayed where he was, now gazing without expression down into Cheyenne’s open, staring eyes.  He did not speak.

“Get him bandaged,” Olivia heard Tina say.  “Keep the wound clean and dry, change the bandages every two hours.  Get him some tea and lots of meat and get him a blanket.  He doesn’t move from this spot until I say it’s okay.  If his eyes are open, he drinks, understand?”

A small chorus of agreement.

Tina stood and faced off against Thugg, glaring.  “What about you?”

Thugg groaned, with misery as much pain.  “I’ll live,” he said.  “For the moment.  I might need you when Doru’s done with me.”

“The bleeding’s stopped.  Yawa, stitch this up, and then we’ll get the belt off.”  Footsteps.  “Are you all right?  Jesus, she really had a whack at you!”

“Huh?”  Olivia started to turn, but felt Tina’s warm, wet hands on her back forcing her to face away.  “What?”

“Your back,” Doru said, without looking around.  “The beast cut hell out of you while you were…touching her.”

“I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but you should be dead.”

Olivia tried to remember if she had used her power against herself at any point.  “Am I okay?”  She tried to reach around, but Tina forestalled her.

“No, but you’re not bleeding, either.  We’ll get you some antibiotics and you should be okay in a week or two.  Obviously, she didn’t hit your spine.”  She stepped away.  “I need to see the babies and…Jesus, someone better tell Beth.”

“Go to work,” Olivia answered.  She gazed at Doru’s back, then reached out and brushed at the base of his wing.

He looked up at her, glanced back at Cheyenne, then stood up and faced her.  “I would have killed her,” he said.  “I have questioned your wisdom in allowing her to live almost continuously since the day you…slipped on your spikes.  I came here to kill her at the first sight of her.”  He dropped his eyes to his hands, turning them in meditative silence.

“Doru—”

“As if two innocent lives were a fair price to be free of the Beast,” he went on bitterly.  “What did it matter when we had four already, four more strongly kindled.  What did it matter, two new young, when weighed against the poison of the Beast?”  He dropped his hands, stared at Olivia almost curiously.  “How am I supposed to live alongside that child, knowing that I meant to trade her for the sake of convenience and quiet?  How can I meet her eyes?”

“You saved her,” Olivia said.  “I couldn’t have done that.  I couldn’t have even guessed how.”

He dismissed that with a cut of one hand, turning back to look on Cheyenne.  “There have been no good births for twenty-eight years,” he said.  “This cruel life has lent us strange talents.”

Olivia slipped around his wing and pressed up against his side.  He put his arm around her mechanically.  She did not look at the body, but she let him brood on it in silence.

Finally, “Olivia, I feel…awful.”

She waited.

“I believed I could sacrifice two lives just to be rid of one more.  That was wrong and I always knew it was wrong, deep down.  But…I think maybe I was wrong to want to kill this woman in the first place.  I have forgotten…even she has been precious to someone.  Olivia, what have we done?  What are we still doing?  How many more will we bring back and ruin?”  He started to speak again, then slowly folded up, ground his fists against his face and began to sob.

Olivia ran her hands over his head, rubbed the base of his horns where the skin was thinnest, stroked the thick pelt of his shoulders.  Soft as otter, she thought again, as she did her best to comfort him.

His arms came up and wrapped like iron around her waist.  He pressed his face into her hip, his tears bleeding slow heat over her clothing.  “I want to ready her for burial,” he said. “Teach me what to do.”

“Will it make you feel any better?”

He shuddered.  “Something has to.”

Olivia used charcoal from the hearth to draw examples of the mystic-seeming spirals and symbols she had used once when painting Judith.  She did not try to invent meanings for them and Doru did not ask.  He studied them in silence, asking only where they should go upon Cheyenne’s body, and then began the terrible task of washing away the blood.  Olivia hovered near him for a moment, but he was deep in his own world, and so she crossed the room and knelt beside Thugg as Yawa finished stitching the deep gash in his thigh.  When Yawa retreated, Olivia was there to bandage him.  Thugg closed his eyes and looked supremely unhappy.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked finally.

Thugg sighed and looked over at Wurlgunn where he lay panting on the floor by the fire.  “I want to die,” he said.  “I can’t believe I was so stupid.  I killed the Beast.  I may still have killed Wurlgunn.  I nearly killed you.  Those babies are drawn moons too early and it is all…my fault.”

Olivia waited, fitting the final bandage tight and pinning it in place.  She slackened Doru’s belt and threaded it back through the buckle.  Thugg was silent as she poured out a basin of water and returned to him, beginning to wash the blood from the fur of his thigh.

“I came to see—” he began, and trailed off.  He was quiet for several minutes.  The only sounds were that of water pattering over Cheyenne’s flesh, of the coarse cloth grooming through Thugg’s pelt, of Wurlgunn’s thick breaths.  “I came to see…a female.  Didn’t matter who, as long as it wasn’t Chugg.  Horumn met me at the tunnels, told me Furluu and Golgun were off fawning over the new babies and Victoria and Carla were occupied.  They don’t have a good waiting place here, so she told me I could wait in the women’s commons.”

Thugg shrugged awkwardly, looked back over his shoulder at Wurlgunn.  “I sat there for a while, but in the end, I decided it wasn’t worth waiting around for.  I figured I could go out, maybe hunt a goat, come back and try again.  I thought…”  He shook his head, grunted something that might have been laughter.  “I thought, ‘I bet it’s been a while since the Beast had any meat.’  Mothers need meat in their last moons even more than milk, they say.”

He lapsed into silence again, now staring bleakly at the pit where Doru’s broad body mostly blocked the sight of the corpse from view.  “She was lying there.  She wasn’t moving.  Her eyes were open, but I could have sworn…I almost turned around and left.  I don’t know why I didn’t.  I felt…sorry for her.  I asked Yawa if I could try and feed her.  Yawa said I could.”

“I was grateful,” Yawa broke in.  She was hovering at the doorway, looking almost as miserable as Thugg.  “I hadn’t had any chance at all to feed myself since yesterday.  I told him to beware her, but I didn’t think she’d even know he was there.  She hasn’t said a word in days and days.  I thought her mind was gone.” Yawa covered her face briefly, then put her hands out as though in supplication.  “I left them alone.”

“She didn’t do anything at first,” Thugg continued.  “I kept myself at arm’s length, chewed each bite for her.  She ate after a while.  Eventually, she looked at me.”  He was shaking his head slowly, unaware of it, in mute denial of his own words.  “She asked me who I was.  I told her.  She asked me what I was doing there.  I told her…I don’t know why.  She told me she’d…do something for me, if I wanted.  I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

“She can be convincing,” Olivia found herself saying.

“I took off my belt and my coverings.  I knew I had the knife.  I put them beside the pit.  I thought it was far enough out of her reach.  But she managed to get closer without me noticing…that is, while we were shifting to…it doesn’t matter.  I didn’t know what she meant to do.  I pretty much did what she told me.  She put me right where she wanted me.  I…I actually closed my eyes.”  Disbelief momentarily colored the emotionless recital.  His hand moved to scratch restlessly at his thigh.

“I didn’t know she had the knife until she stabbed me with it.  Even then, I couldn’t understand where she got it.  I started shouting, I think.  I have no idea where Wurlgunn came from.  I don’t think he knew she had the knife, either.  He jumped in the pit and fell back so suddenly, I thought…I don’t know, maybe he tripped or she pushed him, or something.  He was choking, that’s what I thought.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him.  Then Tina and the others came in and Yawa ran off screaming.  I am so sorry.”

Olivia put her red-stained cloth back in the basin and patted his shoulder.  “You can go, if you want to.  Find someone to stay with you, someone who can change your bandages and feed you tea.  Water, too, but as much tea as you can get.  Keep off your leg for at least ten days, or you’ll tear the stitches.”

Thugg sighed and clawed up the wall until he was standing, balanced on one leg.  He looked around hopelessly, and one of the older females detached herself from the doorway and slipped beneath his arm.  They hobbled out, and Olivia crept over to peer down at Wurlgunn.

“What does it look like?” Doru asked quietly.  He was not watching her; his full attention appeared directed at the task of cleaning the body.

Olivia knelt and carefully peeled back one edge of the compress.  The wound was a ghastly thing, but even she could see that it was not as bad as it might easily have been.  It was only four inches long, but deep and ugly, and if it had been even an inch wider, it might have struck the jugular.  Tina’s stitches were thick and uneven, but would hold for the moment.

“Olivia?  Tell me.”  Doru’s voice betrayed only a slight undercurrent of strain.  She had no doubt that his hands on the corpse would be steady, even as the set of his body betrayed his fantastic tension.

“It could be worse.”

Wurlgunn’s eyes fluttered and opened.  He brought her into focus with obvious effort, and then tried on a shaky smile.  “Olivia,” he croaked.  “Thank the Great Spirit.  Now I will be well.”

“That’s very flattering,” she said gently.  “But I’m not going to do anything.”  She pressed the gauze back in place and took his hand, encouraged when he squeezed.  “Do you know what happened?”

“Vaguely.”  He closed his eyes to collect his thoughts, as though the sense of sight were too great a distraction for recall.  “Anita,” he said at last.  “She makes pictures with string.  She’s good at it.  I thought if I had some string, it would make her happy.  I was talking to…Crugunn, I think.  I heard shouting, came running.  Thugg was on the ground.  I didn’t see the blood.”

“You didn’t see the knife?”

He laughed, a dry rustle like autumn leaves, his eyes still shut.  “Yes, oddly enough.  I did see the knife.  It just…didn’t stop me.  How stupid is that?”  He worked his eyes open and smiled at her.  “Any other day, I would have tripped over my damn feet and fallen over until my brain caught up, but no.  I jumped right in the pit.  I remember thinking, ‘Wait, knives can cut’, and then there was heat.  No pain, just heat.  I couldn’t breathe.  I fell backwards.  I remember wondering if I was going to break my wings and what would happen to my Beth if I couldn’t hunt for her.”  His voice cracked to dust on the last word and he closed his eyes again.

Olivia watched him rest for a little while, then backed away and let one of the hovering gullan take her place and try to feed him sips of tea.  That proved too painful to watch; she returned to Doru.

He had moved the soaked bedding to a pile beside the pit and arranged Cheyenne on the leather cover.  She looked very little and white, the scars and calluses built by the mountain standing out in stark relief against her sun-starved body.  Doru had combed through her hair with his claws and arranged it in a braid over her shoulder, just as she’d done once for Judith.  Her legs were together, her arms folded in a posture of sleep above the ruined recess of her lower body, which he had tried to stitch together.  Her face, white with death, was still twisted with fury and pain and the eyes would not remain closed.

“Is it all right?” he asked.

She nodded.  She didn’t trust herself to speak.  Her heart was a sick well of sorrow and shame and evil relief that the worst had happened and now things could get better.

“I need something to wrap her in, when I’ve painted her.”  Doru put his hands on his thighs and gazed at the body meditatively.  “I mean to stay with her.  Is there anyone else who will make the grave?”

“I’ll find someone,” she promised.  She laid her hand on his shoulder and he reached up absently to cover her hand with his own.

“We even called her a beast,” he muttered and shook his horns.  “Is this what you felt when you…slipped on your spikes?”

“Something very similar, I think.”

He released her and crouched lower.  “You had the power somehow to heal the babies.”

She waited.

He turned and looked back at her from the very corner of one eye.  “Did you have the power to kill her?”

“Probably.”

He studied her in silence for a long time, and then looked back into Cheyenne’s still furious face.  “If you had been stronger, if you’d had more people here to draw from…I think you would have tried to heal her.”

She said nothing.

“You don’t understand how incomprehensible this is to us…to all of us.  This thing you call compassion.”  He frowned down at the corpse, running his claws over the leather pit cover as though wishing to cut it, cut anything.  “We’ve indulged it, because you are Vorgullum’s mate.  We believed it made you weak.  I believed that.”

She wanted to touch him again, but something in the tight posture of his body warned her from the attempt.  She could only stand and be silent as he searched the mirror of Cheyenne’s staring eyes.

At last his head bent.  “Go on, Olivia.  Bring me paint for her funereal markings and bindings to cover her with.  And then leave us alone.  If there is such a thing as a soul, hers may still be close.  I have much to apologize for.”

5

Olivia did not exactly ask anyone to prepare a grave for Cheyenne, but she stopped the first male she saw hovering without the women’s tunnels and told him she wanted two gullan to start digging.  He obeyed without hesitation, and Olivia went back to find something she could use as a shroud.

Olivia came only as far as the doorway of the death room.  She passed the paints and a sleeping bag in to Rumm and withdrew to the women’s commons.  She had not been seated long when she realized that Yawa was crouching submissively a short distance away and that Tina was standing beside her.  She lifted her head, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for one or the other to speak.

“Do you want to be alone?” Tina asked.

Olivia thought about it.  She shivered.  “No.”

Tina and Yawa exchanged a glance.  Tina came and sat beside Olivia on the bench.  Yawa came forward on all fours, and crouched low again when she reached Olivia’s knee.

“What…What do you think about the babies?” Olivia asked.

Tina hesitated.  “They’re breathing, for now.  Honey, I’m not going to lie.  Even in a hospital, this would be bad.  The boy’s chances are better.  The girl is smaller…more severely scarred…it doesn’t look good for either one of them, but for right now, they’re holding their own.  Can I ask you something?”

Olivia nodded, studying the shadows cast by her feet on the floor.

“How long have you been able to do this stuff?”

“A while.”

When no greater answer was forthcoming, Tina frowned.  “How are you able to do it at all?  I mean, have you always been able to do this?”

Olivia contemplated her toes in silence.  After several long seconds had passed, she turned her head and looked Tina wearily in the eye.  “Seriously, you want to know?”

Tina’s brows furrowed slightly.  She nodded, visibly steeling herself.

“I’m fucking the Great Spirit.”

Yawa drew back.

“Is that all?”  Tina hadn’t so much as batted an eye.

“That’s the gist of it.”

“Oh.”  Tina rubbed at the back of her neck.

“Why?”

“I was kinda hoping this was something I could learn.  I don’t suppose…?”

“No.  The Spirit is willing, as they say, but your flesh is weak.”  Olivia thought about it.  “And Urga would kill you.”

Yawa made a grumble of agreement, still staring at her.

They sat together in silence.  The fire hummed and ate the coals.

Tina said, “Are you going to be okay?”

“I couldn’t do more.  I gave everything I had.  That’s all there was.  I probably could have killed every person in that whole cave, but I couldn’t fix them any better than I did, and it took three other—”  Olivia sat up straight.  “Did I hurt someone?  I did, didn’t I?”

“Bodual passed out, but he’s okay now.  I didn’t see who the other two were, but they walked out by themselves, so I guess they’re all right.  A little shaky, but all right.”  Tina put her hand on Olivia’s knee and squeezed.  “And the babies are alive now.  Every hour, their chances get better.  We’ll be taking it day by day for a long time, but if we can get them to eat and keep them warm, they might have a chance.”

“Where are they now?” Olivia asked.  Her breasts ached, as if with grief; she had no more milk to give.

“Liz has the girl for now, but I don’t know that she can handle her along with Sunuu and Levonal.  Amy took the boy, but it’s the same story, you know.  She’s still got Smugg and Somurg.  Anita might start producing pretty soon, and until then, some of the older babies are just going to have to eat pulp.  I know you didn’t want them weaning, but…”

She wanted to protest, wanted to jump up shouting, ‘No!  If you wean them, they’ll die!’  But what was the alternative?  Give up on Cheyenne’s twins now, before they could steal milk from the mouths of the others?  Hopelessness welled up as tears; Olivia covered her face and wept.

The other two exchanged glances.

Yawa scowled, patted her clumsily on the back.  “You waste your pity on that animal.”

“I agree.”  Tina leaned back and folded her arms.  “For God’s sake, she nearly killed Wurlgunn.  She nearly killed you!  Twice!  At what point do you look up and say, ‘You know what?  She wasn’t very nice!’”

“She wasn’t very nice,” Olivia agreed, knuckling her eyes dry.  “And she died in pain in a room filled with people who hated her.”

Yawa grunted, but looked less sure of herself.

Tina continued to frown at her.  “Horumn’s right.  You do feel too much.”  She switched to English.  “If I had a mirror, I’d show you the scars on your back where she stabbed you.  They ought to name that little girl after you, and maybe every time you heard her called, you’d remember that you had to save her life from her fucking evil mother.”

“They should name them both for you,” Yawa added blackly, also in English.  “And every time they speak those names, perhaps it will remind them of the shameful way they robbed you of your mate, pestered you with challenge, and then needed you to save two lives.”

Tina recoiled sharply, blinking, and then burst out laughing.  “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she said, wiping at her eyes.  “You speak human really well, Yawa.”

“You learned our speech in just a few moons,” Yawa said with a shrug.  “Did you think none of us could learn yours in a year?  Ha!”  She switched back to gullan.  “But this way is easier for me.  You may continue in your birth tongue if you like.  I can follow.”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Olivia said.

Tina scowled at her.  “You are just determined to blame yourself, aren’t you?  It wasn’t your fault, dammit!”

“No,” said Yawa quietly.  “It was mine.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

Yawa met Tina’s frustrated eyes coolly.  “I should not have left her,” she said.  “But I did, and I confess that I did so not because I did not think her capable of any action, but because I did not care what happened to her.  I thought the Beast might easily have some demon left in her.  In the deep places in my mind, I even suspected she might allow that demon to come out if she were alone with a male, and I may have left them precisely to let that game play out, to provoke the killing hand.”

“Wrong hand,” Tina muttered, and Yawa nodded, dropping her eyes.

“I…It was a foolish thing to do, and an evil whim that urged it on.  If there was a demon in that cave, it fed on me, not the human.  If her young ones die, it is I who must dig.”  She lapsed into unhappy silence.

“And you,” Tina added, looking crossly at Olivia.  “You’re sitting there thinking about Cheyenne.  After all this, you are still feeling sorry for her.”

“Someone has to.”

Tina muttered something uncouth under her breath, but Yawa only looked more thoughtful.

Olivia brushed back her bangs and said, “Tina, if this were a movie, who would you feel sorriest for?”

Tina opened her mouth to snap something, then frowned and knit her brows.  “Come to think of it…Okay, I’m beginning to see your point.”   Her voice softened.  “But look, hon, this isn’t Hollywood, this is the real world.  Sometimes surviving means you have to be the bad guy, and you don’t have to spend the rest of your life beating yourself up about it.  Cheyenne did what she did to herself, and in my opinion, she’d have done it anyway.  If none of this had happened tonight, we’d have gone in her room ten weeks from now to find her standing over their little broken bodies and laughing at the looks on our faces.”

Olivia closed her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Tina said after a short pause.  “I shouldn’t have said that, but I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“No,” murmured Yawa.  “I think not.”

“I wish this were the big screen,” Tina said with a sigh.  “The bad guys wear black and the good guys ride off into the sunset, and everyone gets what they deserve.”

Olivia found herself trying to think of all the movies she had ever seen.  It was a pitifully small list.  The faces of actors swam in her mind, but like her parents, they were blurry and vague.  Snatches of dialogue rang in her ears, but the voices that uttered the words could have belonged to anyone.  The only thing that she could visualize with clarity was a series of explosions, Hollywood-style, as the hero invariably escaped the clutches of whatever surreally impossible situation he’d gotten trapped in.  Oil tanker in the middle of the ocean?  No problem.  Lost island in the middle of nowhere?  No sweat.  Dead starship in the middle of space?  Big deal.  Top-secret military installation guarded by hordes of bloodthirsty guerillas?  Give me a break.

Undiscovered tribe of batmen in a hollow mountain with primitive weapons, virtually no security, and very reasonable rules of conduct?  Hm, settle down, have babies, learn to live with it.

“If this were a movie,” Tina mused.  “I’d never have to shave my legs.”

Yawa, who had understood maybe one word in three throughout the second part of this conversation, looked down at Tina’s leg, puzzled.  “Never have to do what?”

“Remove the hairs,” Tina explained.  “Look at Olivia’s legs.  See how smooth and bald they are?”

Olivia extended her leg and held still while Yawa inspected her.

“Now look at mine,” Tina invited, pulling up the leg of her rough breeches.

Yawa eyed them curiously, and then showed all her teeth in a smile.  “Look at mine!” she invited, stretching out one foot.

Tina glanced at the thick, black pelt that covered her body and uttered a barking laugh.  “Yes, all right, you win,” she said.

“Ha!  And you are only balding, you know.  Not bald.  How awful it must be to have such clammy skin,” Yawa mused, eyeing Olivia’s bare leg.

“Well, it’s cold, but I wouldn’t say it’s awful.  At least, I haven’t heard any complaints.”

Tina snorted.  “Yeah, well, I can’t speak for the rest of them, but you ought to know that Doru just isn’t the complaining kind.”

“Doru is a noble male,” Yawa added in low, musing tones.  “The old leader would have made him tall if he weren’t so overwhelmed by authority.”  They sat in companionable silence for a while and then Yawa prodded Olivia in the ribs and asked, “How is he?”

Olivia began to reply, thinking Yawa must be referring to Doru’s present depression.  Then her mouth snapped shut as she realized Yawa intended a far more intimate inquiry.  “How am I supposed to answer that?” she sputtered, completely off-balance.

Yawa blinked at her.

“I thought you didn’t care about that!” Olivia stammered, still trying to recover her equilibrium in the face of Yawa’s casual inquiry.

Yawa snorted and fanned out her wings.  “I did not care to be worked by every male who brought me meat just because I can’t breed.  This doesn’t mean that I have never desired a male.  Or taken one.  And Doru,” she finished with a sigh, “is a fine male.”

“He is, ain’t he?” Tina agreed, throwing Olivia half a distracted smile.  “If I went for that sort of thing, I’d be on him in an instant.”

“You’ve had plenty of time to seduce him by now,” Olivia argued, sticking squarely to what she thought of as the point in an effort to keep from answering the initial question.

“When I first nerved myself to do so, he was meeting with a female already.  In secret, you understand.  Those were terrible days.  But she died, and his grief was such that…that I just couldn’t.  And since then, he has been like a child that puts his hand in dark places and encounters a snake.”

“Bit,” Olivia said.

“Bit,” agreed Yawa, nodding.  “And bit.  And bit.  And bit.”  She glanced at Tina with faint apology.  “I tell you, when your Tobi put him aside to mate with you, I went away to the tunnels and cried for him.  I thought he would never take another mate in all his life.  I thought that would surely be the snake that killed his heart.”

“Fortunately for all of us, Olivia Issagul had her wicked way with him,” Tina replied, and Yawa returned her full attention to Olivia expectantly.  “So?”

“I’m not going to answer that!” Olivia exploded.  “I wouldn’t even begin to know how!”

“He must have coupled with you by now.”  Yawa broke off as a new thought occurred to her and looked absolutely appalled.  “You mean to say that he…that Doru can’t…”  She began to gesture awkwardly, not even bothering to hide her disappointment.

Tina was snickering and trying to cover it by pretending to be coughing.

“Yes, he has coupled with me,” Olivia said, having determined that the only way out of this conversation was just to bull through it.  “Several times a night, in fact.  Very thoroughly.  Doru is just fine.”

Yawa looked first relieved and then envious.

Olivia continued.  “Doru is, perhaps, the best damn coupler in the whole freakin’ mountain.  Doru has a spear that could pierce a bear from three forests away.  He rolls like the mountain.  He is enduring as the great oak—”

Tina burst out in one of her rare laughs.

Yawa began to smile faintly.

“Doru is fast as thunder and slow as snowfall. Doru moves like leaves in the wind in the fall. Doru,” she concluded magnificently, “is the great god under the mountain and when Doru is done, there’s always Bodual.”

Tina threw her head back and just laughed.

Yawa shook her head, patting Tina’s arm.  “I think if you gave yourself and Amy both to one male, that male would burst into flames.”

Tina smiled broadly back at Olivia.  “I’ll tell you something, and you might not think it’s funny, but Tobi told me once that sex with Doru was intense.  Tobi used to go base-jumping, for God’s sake.”

Olivia suddenly thought of the freefall experience only, unbelievably, two hours past.  “You can tell Tobi that Doru says sex with me is intense.”

“Oh, that is scary.”  Tina’s smile faded.  “Poor Doru.  I like the big guy, and he’s in there beating himself up even harder than you are.”

Yawa stood and hopped down from the bench.  “You are worried for him, for Doru?”

“A little,” Olivia confessed.  “I feel like I’ve hurt him, by causing him to question himself.”

Yawa nodded.  “You have hurt us all.  To see you flying forward, dropping to heal her even as she stabbed at you…you make me ashamed.  You make me wish…that my ways are the same as yours.”

Tina snorted.  “You’d want to get stabbed in the back?”

Yawa shook her head.  “But if I were the b—if I were she, I would want someone to go beneath my knife to try and save me.  I would want to belong to a tribe that had such courage.  I would want someone to cry for me.”

Tina nodded and sat there for a while, her smile now entirely usurped by her far more familiar expression of matter-of-fact candor.  “I wouldn’t.  Olivia, I love you and I appreciate what you tried to do, but you’re an idiot.”

Yawa recoiled, staring.

Tina waved one hand as if Yawa’s horror were a gnat, and not a particularly troublesome one.  “You want to feel bad about someone, feel bad about Wurlgunn.  He’s going to lose Beth over this.”

Yawa and Olivia both flinched now.

“There’s been a lot of dissension in the ranks since Wurlgunn came back,” Tina told them. “No one’s been bickering over Beth, because she’s so creepily young, and maybe also because everyone knows the poor bastard would end up punching himself in the nose in a challenge…”  Tina trailed off, shaking her head.  “Everyone was talking about Anita moving in with them, but do you honestly think Wurlgunn could manage two women at once?”

The question called up a variety of intriguing images, but they all seemed to fade into the way she’d last seen him, lying limp beside Cheyenne’s body with blood matting his chest and arm.

“No, she’s probably got her own room, with a big pile of personal bedding and a curtain between them.  She and Beth keep each other company by day, and Wurlgunn feels noble and important by feeding her at night.”  Tina ran her fingers through her limp hair.  “Wurlgunn the mighty hunter.  Good grief.  And now he’s going to spend the next month easy lying flat on his back, and I bet he’s not even moved into the clinic before we get a couple of dickheads locking horns over Beth and Anita.”

Yawa’s brows drew together.  “This will not be,” she said.

“Sure it will.”

“You mistake me, healer.  I will not allow it.  It was my evil that caused Wurlgunn’s wound; I will provide for his mates.”  She stood up slowly, her shoulders squaring and wings fanning out.  “I will hunt for him.”

They looked at her.  Olivia could feel herself frowning.  “Doru said none of you women could fly very well.”

“I am not like the rest of them, digging in the earth for roots and grubs and afraid to let some male spy them in the air and find them ugly for it,” said Yawa, tossing her short horns.  “But I swore to the old leader I would not hunt.  When Doru came to us with spears, my vow kept me silent.  No more.  The old leader is dead.  His ways were not just.  I will break my vow to him and if it means I am forced into the care of the Eldest…”  Her voice wavered.  She shook her head furiously.  “So be it.  But I will hunt.”

“No one’s going to force you into the care of the Eldest while I’m around,” Olivia told her.  “I’ll talk to Doru.”

Yawa nodded and started walking again, staring into space, her expression drawn and grim.  They followed her.

Something that had been tickling Olivia’s mind for some time now presented an opportunity to be voiced.  “While we are still on the subject of providers,” she announced.  “Who’s providing for you right now, Tina?”

Tina snorted.  “Tobi does a pretty good job all by herself, for which I could cheerfully throttle her.  And Doru shares all his kills with her. Gullnar is supposed to do the same for me, at least until I’ve given him a baby, but to be blunt, I don’t think he’d do it even if he were here.  He may not actually hate me, but he’s damned close.”

Olivia murmured some sympathetic words which Tina accepted with a shrug and a nod.  For a while, she was quiet.  Then, with that same lopsided little smile, Tina said, “You know, when I was taking care of Vorgullum at Hollow Mountain, he tried to patch things up.”

“Gullnar?”

“His version of patching things up, anyway.  I wasn’t exactly as receptive as I could have been, partly because I was looking at a shot gulla and partly, I admit it, because he’s an ass and I don’t like him.  Then, one night, honest to God, he sneaks up into Vorgullum’s lair—with the man himself lying right there in a fever-sweat—and tried to score.”

Yawa nodded absently.  “This is Gullnar.”

“He is such a dick.  I had an opportunity to go my entire life without kicking a man in the balls and he ruined it for me.  So no, I don’t think he’s going to go out of his way to see that I’m fed.  Fortunately, I’m the chief healer, so Tobi and I are doing just fine.”

“What happens if someone challenges one of you?” Olivia asked, and blushed when Tina focused on her.  “I mean, is it legal to fight a woman for another woman?”

“I don’t know,” Tina admitted.  “Tobi and I have discussed it, but we haven’t agreed on a plan.  Your brilliant performance aside, there’s no way in hell that either of us could take on a horny gulla, and I know it, even if Tobi doesn’t.  I guess we’ll just have to deal with it when it happens, if it ever does.”

“It’s all so stupid,” Olivia said, and shook her head. “This is what happens when you put men in charge.  Women would settle things a lot more democratically.”

“Maybe.”  Tina did not sound convinced.  “But trust me on this, Olivia.  When democracy breaks down, a woman is a lot more likely to do some serious physical damage than any man.  I mean, sure, a guy will be the quickest to mess you up, but speaking both as a doctor and a lesbian, when a woman does fight, she’s a lot more likely to go for the kill.  Especially when the motive is sex.”

Olivia thought at once of Bahgree.

And, with a shiver, of Urga.

6

One week later, Olivia arrived in the common cave in time to see Doru heave a younger male into the wall and roar in his face.  The younger male was bleeding from several claw marks in his chest and arms, but still he bared his teeth in defiance.

“Jesus wept,” Olivia said in disgust.

The nearest human ears belonged to Liz, who glanced her way as she nursed Levonal.  “It’s not what you think,” she said.

“It’s not?”  Olivia halted and stared at the beating taking place in the center of the room.  “What else could it possibly be?”

“You almost sound disappointed.”

“Not disappointed, just….”  She didn’t really want to explore her feelings.  “What’s going on?”

“Nummak there was supposed to be guarding the door and somehow he stepped away from his post long enough for Tobi to sneak out again.”

Olivia blew her hair out of her face and looked around in vain for Tobi.  “Well, I hope he goes after her next,” she said waspishly.

“He’ll have to wait a few months,” Liz replied.  “Tobi slipped off the aerie and took one hell of a tumble down the mountainside.”

Olivia felt her blood freeze over.  She turned and stared wide-eyed at Liz’s level eyes.  “Is she all right?  Did she lose the baby?”

“No, and no.  She broke both arms and cut holy hell out of her back, but she is otherwise just fine and will recover completely in a few months.  Tina will almost certainly do the beating that Doru doesn’t dare do, and in the meantime, Nummak made the supremely stupid mistake of lipping off when he should have quietly hunkered down and apologized for letting Tobi get by him.”

Olivia watched Nummak take a blow to the head and finally drop to the ground.  Nummak rolled onto his hip, snarled half-heartedly, and lowered his brow to rest on the stone.  “Stupid human,” he muttered.

Doru, his fists like rock, his huge chest heaving, threw back his horns on hearing this and swung his entire upper body into a pile-driving punch to his fallen opponent’s ribs.  At the last, the very last, possible instant, he aborted the path of his attack and smashed his fist explosively into the stone beside Nummak, who flinched hard, one hand coming convulsively to his side, as though he couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t been struck.

“Get out,” Doru growled.

Nummak eased back onto his hands and knees and peered up at Doru.

“I gave you an order.  I commanded you to protect a bringer of damned precious life, and you failed in that, which I could forgive in time.”  Doru turned his eyes, snapping with rage, to pin Nummak in place.  “But you sit there and curse the life that the Great Spirit in his mercy has spared, you curse the mother that bears my child as she lies fighting to keep the spark in her womb.”

One of Nummak’s ears twitched and he slid back some short inches and watched Doru warily.

“Get out of my mountain,” Doru snarled.  “If I see your face before ten nights have passed, I will rip it off your head.”

The other gulla didn’t argue.  He got to his feet and ran.

Gullan were silently slipping out of the commons, fading into shadows and taking their humans with them as they went.  Doru continued to stand, his head turned and eyes burning on the spot Nummak had just vacated.  His hands clenched and flexed rhythmically; his claws nicked small drops of blood from his palms to spatter over the stone.  He made no sound at all.

Olivia took a step towards him and three hands reached out at once to restrain her.  She thought a moment, but then gently and firmly moved away from them and went to Doru’s side.

“She’s all right,” she said softly.

“She is not,” he answered, his words a hum of rage pushing through his clenched teeth.  “She will be one day, but for now, she is not all right.  My child is not all right.  And that—” He turned and spat on the stone where Nummak had crouched.  “That animal would show me his teeth and curse her!”

Olivia put her hand hesitantly on his arm; it was hard as rock, unyielding to her.

He said, “It could have happened in the shaft, for the spirits’ sake!  I suppose I should be thankful she fell from the aerie, where at least she had a slope of stone to break her fall, but what in Urga’s name possessed her to leave the mountain in the first place?  She swore me an oath that she would stay until the child was born!”

They did not speak for a long time.

“He’s not whole,” Doru said finally, grudgingly.  “Nummak.  He doesn’t look it, but he’s one of the Wasted.  He doesn’t think right.  He has foaming fits sometimes.  Damn it, I should have set someone else to guard, but he was the first person I saw and I was biting at the chance to get out.  I’ve spent too many days training Yawa.  We needed a real hunt!”

Olivia said nothing.

Doru growled and shook his head, the gesture only a thin thread from an open display of horns and aggression.  “We found summer elk, a fine fat herd.  I was coming back with the first load when I saw her…broken there at the bottom of the upper aerie, where the goat trail winds around to the pen.  I knew instantly, instantly, who it was.  I don’t even remember dropping the meat.  I was terrified to move her.  I started baying and Bodual came and threw off his meat and we wrapped her in a deer litter.”

The big gulla shuddered, a hard slow roll of horror.  “My father,” he said slowly.  “He got tagged by a rogue elk in season, shredded his left wing, and tried to fly back to the mountain on it.  I was close enough to see him when he dropped. We tried to put him on a litter.  I still remember the sounds his back made when we moved him.  He was dead before we were in the air again.  I had to put my hands on Tobi.  I had to put my hands on her and move her.”

His right hand curled into a fist with the sound of brittle snapping.  He was beginning to growl again, and his hackles were slowly spiking out across his back and shoulders.  “And that ass I sent to guard the entry was in the commons, drinking thumperjuice.  When I sent Bodual and Yawa to carry my Tobi to the healer and went to him, he showed his teeth to me!”

“Is he going to survive being banished for ten nights?  Is he smart enough to go to ground during the day?”

Doru did not look at her, but he straightened, tossing his horns and shrugging back his fanned wings.  His hackles were still spiked high and his body was still rigid with tension, but his voice was even as he shouted for Mudmar and ordered the hunter to find Nummak and stay with him until dawn before bringing him back into the mountain.  He glanced at Olivia, still scowling, and then turned away from her.

She pursued him quietly, took his hand and turned it to examine his knuckles.  “Are you hurt?” she asked.

“Damned idiot,” he spat, and tossed a dark look at her.  “Not you,” he added in a muttering undertone.

“No, that one had Tobi all over it,” she agreed.  “Did you break your hand?”

“No.”  He took it back from her, rubbed restlessly at his arm.  “But I gave an old wound a fresh reminder.  That’s good.  Give me something to think about while I wait to hear whether or not my child will leave this world before it ever draws a breath.”

She slipped her hand around his and gave a gentle tug.

He glared at her again.  “What?”

“Let’s go see her,” she said.

He didn’t immediately move, but when he did, it was with swift authority towards the women’s tunnels.  Olivia kept her hand in his and jogged beside him through the dark passages, neither of them speaking.  They came to the hide flap that separated the sexes within the mountain, and there Doru stopped and glared at it as if it were an enemy he wished to strike out and kill.  When it became clear that he wasn’t going to go any further, Olivia moved past him and held the flap open.

He did not move.

“Come on,” she said.

“I shouldn’t.”

“I’ll never tell.  Come on.”

He ducked below the leather door and eased into the tunnel beyond.  She led him past the women’s commons, and he hesitated as he heard female voices hiss to a stop and strike up again in scandalized whispers.  “No,” he said, digging in his talons.  “I shouldn’t be here.”

“You came when Chey—”

He interrupted her before the full name could be spoken, making that hooking gesture to catch the sound before it left her mouth.  “I came to kill her,” he stated flatly.  “Which females are forbidden to do.  I shouldn’t be here now.”  He turned around.

Olivia caught his arm.  “Don’t make me drag you,” she warned.  “I can do it, let me assure you,” she added as he glanced back at her cautiously.

Thoughts of Huuk clearly crossed his mind as he considered her.  Slowly, unwillingly, he permitted her to turn him and lead him on through the tunnels.  He didn’t speak, although she could feel the tension in him growing at each gasp and whisper that came as the females saw him.  And then they heard it, bouncing wildly from the misleading curves of the tunnel walls: a blend of gullanese and English in Tina’s high, furious voice.

“—in the bottom of the fucking mountain, and I’ll put you there myself if I ever, if I ever, hear or see or so much as suspect that you’ve done such a goddamn stupid thing again!  What do you think went through my mind when I saw them carry you in here?  Huh?  Answer me!”

“I don’t—”

“Shut up!  I have to be den mother to a dozen humans and a hundred gullan and I have three preemies that need round-the-clock care and the last person I should have to baby-sit is you, you insensitive little bitch!  Don’t you even care about what I feel?  Huh?  Is that how much ‘I do’ means to you that you can just go galloping out of the mountain just to throw your spear around?  I begged you to stay home, Doru ordered you to stay home, you promised us both you—Are you crying?”

“No!” Tobi’s voice sobbed.

“I’m going to get some aspirin.”  Stomping footsteps.

“I don’t need any aspirin.”

“Well you sure as hell aren’t crying because you feel sorry!” Tina roared.  “Because if you felt sorry, you’d stop, now wouldn’t you?”

Doru was dragging his feet again, but Olivia kept a firm grip on his hand and pulled him into the brightly lit cave they all called the clinic.  Tobi was propped up in a sleeping pit, both arms splinted and wrapped, crying quietly into her chest as Tina messily and noisily threw some of Murgull’s white willow bark and boneset tea into a pot of hot water.

“I’m really sorry and I swear—”

“Save it!” snarled Tina.  “Save it until you mean it!”

Tina spun around, sloshing tea over her arm, and saw Doru.  Her eyes first widened, then narrowed.  “Well, now look who’s here,” she said sourly.  “Perhaps, Tobi, you would like to explain to the father of your child why you saw fit to go sneaking off like you did?  Go on!  Say something!”

“I don’t—”

“Shut up!” Tina roared again, slapping the tea down on the side of the pit.  “Perhaps it has escaped your attention, but you are not sixteen and this is not the night of the Junior Prom and I am not your mother, I’m your wife!”

“Tobi,” Doru said quietly.

Tobi had withstood Tina’s final assault very well, but at the low sound of Doru’s calm voice, her burgeoning grip on self-control crumpled and she began to wail.

“I thought I would lose you,” Doru said.

Tobi twisted towards the bedding and sobbed.

“For our child, I still fear I might.”

Tobi shook with tears, hiding from him behind her hands.  Tina knelt at her head, her expression in grim harmony with Doru’s low, even words, and brought the tea to Tobi’s lips.  Tobi managed a few choking swallows, and then continued to cry, more quietly.

Doru watched her in silence until she had finished her tea and Tina had wiped her face and dried it.  He waited until Tobi flinchingly looked up at him.  He said, “Will you be tribe?”

She hitched in several breaths, then nodded, unable to meet his eyes.

“Then you will obey your leader.  For now, that is me.”

She nodded again.

“Tell me.”

“I’ll obey,” Tobi whispered.

Doru crossed the room and knelt beside his former mate.  He brushed her forehead with a kiss and ran his claws through her sweat-spiked hair.  “Be healed,” he murmured.  “And be easy.  You are still tribe and much loved.”

“I’m sorry, Tina,” Tobi said.

The healer snorted, but not as viciously as she might have done a minute earlier.

The sound of it put a quiver back in Tobi’s chin.  “I am,” she said.

“Yeah, fine.  We’ll talk again.  Come here, Doru.”  Tina carried the empty cup back to her worktable and Doru followed her.  Olivia remained in the doorway, aware only of Tina’s low voice and quiet rumbles of Doru’s agreement.  Eventually, Doru returned to her and moved past her to leave the women’s tunnels.

“Well?”  She didn’t know if it were rude to ask or not, but she did so on the theory that she was the acting leader’s mate and deserved to know.

Doru grunted, then appeared to come to the same conclusion as she regarding her rights, and reluctantly answered her.  “There’s very little risk to the child, Tina says.  Tobi dropped only a short distance, went down the mountain to the game trail on her back.  She broke her arms by trying to grab an outcrop to stop herself.  Clean breaks, both of them.  By winter, she won’t even know she’s ever broken them.  The scars on her back she’ll carry the rest of her life, but maybe they’ll keep her firmly on the side of sense.”

He stopped walking suddenly and lowered his head, leaning heavily against the tunnel wall.

Olivia came in under his wing and pressed herself against him, willing him comfort as he shuddered once in the grip of some emotion that overwhelmed simple relief.

“I need to sit down,” he said faintly.

Olivia took his arm and led him in blackness away from the women’s tunnels to the closest sub-chamber, little more than a wide place in the corridor with a few candles to expose its emptiness, not even a bench to rest upon.  Doru sank down on his haunches and leaned slowly back against the wall, his head bent, motionless.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked, coming to sit beside him.

“I had to move her,” he said again, his voice muffled by his hands over his face.  “I so expected to hear the grind of her bones that for a moment, I actually did.”

They sat in silence for a long time.  There was no other sound in the depths of this part of the mountain.  They might as well have been the last two people on Earth.

“Thank you,” he said suddenly.  “For taking me to see her.”  He dropped his hands to dangle between his knees and leaned forward, still staring into space, but definitely more there then he had been.

“Feel better?”

“Yes, oddly.”  He permitted himself a thin, almost humorless smile.  “In fact, I almost felt sorry for her.”

Without thinking, Olivia laughed and said, “Yeah.  Gosh, can you imagine what it would be to have her for—Oh God, I’m sorry!”

He slid a wearily amused glance her way.  “To have her for a mate?  Is that what you meant to say?”

“I meant,” she hastened to add, “to be mated in the sense that…to have a mate like…oh damn.  I’m sorry, Doru.”

“Don’t cut your wings over it.”  He reached out and she crawled forward and was drawn up warm against his side.  He rubbed his thumb absently over her shoulder and rested his chin on the crown of her hair.  “I rather enjoy the mate I have now.  I hate to admit it, but I’ve even gotten used to Bodual’s cold feet on my ba—”

It was his turn to break off abruptly.  Doru lowered his horns, thinking.  “Not…that I am truly mated, I suppose.”

Olivia bit at her lip, watching him stare thoughtfully into space. “Olivia,” he said hesitantly, and then was silent for a long time.

Olivia could feel her eyes wanting to look away, look anywhere but at the naked honesty of his face.  She felt his claw trace along the bear-tooth necklace she wore, then rise to the curve of her jaw.  She leaned into his touch, unhappily aware of where this conversation had to be heading.

“Do you…like me?” he asked.

Olivia sighed, closing her eyes against him.  “I like you a lot,” she admitted.  “I could probably be in love with you with damned little effort.”

His cautious pleasure at hearing those words died as he heard the bleak reluctance with which she spoke them.  “Would you…stay with me?  I don’t need to be tovorak,” he rushed to say as she drew a breath for answer.  “I would greet Vorgullum in mid-air to make him tall again.  But you…”

“Doru, even if I stayed with you, I couldn’t stay.”

His hand on her face tensed minutely.  “Could you clarify that?”

She didn’t want to, but she could see that he would not let her go without an answer.  “Do you remember what Kodjunn said, after my son was born?  I had to swear an oath to the Great Spirit.  My time here is almost gone.”

Doru’s head tilted as he searched her face, hunting for some sign that this was not the truth.  “He’s taking you away?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“When are you coming back?”

“I’m not.”

He drew back sharply, the whites showing in a ring around his dark eyes.  “Never?”

“Never.”

His jaw clenched.  “Then I’ll go with you.”

She sighed.  “You can’t.”

He stood and paced the cramped tunnel for a short time.  Finally, despairingly, he came back to grip her shoulders. “You swore an oath?”

“Yes.”  She hesitated.  “And I can’t come back.  I’m going to be… different.”

He stared at her for a long time without moving, without expression.  “You have to go?” he said at last, heavily.

“I do.”

“Then I’ll let you go.”  He drew her against him and stroked her hair.  “What a sickeningly selfish man I am,” he grumbled.  “As long as you were there for me, I could share you with any other male.  Now that I am faced with your leaving, I feel like hoarding you right here.”

She tried to smile.  “It’s a good thing I didn’t tell you sooner.  You’d have never let me leave the pit.”

“If I weren’t so miserable and sore, I’d take you there now.”  He put her back at arm’s length.  “But since I am miserable and I am sore, I’ll just take you back to the commons.”

“Noble Doru,” she said softly.

“At the first opportunity, I’m going to cry like a teething baby.”  He stood and raked his claws once over the wall, but not hard enough to leave a mark.  “I must be cursed,” he muttered.

Olivia sighed.  “What a tempting thought,” she said.  “I’ve been rubbing ashes into my hair and yelling ‘Why me?’ for months.  It’s kind of comforting to think it might be someone else’s bad luck.”

“All my life,” he mused, “I have believed that the earth will have what it desires.  And now, when at last I hold a woman that the earth has no claim on at all, the Great Spirit leaps up and takes her away from me.  The Great Spirit.  I am feeling, I think, a small fraction of the thing Lorchumn felt, when he bayed out challenge and curses.  If I were less religious, or more fool-hardy, I would be tempted to do the same.”

“You’d lose.”

“That,” Doru said heavily, “is not the point. Tell me, Olivia, why are you going?”

“Because the Great Spirit made me promise that I would.”  She rubbed at her eyes in the near-total blackness, feeling suddenly very tired and cold.  “And he has reasons.  Good ones.”

“And you mean to go alone?”

“No, I’m taking Kodjunn.”

He leaned back and actually gaped at her.  “What in the world for?”

“He made a promise, too.  Oh Doru, I wish I didn’t have to leave,” she said.  “I’m afraid to start this journey and I’m terrified of what has to happen at the end.  I’m afraid of dying, and I’m afraid most of all of living through it and being changed.  But I have to go!  Even if it wasn’t for my promise, I have to!”

He was quiet so long she thought he would not answer at all, merely sit and act as a calm sounding-board the way she did so often.  But at long last, in a tone of idle contemplation, he said, “If it had to happen, if someone had to go on the Great Spirit’s journey, I’m glad it’s you.”

“What?”  She pulled back from him, hurt, and strained her eyes to see him in the darkness.  “Doru!”

“Not because you’re leaving.  That…that’s too much like a knife in my heart right now.  But because of you, of the way you are.  If ever there was any one person I trusted to do the work of the spirits and to save our race, it is you.  Vorgullum can chant poetry for hours and days and moons about how brave and clever and incredible you are, but I don’t think any of us really understand how right he is.  Maybe not even Vorgullum.  You’re like the spring that comes from below, showing us only the barest trickle of a great, hidden, rushing river.”

She saw herself again as Bahgree, rising from the water with the light of lunacy in her eyes and shivered.

He felt it, and his arm on her shoulders tightened.  “If this has to be, at least it’s you who is going and not…not me, for instance.  I, who would have killed a pregnant woman for the sake of two moon’s peace and quiet.”

“Doru…”

“Hush, woman.  It’s the truth.  But you, you will follow the Great Spirit to whatever fate he has designed for you, and I trust you to meet it with courage and wisdom…and compassion.  Of all the people I have known in my life, human and gullan, I think I trust only you to do such a thing.”

“You just don’t know enough people,” she said.

“Ha.  You may have a point.  And I admit I don’t know what the Great Spirit has in mind for you…but I think I have an idea.  And if I am even in the shadows of the truth, I am terrified by it…and more relieved than ever that it is you at his side.”

She turned from that further into his pelt, trying to slow the racing of her heart with the steady beat of his.

“Can you imagine if he’d chosen Tobi?” Doru murmured.

Olivia had a vision of Tobi, pregnant and with both arms in splints, leaping on Bahgree’s back with a knife in her teeth.  And on the heels of that, the picture of Tobi putting her knee resoundingly right in the Great Spirit’s groin.

She must have made some sound, because Doru chuckled.  “Exactly,” he said.  “All the same,” he added, rising and pulling her after, “I wish that I were permitted to join you on this Journey.”

“You can’t,” she said.  “You’d be killed.”

“There are things worth dying for,” he replied evenly, as he brought her out of the cavern and back into the tunnel.  “I believe that you are one of them.”

They went in silence through the winding halls of the mountain and back into the common cave.

There, rubbing her eyes against the sudden light, Olivia took several steps away from Doru and bumped against a male’s broad chest.  “Sorry,” she mumbled, blinking rapidly and backing up.

It was Vorgullum.

They were home.

7

Only then did Olivia hear the excited squeals, laughter, hisses and snarls of contention, and cries of joy as other humans were reunited with their long-lost mates.  Beyond Vorgullum’s broad shoulder, Olivia saw Kurlun lift Amy easily into his embrace with one arm while giving Damark a perfunctory and careful shove with his other.  Sung and Sutung were locked in blood challenge while Sarah J. watched impassively.  Liz had thrown her arms around Gormuck’s neck, squealing with delight, as Hodrub stood off to one side with Levonal in his arms.  All around them, gullan met to exchange news, reclaim mates, and welcome their tribesmen, and amid all that commotion, Vorgullum’s silence seemed very loud.

“You’re early!” she gasped, and blushed immediately as she realized how that sounded.

His expression, still and calm as deep water, did not change.  “I know.”

“Where are the humans?” she asked, knowing there had ought to be some word of welcome, but unable to think what.  He was back and that meant she had to go; he was early, and her time here was still done.

Vorgullum began to make some reply, but he broke it off as she burst into tears and threw herself at him.

“I’ve missed your voice,” she sobbed.

“I’ve missed your touch,” he whispered, but he did not move to put his arms around her.

Doru heaved a sigh, nodded once and stepped away.

Vorgullum watched him go, turned his attention back to Olivia, and then caught sight of her necklace.  His jaw dropped, and then snapped shut.  “He challenged Sudjummar?” he asked, his voice finally coloring with emotion—fear for his brother.

Olivia sighed.  “It’s a long story.”

The shape of a mateless gulla came out of the celebratory crowd.  Kodjunn caught Olivia’s eye and held it.  His gaze was full of welcome and something else—something lost and inexpressibly sad.

“Not yet,” Olivia whispered.  “Not yet.  We’re supposed to have seven more days!”

Kodjunn said nothing, but looked back once at the dark mouth of the cavern, to the waiting world beyond.  When he met her eyes again, it was with a faint gleam of molten gold.

Vorgullum wrapped his arm and one wing around Olivia’s body and turned her away.  “Tell me what you can,” he said, walking towards their long-unused lair.  “We can light the hearth and lie down together and pretend we have the rest of our lives to tell each other stories.”

He carried her through the chimney passage and into cold rooms made unfamiliar by long months of neglect.  She had to feel her way towards the pit room, stumbling as she struck walls that weren’t there in Doru’s chambers, following the dry clack of Vorgullum’s talons on the rock.  There was the rasp of a lighter, a faint trickle of flame, and then the coals caught and he was revealed in dark outline before the fire, staring at the stone between his knees.

“Tell me,” he said at last.  “My brother…lives?”

“When Wurlgunn returned that first time…when you were shot…”

Vorgullum nodded.  “I feared that would bring trouble.”

“Sudjummar had to set me aside.  Doru took me in.”  She didn’t know what else to say about that, so she said instead, “Sudjummar asked if he could keep Somurg for me and I said yes.”

Vorgullum nodded again.  “If he does not mind, I will have him keep Somurg a little longer yet.  Things will be…complicated.”  He raised his head, searching her eyes.  “Doru was…fair to you?”

“Very fair.  I wanted to be alone at first, but…that didn’t work out,” she finished lamely.

A ghost of a smile touched the corner of his mouth.  “No, I imagine it did not.  Still, if you had greeted the first suitor with the same gentle persuasion as you used against Huuk, you might have spared yourself some grief.”

“You heard about that already?”

“I did.  And I saw him.”  He dropped his eyes again to his hands.  “They told me who had done it and oddly, I believed it at once.  My Olivia.  My fierce Olivia.”

“I missed you,” she said again, as if she could make it more true with repetition.

He looked back at her, drawing his eyes slowly and sadly down the full length of her as she stood in the doorway.  He did not speak.  He did not move.  He gazed on her without blinking, tracing every curve of her body with his eyes.

And then he sighed and looked away.

“I could not wait.”  He crouched tighter in on himself.  “I am a coward.  I knew that you would leave me when I returned, and I could not face one more span of days beneath the weight of that knowledge.  I thought, ‘I will return, have it done, and use my time to grieve for her when she is gone.’  I can grieve, I think, better than I can sit and wait.”

Olivia came to him, knelt in the warming pool of light that spilled from the hearth and put her arms around his unyielding body.

“You have done very well in my absence,” he said after a moment.  “They speak now of Olivia’s laws…I mean to keep them, make them tribe laws.  They are good, I think…I don’t pretend to understand the need for all of them, but I see that they are good.”  He started to say more, then fell silent again.

“Vorgullum,” she began.

He turned to stare at the fire.  “They told me about Augurr.  I have not spoken with him yet…but I intend to.  And I think that I will let him live.  Because you wish it.”

“Won’t you hold me?”

He shivered.  “I don’t dare.”  His voice was tight with pain.

“Please.”

He pulled in a hard breath, hissed it out again, then took her hand in his and leaned against her.

The fire hummed and spread slow heat over both of them.

Vorgullum removed his hand and slid back from her across the stone.  His eyes were dark and bright and deep.  “I have,” he said with harsh emotion, “another mate.  Because I am tovorak and I can demand nothing of my tribesmen which I dare not do myself.”

She managed a smile for him, and he flinched as though she had slapped him.  “You’ll be her friend.  You were my friend.”

“I…” He lowered his head, stared at his hands.  “I think I can learn to care for her.  I hope I can.  But it won’t be the same.”

She reached for him and he moved further from her, still without looking at her again.

“I have told her my name,” he continued.  “She is learning to speak it.  In five days…when my mourning is done…I will take her from the women’s tunnels and bring here…to this pit.”  He looked around at it as though he had never seen it before.  His eyes were wide with an ugly blend of bright emotion—shock and anguish and worst of all, a terrible confusion.

Olivia lifted her hand a final time and Vorgullum shook his horns and stood up.  His chest heaved once, twice.  He swallowed hard, passed his hand over his eyes, and turned away from her.

“Go, Olivia,” he said quietly.  “I will never…never stand quite so tall without you.  Not in my heart.”  He walked swiftly past her and out from the room.  He did not touch her.  He did not look around.  The sound of his steps receded and was gone.

Olivia hunched around her knees and waited until she was sure she wouldn’t cry.  Then she stood, gathered her traveling clothes and a pair of thick leather shoes.  She washed her face, tied back her hair, and made ready for her journey.  Last of all, she opened her belt-pouch, removed her climbing claws—blunt from usage—and laid them on the bench.  She took up her photo album, brushed it free of dust, and laid that with the claws.

She took a last look, then climbed down the entry chute and walked to where Kodjunn was waiting at the mouth of the commons.

“Is there anyone else you wish to see?” he asked.

“I can’t,” she said bleakly.  She wouldn’t even know how to start.

He nodded, his own eyes mirroring her inner struggle.

“Have you,” she began, fighting to keep her voice level and calm.  “Have you seen your children?”

“I saw,” Kodjunn replied, and smiled painfully at her.  “They look just like their mother.”

They stood in silence and stared at each other in the shadows of the celebration of reunion.

At last, Kodjunn took her into his arms and out of the mountain.

BOOK III

OLIVIA

CHAPTER ONE

JOURNEY

1

Kodjunn had to be tired after six days’ hard flight between Hollow Mountain and Dark Mountain, but either he had some hidden reserve of strength, or the Great Spirit was working in him to prevent him from stopping.  They flew without rest until the sky began to grey with dawn, and it was not until Olivia saw the faint light of the coming day that she had any clear idea of what direction they were headed.  Mostly south, but also east, and that was disturbing.  When the Great Spirit had mentioned a Journey to the sea, she’d hoped he meant the Pacific, which couldn’t be all that far away, as the gulla flies.  Although she wasn’t so certain of Dark Mountain’s location that she could point to it on a map, she knew the nearest southern sea had to be somewhere around Panama.  Did he really mean to take her that far?

The sun came steadily up.  Kodjunn ducked in low to the tree line, scouting for a clearing to land in, and finally dropped in a lightly wooded place and landed clumsily with Olivia still in his arms.  He looked at her with mute apology, and then released her and stood as if expecting a blow.

“It’s not fair,” she said, staring past the gulla’s features to the unseen light of the god within.  “You promised me another seven days.”

She expected him to come forward, but the sudden rush of divinity that filled the gulla’s frame still struck with a force that knocked Olivia back off her feet.  In an instant, Kodjunn’s body seemed to double in size, swell with flame and thunder, blaze with light; it was the Great Spirit who glared down on her, wearing a mask made of Kodjunn’s face.

“I remember what I told you,” he said.  “I told you I would take you safely from the threat of Bahgree’s influence when my host returned to the mountain. I could have easily summoned him at any hour, but did not!”

She sat up, sobbing, but kept her face turned from him.  “I didn’t have enough time!” she cried.

He narrowed his eyes, but made an effort to speak in tones of reason.  “Soon, you will have all eternity.  That should be enough even for you,” he added darkly.  “For you have known of your fate all this time and have not bothered to unfasten the ties that bound you within the mountain.”

“Unfasten the ties?” she echoed, incredulous.  “Just that easy?  I had to do that once already for my parents, my people, and when I’ve finally forced myself to make a new life here, you think I can just shake it off again?  Well, I can’t!  And how dare you?  How dare you expect me to?”

The Great Spirit swelled within Kodjunn’s frame at the rebellious cry.  “You owe me your obedience, woman!”

“But I don’t owe you everything!” she shot back.  “I don’t owe you my heart or my mind or my feelings!”

“Your feelings?  What do I care for your feelings?  Enough of this!  Come, the day is risen and we must begin.  You may lie down if you wish.”

She stared at him.  “You honestly think I’m going to fuck you?!”

He seemed puzzled.  “Yes.”

“No!” she shouted.  “Not now, not today, and never again!”

The god’s eyes darkened to pits of blood.  “So be it,” he growled.  “I have been patient with you until now.  I have accepted what it has pleased you to offer.  Now I will take what I wish.”

He moved to seize her and Olivia flung out both arms and let the white balefire of her power surge through her body and soul.

“Come and try it!” she said in a voice that roared all on its own.  “We’ll see which of us breaks first!”

She saw, perhaps for the first time ever in his existence, doubt enter the eyes of the Great Spirit.

Slowly, he lowered Kodjunn’s hand.  They faced each other as the sun climbed into the sky.

At last, he bent his head very slightly.  “I…was wrong to say such a thing.  I…”  His lip curled, and he broke his gaze from hers.  “I ask your forgiveness.”

The strain of holding her power at the fore of her body and yet still in check was telling on her, but she held it a while longer, all of her misgivings open on her face.  “Don’t patronize me!” she spat.  “I know you don’t mean it!”

She half-expected him to meet her with renewed anger.  Instead, the corner of his mouth twitched with thin self-depreciating humor.

“It is not in the nature of an incarnation to offer emptiness in any form—apology, threat, or praise.  Neither is it possible for an incarnation to deceive, except by omission of fact.  I could not confess to a sin unless in fact I had committed one.”  He was quiet for a moment, perhaps thinking that over.  In the end, he shook his head and looked at her again.  “Now it falls to you to forgive me, Olivia.  You may unleash your anger—I’ve no doubt you can harm me in this borrowed form, and you will certainly be able to kill the body that holds me—or you may meet me again in the spirit of compromise.”

“I don’t feel like compromising,” she said, but the words sounded churlish to her own ears, with none of the defiance she meant for them to have.  And what would it mean, to strike out at the god?  He was right; she could kill Kodjunn, and maybe chase the Great Spirit off for a while, but he would return to her in a new host soon enough.  And even if she were able to hurt him severely enough to make him leave her alone, what good would that do to her?  To Somurg, or to any of the other babies who were even now beginning to wean to give Cheyenne’s twins a chance at life?

She lowered her arms and let her power burn down to low coals deep inside her.  “All right,” she said, hating the submissive posture, the note of defeat that stained her voice.  “I gave you my oath.  I mean to keep it.”

“So,” the Great Spirit murmured, looking out at the face of the sun.  “I am appeased.”

She couldn’t stop the curt sound of irritation that escaped her.  He tipped his head back and glanced at her from the corner of one gold eye.

“In all the empty fathoms of time since first I separated myself from the darkness of the universe, I cannot remember any being, mortal or immortal, who has had such power to placate me.  It is not,” he added darkly, “a comfort to me.”

She watched warily as he turned and came back to her.  So close, even contained within the shell of Kodjunn’s mortal body, the aura of the god was a tangible, humming heat; the sheer masculine force of him crackled invisibly around them both.  She thought he meant to touch her, and if he had, with her defenses lowered and the might of his divinity blazing from him, she supposed she would have let him.

Instead, he spoke, and made no effort to disguise the uneasiness with which he regarded his own words.  “I…apologize for threatening you.  I shall not do so again.  I will only tell you now, and never again, how vital it is that you take my essence before the final battle.”

“I believe you,” she said, and looked down at her hands.  “And I’m sorry I yelled at you, and I forgive you for threatening me.”

“Ah.”

She sighed and spread her hands helplessly.  “So what now?”

“Now?”  He glanced towards the sun, considering the question.  “When night falls again, this host must carry you.  Until then, I mean to couple with you.  Your final encounter with Bahgree is nearing, and she may try to kill you before you come to our destination.”

“You’re going to fuck me from sun-up to sun-down, is that it?  When do you expect me to sleep?” she asked.

He tossed his horns.  “When you possess my essence, even channeled through the mortal seed of this host, you will not require sleep.”

To refuse invited another argument.  And it would be a pointless one, anyway.  Olivia took his hand.

2

The Great Spirit retreated long before sun-down, when the sexual limits of Kodjunn’s body were reached, as if the host no longer mattered once it could not be made to perform.  One second, he was there, his gold eyes blazing as he thrust a final jet of hot semen into her body, and then he was gone and Kodjunn dropped, gasping and shivering, atop her.

Olivia struggled with him briefly as he fought to orientate himself; at last, he looked down and the light of awful recognition filled him as he realized where he was and what he had been doing.

Then he leapt away from her, stumbling in exhaustion over his own feet and falling on his back.

Olivia cried out a warning, already reaching for him, her face contorting in expectation of the dry snap of his wing-bones, but he had flattened them as he fell and now only lay sprawled and naked, panting, his eyes shut against her.  She knelt over him, feeling a terrible sinking pity for him.  Her hands worried at themselves.  She said, “Are you okay?”

He gulped, shuddered, and shook his head.

“Talk to me,” she pleaded.

“I’m not okay,” he said dutifully.

She crawled a little closer and lay her hand upon his stomach, feeling the jump of muscle below her touch.  “I’m okay,” she offered.

His features clenched once in self-loathing, although he did not open his eyes.  “How can you be?” he demanded, almost wailing.  “How can you be, when I…I…”

“You didn’t do anything,” she said.  “It was him, and it’s sort of what he has to do.”

He pried his eyes open and looked at her, as though wanting very much to disbelieve her.  What he saw in her eyes brought him slowly up, although he edged further from her and fumbled for his loincloth, discarded by the Great Spirit some time before, as though he feared he might fly at her again in lust if he stayed near her.

“It’s all right, Kodjunn,” she said a final time.  And you’d better get used to it, she thought, because I have a feeling you’re going to spend an awful lot of time in that position.

He relaxed only after he was covered, and then only enough to crouch a short distance from her and stare at her in the light of dawn.  “I missed you,” he said at last, awkwardly.

“I missed you, too.”

“It was awful.  Worse than before.”  He looked away at the ground, frowning.  “Because, I think, we knew what to expect.  We knew exactly what they would do, how miserable they would be.”

There.  The fact of the kidnappings, lying between them like a dead animal.  Olivia hated herself for it, but she asked him anyway.

“How many did you…did you take?”

“Each of us took one.  Forty-four, in total.  I don’t know how many will survive.  They told me Sarabee died on the birthing bench…and Victoria is almost in the shadow of the earth as it is.  As for these new humans, who knows?  There may be some who…who might die, some who might be barren.”

“Is that enough?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that enough?” she asked again, harshly.

Silence.  “No,” he said.  And rubbed wearily at his face.  “No.”

“How long will Vorgullum wait before he goes for more?” she asked.

“I don’t know.  Not until these are settled and sparking.  Perhaps even long enough to see Somurg fledged.  But…But he means to continue taking them until every male in the mountain, old, young, or even crippled, has a mate.”

Olivia stared at him, numbly.  “Another forty humans?” she asked.

“At least.”  He bent his head still lower, dropping his eyes again.  “And he wants males for our females.  The tribe is not decided in this.”

“Now you’re growing a conscience?  Now?”

He was quiet for a short while.  “Males…gullan males…tend to be more aggressive than the females…more dangerous.  We think it is the same, perhaps, for humans.  We don’t dare to take them when they are of breeding age, only to be forced to kill them.”

“So you won’t,” she stated.  When he didn’t answer, she reached out and shook his arm.  “You won’t!”

“Vorgullum is considering his options,” Kodjunn said.  “He thinks either to take grown humans and hobble them…or perhaps…if they are still young, they can be raised as tribe…”

Olivia had an awful vision of Vorgullum wandering through the maternity ward of a hospital, scooping up infants from the nursery and passing them into waiting gullan hands.  She recoiled from Kodjunn, appalled.

“Olivia,” he whispered, his face furrowed with pain.  “There are more than twenty females of breeding age.  How can we waste them?”

Olivia twisted away and said something incoherent into the wind.

He fell miserably quiet, closed his eyes.   After a year or two, he opened them again.  “I took one,” he said tonelessly.  “I took a human from the hive.  I suppose, if she is still unmated when I return, that I should claim her.”

“Oh Kodjunn.”  Spoken without anger, only with a numb dismay.  Olivia crawled forward and wrapped her arms around his thigh, and rested her head on his knees.  After a long time, his hand fell warmly over her back and lay there, heavy with comfort.

“I stood over her a long time before I took her,” he said.  “There were three females in the den, a mother and her young, I think.  Lorchumn took one of the young, and I took the other.  We left the mother.  We took none, this time, with gray in her hair.  I don’t know how old she is, the human I took.  Old enough for a woman’s shape, at any rate.  She and her sister clung to each other for days, sobbing.  I felt profane.”

“Is Lorchumn all right?”

Kodjunn’s hand on her back moved in a slow circle.  “I knew you would say that,” he said.  “Lorchumn was kind to them.  He told them his name, which seemed to help.  And he told them about his first mate.  He was beginning to make a bond with the one, with both of them really.  They are nearly a single mind; in their fear, they are never parted from each other.  Now that they are settled in Dark Mountain, perhaps they will rest easier.”

“What if they don’t?”

“Then Lorchumn will take two mates, I think.  I don’t need a mate badly enough to divide them, and I think Lorchumn can help any other male to feel the same way.”

“But then what about you?”

“If Vorgullum would allow it, I would not take another.  He won’t,” he said bleakly, “but I have made two young ones for him, and if they live, perhaps I can avoid a mate for a few years.”

“I’m sorry, Kodjunn,” she said after a short pause.  “I know this is hard for you, too.”

“It is worse for me,” he insisted, and looked away from her.  “Forgive me, Olivia, I don’t mean to belittle your suffering, but at least, for you, it is over.  I have allowed my first mate to work unspeakable evils, I have helped to destroy the lives of forty-four new humans, and I am taking you away.  And after this journey is done, I’ll have to return to face all those who will surely curse me for your loss.  I curse myself.”

Before she could think of an answer to that, he stretched out over the ground and curled on his side to sleep.

3

Olivia woke again to Kodjunn’s sleepily urgent caresses and knew that the Great Spirit was once again in control of the body.  They fumbled with each other’s clothes, had sex until night fell, and climbed once more into the sky.

Travel was exhausting for all three of them.  The Great Spirit was in constant internal struggle to keep from consuming Kodjunn’s body and soul with the fire of his presence.  Olivia was having difficulty convincing him that rest periods should be used for resting, and that even if she was having sex on her back, it wasn’t particularly restful.  Kodjunn was being used worst of all—straining his wings to keep aloft for hours at a time, exhausted by the Great Spirit’s relentless use of Olivia’s body, and undergoing constant physical agony every moment the Great Spirit inhabited him.

“How long will it be until we get where we’re going?” Olivia asked, speaking loudly to be heard above the wind of their passage.

“Many days,” the Great Spirit replied.

“Many years, if he keeps stopping to make sex with you,” Kodjunn added crossly.

“I explained this to both of you,” the Great Spirit said.  “Olivia will have to battle Bahgree’s spirit, then absorb and translate the essence of the Water-Woman’s power.  She must…how did you think of it?  Build up a charge.”  He spoke the unfamiliar phrase using staccato English.

“Would you even know if she was charged enough?” Kodjunn demanded and the god complacently replied, “There is no ‘charged enough’.”

Olivia sighed.

Kodjunn bared his teeth and it wasn’t a smile.  “Well, you’d better start thinking of a different way to charge, because I can’t keep making all these stops.  You chose a mortal body, Great Spirit, with mortal wings that are rapidly losing their strength.”

Trying to ward off an argument before it became inevitable, Olivia ground her hips playfully against him.  “Well, who says we have to land?”

Kodjunn banked sharply and beat his wings hard to regain altitude, while the Great Spirit caught her mouth in a kiss and tried to edge her travel-breeches down.

Olivia screamed and plastered herself to his body.  “You’re going to drop me!”

“I’m not either!” Kodjunn shouted, but he wrapped his arms completely around her to be sure.

“I’m sorry,” she said, when she was certain she wasn’t about to plummet to the ground.  “That was a stupid joke and I knew better than to do it.”

“What are you doing here?” Kodjunn exploded furiously.  His hands tightened on Olivia, although he was not addressing her.  “I understand that you must empower her, but why are you here now?  You may not be able to see her anymore, but you can always find me!  Don’t you know how exhausting it is to carry you?  Leave me alone while I’m flying, at least!”

“I am safeguarding my interests,” the Great Spirit said coldly.  “And I am doing it as gently as possible.  Doubt you that it is far easier for me to simply blast your mind free of thought, your body free of life, and use you as an empty vehicle to carriage myself and my Olivia to our shared destination?”

‘My Olivia.’

For one irrational instant, Olivia was certain she was going to bite him.  All that prevented her was the thought of dropping six hundred feet into the jagged line of deadwood below.  When she was in control again, she softly said, “Kodjunn, put us down.”

Kodjunn’s temper put in a rare appearance.  “What in hell for, woman?” he bellowed, now enraged at both of them.

“We can’t go on until we settle this.  Put us down.”

“You want to settle,” Kodjunn snarled, banking roughly towards a clearing.  “He wants to rut with you like an animal, and I just want to go back to sleep!  Rats bite both your eyes, I am through with both of you!”  He dropped her from a height of six feet and soared off without slowing down.

Olivia landed clumsily—her hip on a jutting stone, her left leg in slick mud, and her head on a half-hidden ant’s nest.  She jumped up, pulling her foot free of the sucking mud, but lost the shoe and stumbled away, slapping dazed insects from her hair.

The Great Spirit appeared as soon as Kodjunn was gone from sight, blazing with the force of his rage.  “Speak whatever words you will, Olivia, but I mean to have that mortal humbled and I will tolerate none of your indignation.  It is not for the host to object at the burden he carries, nor to question my work and will.”

She tore what she hoped was the last ant away, along with several hairs, and limped across to a sloping hillock that seemed dry.  “My indignation,” she echoed, and made herself smile at him.  “My little mortal fits of pique.”

His expression was at once tense and watchful.  He did not move from his place, did not alter his position.

She sat down, favoring her throbbing hip, and stretched out her muddied leg.  “You’re right to call it that,” she said.  “Being offended…It’s something of a luxury, isn’t it?”

The Great Spirit folded his arms and scowled at her, waiting.

“I used to think I was being harassed when one of my co-workers asked me the color of my underwear, and now I don’t even remember the last time I wore underwear.  You don’t care about any of this, do you?” she asked.

“Should I?”

“I guess not.  I swore an oath, so I belong to you.  Kodjunn swore an oath, so you can use him, too.  Neither of us have a right to complain about the way that you do it.”

“And yet you do.”

“I do,” she agreed.  “But I understand something that Kodjunn hasn’t quite realized yet.  It could be a lot worse.”

“Indeed it could.”

“I’m pretty sure I could hurt you if I tried,” Olivia mused, and looked thoughtfully away when the god bared his fangs at her.  “Unfortunately, I’m also sure, very sure, that you could kill me if you tried.  May I ask you something?”

He glared at her for a long time, but at last nodded stiffly.

“Did you ever think of asking one of the other humans that Vorgullum took?  You said you were watching, you must have seen your options.  I know what you said about my heart and all that,” she added with a dismissive wave.  “But I also know that I didn’t make it easy for you, so why didn’t you ask someone else?  Why didn’t you ask, oh, Amy?  She’d do this, I’m sure of it.  She’s smart and she’s brave.  She loves Kurlun and her daughter…hell, she was the first person to ever say that we captives had an obligation to help our captors breed with us because of your biological imperative to prevent extinction.”

The Great Spirit frowned, but anger was not the only emotion burning in his eyes now.  Uncertainty had joined it, uncertainty and shame.

Olivia studied him in his tight-mouthed silence and finally said, gently, “It’s because she didn’t have someone like Murgull you could show her being tortured, isn’t it?”

He did not answer.

“And as willing as Amy might have been to hop up and save your children, you’d rather have a person that you could hurt, if you had to.  Well, that’s all right,” she said, and stood up to square off against him.  “That’s just fine.  I’m glad you understand the concept of manipulation because I intend to use it against you.”

“Do you indeed?” he snarled, advancing on her.

“Why else would I bother to help you cum?  Why, when it’s more work, more risk and a lot more painful for me!  Why?  Because I wanted to give you something you could only get from me, something you’d want so much that you’d want to make me happy.  I want you to think about that: You had to dangle a suffering soul in front of me to get what I got out of you for a good fuck.”

He roared at her without words, blasting her face with the heat of his godly breath.

She closed her eyes against the worst of it, opened them only after she felt her flying hair resettle.  She looked past the raised hooks of his claws, wet her chapped lips, and calmly said, “But Kodjunn is here because he loves you.”

The Great Spirit drew back, his blazing eyes dimming.

“His oath was yours at the asking, remember?  He’s here because he wants to be.  He’s here because you are his father and his god.  And you’re hurting him.”

He retreated another step, his hands falling to his sides.  After a moment, his fists unclenched.  He looked back over his shoulder into the dark, at Kodjunn, perhaps, unseen in the distance.  Finally, the Great Spirit bent his head.  “So be it,” he said.  “It is my nature to give in to heated fury, but I concede to your cool wisdom.  What do you offer as solution?”

“How do you define the problem?”

He shrugged.  “Kodjunn objects to my possession of his body.”

“Wrong,” she said firmly.  “He objects to your abuse of it.  You can’t force him to carry me for hours at a time when the only rest he has is to stop and have sex.  Sex is not restful.”

The Great Spirit looked troubled.  “The argument I gave before is still the truth.  I am an archetype of male energies, most of which cannot be shared out to a female.  I can only give you the raw seed of my essence.  It is your feminine nature that gives you the ability to receive that power and change it within your body.  What you think of as building up a charge is the act of conceiving a living body of magic of my divine seed.”  He released her hand and stared up at the moon, his face inscrutable.  “The process of such reproduction baffles me.  It always has.”

She interrupted gently, saying, “I’m familiar with the process here, Great Spirit, but one of us is going to end up killing Kodjunn if we keep using him like this, and then where will we be?”

He bared his sharp teeth, but at last the snarl was not directed at her.  “We have precious little time before we come to the Place of Binding, woman.  If you go as you are now, you will be at once consumed.  Do you think I enjoy the act of sex from within the unfeeling clay of my son’s mortal husk?  I use him only to arm you against the inevitable battle with the River Woman!”

“If you really want to help empower me against Bahgree, you’ll let Kodjunn rest during his rest periods, sleep during the day, and eat whenever he can.  If you really feel like you have to be there to protect me when he’s carrying me, then leave him alone the rest of the time.  Stop using him to have sex with me.”  She reached out to take his hand; he started and looked down at it.  “One hour with you is worth ten nights with him, anyway.”

He dropped his eyes to her hand, then sighed and looked away again.  “At least when Kodjunn couples with you, my aura is sufficiently constrained that I do not hurt you.”

“We’ll work on that, but you have got to give us some space.”

He scowled at her.  “You say this,” he said dismissively, “but you do not appreciate how my presence protects you.  You think that because you have not seen an enemy that you are safe?  This world belongs to Bahgree.  There are a thousand rivers, a million drops of rain.  She knows you are coming, she sees you even as I do not,  and she will have you if she is able.”

“You’re doing it again,” she sighed.

He looked startled, and then frowned.  “I am not threatening,” he snapped. “I am stating the facts.”

“To scare me.”

“To impress you.  You stand in altogether too much need of impressing.”  The Great Spirit lowered his display of horns and scowled at the ground.  “Very well,” he growled.  “I will not mention it again.”

“I think it’s sweet when you humor me.”

“Indeed, woman, you have no idea how I humor you.”  He glowered at her.  “But as you say, we manipulate one another.  I, to spare the lives of countless innocents.  You, for whatever trivial reason you think you have.”

She raised an eyebrow and looked at him.  “Trivial.”

He folded his arms and tossed his horns at her defiantly.  “It is not for my pleasure that you work your will on me.  You admit this.”

“And you admitted it was worth my effort, so you shouldn’t be moaning on about how pointless it is now.  Unless you don’t want me to do it again,” she added.  “Now come on.  Are you really this determined to have a fight?”

He threw back his head, preparing for a full assault, perhaps just on principle, when he heard this, but then stopped and tilted his head to the side as if listening intently to something beyond her range.  His expression darkened slightly, and then smoothed out with mild surprise and faint chagrin.  “Kodjunn,” he said reluctantly.  “Kodjunn is asking my forgiveness.”

Olivia said nothing.

The Great Spirit bared his teeth and glared down at the ground.  At long last, he looked up at her and growled.  “You are right,” he said finally.  “About a great many things.  I will go to my host and we will come for you.  We will carry you.  I will permit him to sleep at times, if you will promise to meet with me apart from him and give me pleasure when we couple.”

She hesitated.  This was a victory of sorts; her argument all along had been intended to get the Great Spirit out of Kodjunn’s body.  If she took the god in his own flesh, so to speak, the raw stuff of his seed would empower her far more, and she thought the temptation of touching her with his own hands would be incentive enough.  But no, she had to put the idea of orgasm in his mind, and giving him one meant enduring the painful backwash of his divine power.

But she could heal, and Kodjunn had been carrying him for days, suffering the dual agonies of the Great Spirit’s possession and Olivia’s sexual vampirism without complaint.

“Agreed,” she said.

He showed his teeth again, this time in an unwilling smile.  “Compromise,” he said, mouthing the word as if it tasted bitter.  “I am in danger of growing accustomed to this.”

“But you are getting just awfully good at it,” she said.

“Hm.  Indeed.”  He vanished.

4

On the third day, Kodjunn banked clumsily for an emergency landing, struck the ground, and dropped like a stone atop Olivia.  “Sorry,” he gasped.  “Hurt?”

“Get out,” Olivia said.

The Great Spirit looked wounded, but not insulted.  “So soon?  I should never have selected such a fragile male as host to me.”

“Everybody’s sorry for something,” Olivia retorted.  “You’re killing him.  Let him sleep.”

“Please,” Kodjunn added wearily.

“Every moment we spend out in the open is one more moment that Bahgree can plot against us,” the Great Spirit warned.  He paused before saying more, perhaps exploring the extent of Kodjunn’s exhaustion.  “But there must be risk.  Olivia, we will couple while Kodjunn sleeps.  Meet me there.”  He lifted Kodjunn’s shaking hand and pointed it at a very distant outcrop of rock.

Quite suddenly, the Great Spirit was gone, and Kodjunn slumped again atop her, instantly asleep.

Olivia pushed him to one side long enough to slither out from under him.  She wondered if she should cover him with something, decided there probably wouldn’t meet too many people in the middle of the night this far in the wilderness, and set off for the meeting place.

She reached the correct spot after an arduous three-hour hike.  The Great Spirit was perched on a dead log, contemplating the sly, winking eye of the moon.

“She will be in season in tomorrow,” he murmured, his face a study in innocent lust.  He dropped his gaze to Olivia, and gave her a huge smile.  “I have fashioned for you a spear,” he said, producing one from its resting place against his flanks.  “So that you might hunt for yourself and my son.”

“Why didn’t you hunt while you were waiting for me to get here?” Olivia asked, irritated.

“I require no food.”

“So you just didn’t bother?”

His head cocked.  “And so I have never learned how.”

That couldn’t have been an easy admission.  Olivia turned the spear in her hands, studying it while she tried not to be so annoyed with him.  It was lighter than it ought to be, judging from its size, but didn’t appear to be either wood, stone or metal.  Whatever it was, it was all one piece, perfectly straight and smooth, the blade very thin and sharp along its entire edge, the haft molded perfectly for her hands.  “Thank you,” she said at last.  “For someone who doesn’t hunt, you make a great spear.”

He shrugged that off.  “There is no skill in it.  Only a mere shred of whim, of will.  I do not need to understand a thing in order to duplicate its form and function.”

“You don’t find it odd that you can magic up a perfect spear but not use it?”

“I do not dwell on such matters.  It serves no useful purpose.  Now,” he said briskly, folding his arms.  “You will hunt for yourself and my host.  I will accompany you.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

“It is,” he replied.  “As I can neither hear nor see you unless you stand before my eyes.  Apart from the dangers of the River, there are other threats in the wild places of the world, still perilous to your mortal body.  Besides which, when you have done with hunting for the night, I mean to couple with you for many hours.”

Of course.

Olivia looked at the spear again, then shrugged and led him off in search of game.  Doru’s training hadn’t advanced quite to the stage of recognizing game-trails, but it had rained fairly recently and she could see, here and there where the grass had thinned, the soft indentations of hoof-prints in the soil.  So deer had been here at some point, even if she had no idea just when.  The Great Spirit was content to follow along behind her, watching avidly as she searched the ground, but the closest she came to deer were a few more tracks and a pile of a pellets.  In frustration, she flew out from her body and at once saw the uncountable lights of animal life all around her.  She followed some of them  to a warren of rabbits, and spent the next forty minutes trying to scare them out long enough to kill one.

It didn’t work well, and her performance suffered severely by the presence of the Great Spirit, standing off to one side with his arms folded and his massive horn-crested head tipped thoughtfully to one side as he watched her.  At last, in desperation, Olivia flung out a bolt of power, which had the fortunate effect of stunning three bunnies long enough for her to rush up and bash them on their furry heads with the flat of her spear.

“Is that how it is used?” the Great Spirit asked, surprised.

“Yes,” she snapped, scooping up the corpses.

“Well done!” he said, nodding his admiration.  “I always presumed it a throwing weapon, or perhaps a stabbing—”

“Well, you’ve never used one, have you?”

“No,” he admitted.  “I never would have thought to use it properly.”

“How did you know I could hunt anyway?”

“You burn at the fore of Doru’s mind,” he replied, taking the rabbits from her.  “He knows that you hunt and so I do also.”

“Doru hunts,” she countered.  “Why don’t you know how to use a spear?”

“Thoughts of you interest me,” he said.  “Hunting does not.  I require no food.  Why should I bother myself with the taking of it?”

“Of the three of us,” she returned, careful to keep her voice neutral, “you are providing the least amount of service on this journey.”

He opened his mouth to offer some arrogant contradiction, but closed it again, frowning.  “You are, perhaps, correct in that.  Very well, I submit to your will.  Show me how to prepare meat for food.  That shall be my function, apart from mating with you.”

Olivia removed them from the game trail to a reasonably flat clearing.  “First,” she said, “we need a fire.”

“Easily done,” he said, holding up one hand.  Flames burst in a funnel from the ground before him, and died back to sullen embers.

“Can you keep it from spreading?” she asked uncertainly.

He narrowed his eyes at her.  “Are you being insulting?”

“No, I’m being nervous about setting the whole west coast on fire.”

“Ah.  Then I answer you:  Fire is my element, the sum and substance of my immortal being.  I can scorch the earth entire, if I wish it, and I could contain these paltry flames even if I had set them in a field of dry straw.”

“Can you make me a knife?” she asked.

“Indeed.”  He took the spear from her and it shifted at once into a sword.

“A smaller one?”

The sword shrank minutely.

“Smaller than that.”

The Great Spirit cast the weapon away into mist and said, “Visualize, if you will.”

Olivia closed her eyes and imagined a skinning knife.  She felt the heat of the god’s claw tap against her brow and then his mind drifted over hers with searing heat.

“You call this a knife?” he asked, openly scornful.

“Could you skin this rabbit with a bayonet?” she countered.

There followed a quiet moment of reflection.  “I very much doubt it.”  He formed the correct blade and handed it to her.  He listened attentively as she instructed him in the skinning and cleaning of the meat, and then had him lower the flames into coals for cooking.  With supper spitting pleasantly on a stick, she leaned back on her hands and took a deep, soothing breath of summer air.

“And now we shall mate.”

She opened her eyes and saw him, crouched low on the opposite side of the fire, his gold eyes burning as he watched her.

“I will be gentle,” the Great Spirit said.  “I will try.”

Olivia edged a little further from the fire.  “Come here,” she said, trying to sound willing and not merely resigned.

He rose at once, walking through the flames, and knelt beside her, his hands sliding hot and eager over her skin as he freed her from her travel-stained clothing.  He lifted her, bearing her weight easily on his arms as he bent his head to trace his tongue like fire from her breasts to her sex.  Once settled there, he wrapped one arm around her hips and pulled her tight against him, thrumming with satisfaction and desire in equal measure.

Olivia rubbed her heels slowly against his shoulders, ran her hands up and down the serrated ridges of his upper-most horns, and closed her eyes against the sky.  He was trying, she couldn’t deny him that.  And he had a considerable raw talent, amplified by the fact that he did not require air.  He breathed fire into her womb and drank the oils of her release when she came; he felt her rock against his mouth and matched her with thrusts of his tongue until she cried out with pleasure; he cradled her with ageless strength and patience, explored her with a child-like fascination at her responses, and fed her pleasure with passion until she lost her grip on his horns and fell back.

He lowered her gently to the ground, moving over her to fill her vision, and split her with pleasure and pain as he penetrated, oiling his invasion with the heat of his cum.  His arms slipped beneath her back and he lowered himself full atop her, the rhythm of his pumping hips shoving her along the ground even as his weight pinned her in place; it seemed that he could not be close enough to her, could not feel her solidly enough against him.  His mouth moved, lapping steadily at the join of her neck and shoulders, drinking her sweat and thrumming low delight as he moved in her.

Enough, she thought, languid in his arms.  She slipped up and out of her body.  The rabbits are going to burn.

“You can hunt new ones,” he replied, but lifted his head to show her hovering spirit a smile.

He’d made a joke.  She almost couldn’t believe it, and he must have sensed her astonishment because he laughed before he bent again to lick the sweat from her throat.

Olivia floated further back until the sharp lines of the real world bled out.  Freed from the distraction of sensation, began to shape his climax.  As far from her physical self as she was, she could not mark the passage of time, but above her, she could see the crescent moon circling the sky, glaring down at them as they coupled.

It was time to bring this to an end.  She stoked the furnace of swirling power he had placed inside her, channeling it in precise patterns around and through him and playing off his own frenzied energies.  Always, a part of her was waiting, searching his aura for the subtle signs of his nearing climax.  When he began to utter a small, tortured sound in sync with the thrust of his hips, she knew he was close.  She spun out a thread of her own power and caught him.

Pleasure, she ordered, stabbing at the faint light of him far below.  The music of his roaring release brought a smile to her spirit lips.  Pleasure pleasure pleasure.

He blazed; the swell of his light exploded towards her, and then died back as her own body absorbed it in a purple bruise of pain.  She flicked a measure of healing at her puppet, studied the Great Spirit, and decided she’d struck the limit of what her fragile body could contain.  It was time to give him true release.

Gently, she thought at him.  I’m here, I’m here.  Don’t forget me.

His knuckles cracked as he forced them to release her.  He let out a scream as he slammed his claws down into the hard earth to the side of her head and hooked them there, half-rising off her for a final thrust.

Olivia brought them together with a galvanizing explosion, sparking his release and then streaking like a comet across the darkness of the coldest corner of her mind.  She succeeded once again in outrunning the lethal fallout as his aura burst in an eruption of sexual energy.

Olivia waited in the farthest corner of her mind, watching as from a great distance as the husk of her physical body convulsed with the force of the Great Spirit’s orgasmic release.  Although there was no real sense of the elapse of time, she knew it had to be several minutes before she deemed it safe to return to the realm of sensation.

She moved back to fill her body.  As always, she was struck at once by the weight of sheer exhaustion, coupled with a weary sense of accomplishment.  Her whole body ached with use, and the being lying spent atop her was damn heavy, but for now, she luxuriated in the brittle warmth of triumph.

The echoes of his primal screams were still rolling through the valley, but his mouth was gentle against her shoulder as he bit and licked at her.  When he sensed her return, he freed one hand from the ground, then the other.  He sat up, pulling her with him, and devoured her mouth with hungry gratitude.

“Are you injured?” he asked at length.

“I’ll heal.”  She patted his shoulder.  “You were very gentle, for you.”

He did not respond to the simple compliment as he had been wont to do, and she opened her eyes to see him watching her with an expression that was dark and deeply unsettled.

She searched his face, frowning.  “What’s the matter?”

“It begins to bother me,” he said slowly, “that you concern yourself with showing me praise.  It never has before.  Indeed, I have never before noticed the venerations of my followers unless they were denied me.  But you… why do you praise me?”

It’s harmless and it makes you happy, she thought, but didn’t say.  She studied his faintly apprehensive frown and tried to sort out an honest answer.

“I don’t worship you,” she said at last.  “But I can understand that you are making a tremendous effort to indulge my little whims and I appreciate it.  I’m not telling you anything I wouldn’t say to any other lover who made the same effort to please me.”

She thought this would assuage him.  If anything, he grew even more perturbed as he lifted her and sat her at arm’s length on the ground.  “I feared that you would say that,” he muttered.

Mystified, she only stared at him as he took to his feet and began to pace around the clearing.

“When I decided on you to bear Bahgree’s essence,” he said at last, “you were to be as Urga is, immortal and subservient, a concubine to stay at my side for all eternity.  Olivia, you must be made immortal, but you will not be my servant and you will not be my concubine.”

“No?”  She knew better than to be hopeful, but she was surprised.

He shook his head slowly, still gazing into the fire.  “You could never be a mere concubine. You are not Urga, some cast-off shred of my own consciousness.  You are complete within yourself.  When you become my mate…surely you shall complete me as well.  Even now, what one of us lacks, the other provides.  Our bodies, our natures, our very souls, if I can be said to have one.  It is the first great joke I have ever known, that in forcing to you into my service, I have made you my equal.  And now…now I see that an eternity with you at my side will not change only you.  It will change me.”

He finally turned around, meeting her eyes with what actually seemed to be difficulty.  His voice, when he spoke again, was curt and strained by emotions he did not seem to know how to handle.  “In our short time together, you have made me disturbingly aware of many things new to me.  One of these is the concept of unfairness.  Another is regret.  I have never felt such things, never in all the naked time of my consciousness.  Never, until now.  I am…sorry for what I have done.

“It is in my nature that my memory be eternal,” he continued after a short, agonized pause.  “My thoughts are immortal as I am, always with me, inviolate and indelible.  I have always reveled in my memories.  My existence has always been one of continuous glory.  But when I think on that moment when I forced your oath on the pain of another, I am ashamed.”

Olivia was afraid to move for fear of breaking this moment.  She didn’t even want to breathe.  She wanted him to say those words again, not to gloat, but just to be sure he’d really said them.

The Great Spirit reached down and helped her to her feet.  He clasped her hand with both of his, gazing into her wide eyes with grim determination.  “And so I release you from your oath, Olivia Blake,” he said. “I was wrong to force my will upon you.  I will free my son from his oath, and let him take you home.  To your mountain, or to your apartment and your human world, if you wish.  I will…I will speak to Bahgree.  Perhaps there is another way.  I only know that I cannot force you to go on.  It…would be wrong.”

It was the one thing she had never dreamed he would say, the one option she could not imagine she would ever be given.  Thoughts of home, of parents.  Houses with plaster walls and carpeted floors, electric lights, hot and cold running water, telephones, and remote controls, with people that looked like her and spoke her language.  Home.

She gazed at him, dizzy with relief and joy.

“No,” she said.

“I am in earnest,” he insisted.  “I release you, and release the soul I used to coerce you.”

“No,” she said again.  “Having the freedom now to choose my path, I freely choose to help you.”

He looked at her, thinking, then released her hands and stepped back.  “I will tell Kodjunn.  If he returns to the mountain, we will walk together to the sea.”

She smiled at him, and he returned the smile with a little effort, and then vanished.

Olivia uttered a little laugh.  She looked down at her naked foot.  Mud still squelched thickly between her toes, gluing pine needles and other organic debris to her skin in itchy clumps, but it was beautiful mud.  Olivia looked up into the sky, drinking in the sight of dazzling stars and a crescent moon with giddy delight.  “I’m a free woman!” she shouted.

The moon vanished.

“You are a dead woman,” said Urga.

CHAPTER TWO

URGA

1

Urga hovered before her, her lean body rigid with fury, and her eyes blazing with vengeful fire.  Now, at last, Olivia saw emotion in the goddess, and the sight of Urga’s hate filled her with terror.

“My mate tells me a woman must be found to cure his people.  She must be of human born, and he must lie with her and get her with his power.  I must be content!” Urga spat, floating steadily towards her.  “I must stand over him each night that he spends his seed inside you!  I must give my son to come through you!”

Olivia tried to run.

Urga caught her by the neck and pulled her easily off the ground, still moving forward.  She could feel her kicking feet brush at the ground now and then, but the ground was not as important in that moment as Urga’s hands—either the one around her throat, or the other, growing claws like icicles in the air before her face.  “I was content,” Urga said, watching her struggle.  “But I will not stand aside while he talks to you of challenges and choices and the taking of mates!  I am his mate!  I have been his mate since time began!  I would see every newborn gulla suffer and die before I stand aside for you!”

Urga’s body was as light as air.  There was no pressure around Olivia’s throat, but all the same, she was choking to death. Her hands fumbled out, scrabbling in the empty air for a weapon and touching only the moonlight-cool space that was Urga.

“Tell me, mortal,” the goddess whispered.  “Do you see death coming for you?  Is it cold?”

As an act of desperation, Olivia thrust both hands into Urga’s ghostly chest and blasted her with power.

She could not have hoped for better results if she’d struck the woman with a battering ram.

Urga’s chest seemed to shatter; sprays of mist erupted out around Olivia’s arms while the goddess herself hurtled backwards, leaving a contrail of light in the air like blood.  She flew, as limp in the air as a rag doll, and when she came to the first inevitable tree, she did not pass through.  Instead, she cracked up hard against its trunk, impaling herself through the neck, chest, and thigh with scorched, dead branches.

Olivia dropped, but couldn’t keep her footing.  She hit the ground hard and struggled to get up again before the counterattack that was surely coming, but the simple act of breathing was like swallowing rocks and the swimming of her vision made it impossible to find her balance.  She could only watch, croaking for help, as Urga reached back and pushed herself off the tree.  One of the branches broke off.  She pulled herself off the others, sliding weightlessly into space and floating there.

“Human filth,” she said.  “That hurt me.”  Urga snatched the broken branch, yanked it out of her body and threw it to the ground.  There were no wounds, no blood.  If she was truly injured, there was no physical sign.

Urga crouched in mid-air and sprang again.

Olivia managed to twist around and get her weight on one leg before Urga smashed into her back.  Her face struck the ground; she choked on dirt and tasted pine.

Urga’s hands were changing, growing larger and rougher even as they gripped her shoulders.  Through her own hoarse cries, Olivia realized she could actually hear the creaking groan of unnatural growth as the goddess altered herself.  Funny.  She hadn’t remembered until that moment all the gullan stories in which Urga changed her shape—as if the ever-changing moon she’d seen her whole life wasn’t proof enough.  Then the moment snapped, and Olivia flailed mindlessly for freedom.  Her arms and legs passed through her opponent’s body like smoke, but Urga’s hands were all too real as they pressed her to the earth.

“Beg me now, daughter of Bahgree,” Urga said above her.  Her legs were caught on both sides by what felt like hooks and wrenched widely apart.  “Beg for a swift death and perhaps I shall grant it.”

Olivia’s mind reeled desperately and called up an image—an aura of golden light.  She screamed, pushing her power up through her pores, and felt Urga shoved violently away.

Now it was Urga’s turn to scream, not with pain, which would have been nice, but with animal frustration.  Olivia huddled within the protection of her armor, her eyes tightly shut.  She could feel a faint sense of pressure whenever Urga struck or slashed at her, but her aura remained intact.  She had no desire to look and see what the goddess had become, but when Urga’s furious tirade suddenly silenced, she could not stop herself.

She might have screamed.  One of them did, at any rate, but whether it was Urga in a rage or Olivia in horror, she honestly did not know.  She could be aware of nothing but the abomination rearing over her.  It had no symmetry, and that alone scarred her eyes.  There was nothing of a female or even an earthly nature about it.  It was a distorted mass of black, bony plates; a nightmarish figure quilled with insectile arms and hideously jointed limbs.  When it reared back to savage the armor over Olivia’s horrified face, the act revealed a grotesquely gnarled horn, hooked and barbed and dripping, both longer and thicker than Olivia’s arm until it came to its killing point.

To let the punishment fit the crime, Olivia thought, and then she was on her feet and blindly running.

Urga bounded after her on seven joined appendages, baying from three throats and a gaping, tooth-lined slit in her chest.

At the time, it felt very much as if the chase was a real danger.  It never occurred to Olivia that Urga might easily catch her.  Similarly, she did not think to wonder how long her magic armor could have withstood any serious attempt by Urga to penetrate it.  Olivia just ran, concentrating on keeping the ground moving beneath her feet, and keeping that panting, snarling, chittering thing from getting any closer than it already was.

She ran without any regard to where she was going, ran until her sides, legs, and throat ached.  Olivia ran in the dark until the inevitable happened and she tripped.   There was an ageless, disorientating moment in which she was suspended in the air, without any sensation of flight or falling.  Then she hit the ground and the ground broke away.  She fell and thrashed her way through a slope of rocks, spiny branches, bushes and debris, and dropped into a shallow flow of icy water.  She lay there, staring up at the stars, physically unable to move even though she knew her death followed her.

Moonlight, rising over the ridge.  Then the blackness of a monstrous silhouette.  It was not running, did not coil itself for a final pounce.  It merely looked down at her, and in each of its terrible eyes, Olivia could see Urga’s hatred. One three-fingered hand gripped the lethal phallus that thrust from the ridged loins and stroked once, considering her.

Olivia waited, dragging up her hands and rallying for one more attack.  She didn’t have one more left in her.  She felt more than exhausted, more than defeated; she felt drained, as empty of power as a woman already dead.  She held up her hands anyway.  It was all over.  She had nothing left but a bluff.

One by one, all of Urga’s monstrous faces began to grin.

Then, without warning, the thing vanished.

She was alone.

She was alive!

…And she was lost…

2

After Olivia had finished with the initial phase of her response, which was panic, she crawled out of the creek and tried to think of what to do next.  She’d lost one of her travel-shoes in the chase, but beyond that and a few scrapes and bruises, she was fine.  Being lost was the real issue and she needed to come up with a plan fast.  Her first idea, which would have worked immediately in the movies, was to start a signal fire, but she didn’t have a lighter, or a gullan set of striking stones, or even a match.  In the course of their Journey, the Great Spirit had started each and every fire, and he did so merely by waving his hand.  Olivia knew that, theoretically, you could make a fire by rubbing sticks together, but all she got for the attempt was a sliver.

For an unknown length of time after she realized the futility of fire, Olivia simply sat on the bank of the creek and did nothing.  She was lost and there was no way to be found.  She was afraid to climb the ravine and find Urga waiting there.  She was afraid to stay here by the running water.  She was afraid of the dark, and she was afraid of the light.

She wasted some time by alternately sobbing and screaming for help, but the only answer came from crickets.   She tried to use her power to some advantage, but her energies had been utterly depleted and rest alone wasn’t going to renew them.  Even if she’d had some kind of charge and knew how to use it to make a beacon, Kodjunn would be too mortal to see it and the Great Spirit would be blind to it.

At last, she convinced herself that if Urga were still in the woods, she’d have leaped down and killed her by now.  Bahgree, on the other hand, might realize she was there at any moment and come popping out of the creek, so the only thing to do was leave.  Olivia ascended the ravine.

She tried to follow her own trail back to the clearing she’d escaped from, but that proved useless as well.  Certainly, a monster as large as Urga should have left a clear path of destruction even in this dim light, but Urga was intangible whenever she wanted to be.  As for the wake of Olivia’s own frantic flight, if she’d left footprints, she couldn’t see them in the dark, and all the trees looked the same.  She found a few broken twigs, but looking around, she could see dozens of broken twigs hanging for nearly every bush and tree.  Doru might be able to find her trail (her heart ached at the thought), but Olivia could not.

She walked anyway, even knowing it was the very worst thing to do when lost in the woods.  Panic had left her long ago, and that strange, clear-headed determination that so often follows finally died away as well.  She walked, no longer reacting when she tore her skin on the occasional spiny bush.  She walked without flinching as her bare feet moved over bark and stones and pinecones.  By the time she was able to see the sun rising through the pine trees, she had passed a scattering of unmistakably human leavings: beer cans, glass bottles, scrappy bits of water-bleached paper, strips of pale rubber which may or may not have begun existence as condoms, and a few shell casings, but she had processed none of these things.  She just walked and waited to be found.

The first ray of sunlight that finally crowned the trees struck her directly in the eyes.  Olivia put up one hand to fend it off, and then gave up.

She collapsed in a cross-legged pile and buried her face in her hands, dry-eyed, defeated.  By her estimate, she had been lost for about six hours.  At this time of day, it was impossible for Kodjunn to fly and so there was no hope of him swooping down to save her.  The Great Spirit couldn’t see her unless he was looking at her with his own physical form, which of course, he couldn’t do because he couldn’t find her.

So much for the Great Journey, she thought.  Now everyone would die.  Beginning with her.

Olivia waited to see if she’d start crying, but she was too tired for that, it seemed.  She looked once more into the empty morning sky, heaved a sigh, then curled herself into a ball and went to sleep.

3

She dreamed she was back in Hollow Mountain, walking the familiar mainway to the commons where she knew she would finally be able to meet with the other human women who had been taken.  In her dream, they would all be strangers again, except that somehow she still knew they would all be there and they’d all be fine; even the crazy lady with her saucepan would wave to her and smile and be all right.  She wanted to see this and so she was hurrying, but when she reached the wide mouth of the caverns, it changed to become the commons of Dark Mountain.

The human women were still there, but paired off with their mates.  Most of them were lost in shadows, but Olivia could still see some of them, half in and out of firelight, even though none of them seemed to be aware of her.  She watched, embarrassed and confused, as gullan bodies eclipsed human figures.  She could see Bundel with the madwoman, riding her at a furious pace while she stared star-eyed into space; Gullnar had Tina on her hands and knees, swearing and cuffing at her when she struggled, his fangs exposed in a grimace of animal pleasure.  And all that might have been real once, as awful as it was, but she could also see Kodjunn sitting backwards on Cheyenne’s stomach, ramming the haft of his ritual knife between her kicking legs and grinning; and there was Sutung, standing over Carla where she’d been tied to a bench so that she could service him through her tears while other males used her.  And overseeing it all was Vorgullum, his eyes moving restlessly from depravity to depravity, saying, “Think of healthy young,” as the air filled with grunts, sobs, and moans.

“Stop it!” Olivia shouted.  “What are you doing?  What is this?”

“This is why we brought you,” Bodual answered, rising from a limp and seemingly lifeless Karen.  He spied Tobi, sprawled limply across a bench, and headed for her, already stiffening.  “This is what you’re saving.”

Confused, Olivia backed up, but Doru’s hands slipped around her waist and held her, forcing her to watch as Bodual pulled Tobi’s legs open and pierced her unresisting body.  “Stop it, just stop it!” she cried.  “Doru, how can you do this?  She’s your mate!”

“We share,” Doru murmured.  His hands swept up to cup her breasts.  It was not until that moment that Olivia realized she was naked.  “The daughters of Bahgree belong to all of us,” he said, nipping at her shoulder.

His mouth was wet.  She reached up to rub the moisture away, but water poured over her hand.  Water was dripping from her hair, falling down her body in streams, pooling around her bare feet.  She looked at Doru, tried to speak, but her mouth fell open and water gushed out across her chest in a frozen stream.  Doru didn’t seem to notice.  He wrapped his arms around the column of water she had become and maybe he even thrust inside it, but she couldn’t feel him.  She couldn’t feel anything.  Olivia looked across at Bodual, who was still feverishly riding Tobi, but Tobi had somehow become Cheyenne.

“No!” she said, or tried to say, but her mouth was full of water.

Cheyenne heard her anyway.  She caught Olivia’s eye in a conspiratorial wink, then pointed one finger at Bodual’s head and cocked her thumb, making a gun of her hand.  She grinned, pulled an imaginary trigger.

Bodual exploded.

4

Olivia thrashed herself awake, and realized two things at once.  The first was that the sound still rolling through the sky was no dream but the echo of genuine gunfire.  The second was that she could smell smoke.

She crammed her fist into her mouth to prevent a scream while she tried to sort out what was dream and what was real.  Above the pounding of her heart, she could hear human voices shouting to each other, but they were too distant for her to make out what they were saying.

Humans.  Her first instinct was to leap up and call for help.  Mercifully, she was too tired and sore to act on her instincts; a second moment’s thought killed the urge entirely.  If it was deer season out there, she was likely to catch a bullet from the first hunter who glimpsed her moving through the threes, and if it wasn’t, then she would be throwing herself into the arms of a bunch of men who thought it was fun to go off into the woods and shoot guns.  Besides, even if they did want to help the crazy lady dressed in animal skins, what would they do with her but call the cops and send her off into town?  No, human help was a very bad idea.  She needed to get out of here as fast as she could.

Olivia crawled well clear of the fernbreak that had been her bed throughout the day and as soon as she dared, she scrambled to her feet and went rapidly away in what she hoped was the opposite direction.

It was late afternoon, and there was still plenty of light in the sky.  She ran as long as her aching body could stand to, which was not long at all, then fell against the rough trunk of a tree and tried to catch her burning breath.  There was no sign of her frantic flight from the night before anywhere around her.  She supposed she really couldn’t have hoped there would be.  All the same, she couldn’t be that far from Kodjunn, a few miles at most.  She cupped her mouth, and then let her arms fall to her sides.  Gullan ears were excellent, but if she was close enough to hear humans, they were close enough to hear her.

Another gunshot ricocheted through the forest.  The voices, when they started whooping it up, sounded closer.

Olivia started away again, and then stopped, torn.  Was she walking towards them?  The way echoes rolled and bounced, it was difficult to tell.  Was that a smudgy funnel of smoke over the trees, or just a thicker place in the clouds?  Where were they?  Where was she?

She kept walking, clutching her hands before her as she went, and casting nervous glances in the direction of what might or might not be a human camp.  But wait.  There was something ahead, caught on a tree.  Something that fluttered in the light breeze.  It wasn’t a scrap of leather from her travel breeches, though; it was a ribbon, carefully tied around the tree’s narrow trunk.

A marker?  For the hunters?  Was she walking down a game trail?

Olivia looked down, shifting her weight from foot to foot uneasily, as though her suspicions alone would reveal a helpful plaque or a map of the area, perhaps with a You Are Here tag and maybe even a Here Is Kodjunn.

Of course, there was nothing.  The ground was dirt and pine needles, bark and rocks, and if there was a path, it was invisible to her ignorant senses.  More uncertain than ever, Olivia coaxed her feet to continue moving her forward.  Nightfall was hours away.  She couldn’t afford to second-guess herself until then.  Either she sat down under the heavy pattern of branches and hoped for a miracle, or she kept moving and hoped to stumble on Kodjunn, who was surely looking for her.

A rebel yell, from very nearby.  Two more flat cracks of gunfire.

“Will you stop with that fucking thing?” someone shouted, more exasperated than angry, and quite obviously drunk.  Dropping his voice, but still perfectly audible, he added, “Gimme that.”

Olivia was appalled.  She hunted through the thick growth of pines, but couldn’t see anyone.  She didn’t have to see them.  That she could hear them even when they weren’t shouting was enough to tell her she was way too close.

“Fuck off,” someone said sulkily.  “Gotta have a gun in the woods.  Protection.  Could be bears.”

Two or three others laughed contemptuously at this.  Olivia cringed back against a tree.  How many of them were there?  And where were they?  Was she walking right into their camp?  They didn’t sound as though they were ahead of her, but it was so hard to tell for sure.

“Hey, give it back!  Give it—Aw, fuck you all.  I don’t need the fucking gun.  I see a bear, I’ll just piss on it.”

“With that little pecker?  What’s it gonna do, die laughing?”

“Gotta use it if you want it to grow, Reb,” a gravelly voice said sagely.  “And I don’t mean pull on it your own self.  Gotta find some pussy, get a good tight fuck once in a while.”

They’re just men, Olivia told herself, and made herself keep moving.  Men on their own will talk big, say things they’d never say if they knew someone else was listening.  It’s locker room talk, nothing more.

“You want to watch what you’re saying, Jimmy,” one of them said, cruelly interrupting another man’s stirring critique of the last ‘keg’ he’d ‘tapped’.  “I been out here ten days with nothing to look at but beards and ball-sacks, I’m about horny enough to fuck the crack of dawn.”

“Yeah, so why do I have to watch it?”

“You’re the littlest,” came the smirking reply and everybody laughed.  Manly kisses were blown, manly catcalls were made, and Jimmy, by the sound of it, retreated to where he could put his back against a solid tree and his ass firmly against the ground.  “Hell, boy, why you think we brought you?”

Just men, Olivia thought again, but she was careful not to make a sound.

She had skulked another thirty feet when the hill abruptly ended and she found herself looking straight into the campsite, with only two trees between her and six men.  Two of them were facing her direction, although one of them was cleaning a gun and the other perusing a magazine.  Olivia found herself flat on her belly without any recollection of the dive that put her there.  She listened, but heard nothing but coarse laughter and coarser conversation.

“Loreen knows better than to say shit to me,” one man was saying.  “Hell, she came into the bedroom once when I was banging Rosie Harper, and she just turn around and left again.  You got to train your woman like you train a dog.  She bites, you give her a sock to the side of the head.”

“Rosie Harper’s a fucking whore.”

“Yeah, so what?  You tellin’ me you ain’t never paid for it?”

“Jack Kaplan never pays for it.”  A considering pause.  “I been known to take it, but I ain’t never paid for it.  Tell you what, if a woman walks out of her house with her tittybuds showing and her ass crammed into jeans too tight for her, there ain’t no such thing as ‘please no please stop.’”

Grunts of agreement.  A bottle broke.

Olivia buried her head briefly in her arm and then started crawling faster.  It seemed to her as though the woods opened up about two hundred feet ahead of her.  It looked like the ground might drop off a little, too.  It might even be the clearing she’d run from the night before.

She risked a glance over her shoulder.  The trees still striped her view of the campsite, but she could still count all six humans.  As she watched, one of them announced a call of nature, and her heart actually stopped as she thought he might come her way.  If he had, he would have found her without any trouble at all.  As it was, he went in exactly the opposite direction and vanished from sight.

Olivia jerked her head back around and started crawling again.  She forced herself not to hurry.  She was too close to them.  The reptilian shush of pine needles sliding beneath her as she slithered on her belly seemed overloud.  She couldn’t risk any sound greater than that.

Another ten feet, and she looked around again.  More trees, more distance.  Still no real cover.

Twenty feet.  She started to get on her hands and knees, but lost her nerve and kept crawling.

Forty feet.  There was a subtle rise to the ground, and the trees were more densely scattered.  The campsite was well behind her now; she could see the backs of two of the humans, but no more than that.  It had to be enough.  She pulled herself into a crouching position, her ears aching to hear them, then made herself run a little ways.  She stopped, listened, and then ran again.  She could still hear them, but she couldn’t see any part of them or their camp.

Breathing a tiny sigh, she opened up her feet and ate the distance between her and the clearing.

It was the same!  Here was the dented ant’s nest!  Here was the sloping hill where she’d sat and talked with the Great Spirit.  Here was the muddy ground of the slow-flowing river she’d nearly fallen in!  She slid down the slope and stood in the damp grass, searching the sky anxiously.  If they were looking for her, they would have to see her here.

She hunkered down on a knobby thrust of grass to wait.

5

She was dozing when she first heard the noise.  It sounded stealthy, but not too stealthy, and her first thought had been of snakes.

At once alert, Olivia hunted through the grass without moving, but saw nothing.  She glanced up at the darkening sky, then over in the direction of the campsite.  She had removed herself to the driest section of grass, dimly mindful of leeches, but had seen no sign of wildlife.  Doubtless, the raucous noise of the humans was keeping the forest animals at a generous distance; all too often throughout the day, they’d fallen back on firearms for entertainment.

The sound came again, from behind.

Olivia spun around, backing up on her hands and knees, but still saw nothing.  Sound carries, right? she thought, on the verge of panic.  If I were to scream, maybe Kodjunn could get here before the humans.

Irrational, improbable.  Nevertheless, extremely tempting.

From the corner of her eye, she saw movement in the grass as something streaked towards her, but when she whipped her head around, it stopped.  She backed further away, keeping her eyes pinned to that spot.  Another rustle from the right.  Then from straight ahead.  Olivia bounded backward.  Her feet splashed into the running water.

“Jesus, that’s cold,” Olivia hissed, as icy water enclosed her ankles.

But the words were stunned from her mind when the water became hands and she was yanked back and into the river.

Her scream became a cascade of bubbles.  Her body went instantly numb.  Hands seized her arms, legs, hips, throat, breasts, thighs, hair.  The rushing water became distorted laughter.  The cold became biting teeth and scratching claws.  And then there was a face.

Drained of power, Olivia was helpless to do anything but drown.  She could not hear the things Bahgree said, but the hatred and insanity in that evil face did not need translating.  The face swam closer, gibbering, gleeful.

Olivia’s feet glanced off the bottom of the river.  She immediately got her legs beneath her body and kicked up as hard as she could.  She broke the surface, seized two handfuls of grass and tried to scramble out of the water.

She became the rope in a vicious tug-of-war between the Water-Woman, and her own grip on the grass.  She could hear a thick tearing sound as dozens of tiny roots tore free, but she was still holding on.  She kicked furiously, screaming out curses even as she fought to pull herself free.

Something impossible—an arm, meant to be a woman’s, but awkward and ugly—formed itself of brackish water and grabbed her by the hair.  One swift hard yank brought tears of pain to her eyes, but then the arm splashed apart.  The resistance in the water vanished.  Olivia kicked free of the river and clambered onto the bank.

She took rapid stock of herself.  She was freezing and shivering.  Her travel-breeches had been torn away, as had most of her shirt.  She was still wearing her left travel-shoe.  Her skin was bluish and pimpled with gooseflesh.  Otherwise, she was all right.

“Hey,” someone called.  “You ain’t never gonna believe what was making the ruckus!”

The river babbled out an ugly snigger.

Olivia started to scream out Kodjunn’s name.

6

They let her scream, and why not?  They were out in the middle of nowhere.  Six men fanned out in case she decided to run, but she was backed up against the water, and there was nowhere else to run.  They closed in on her, and then one of them had her by the arm and she was yanked roughly to her feet.

“What are you standing her up for, you idjit?”

“It’s too wet out here,” her captor said simply.

“Which one of us do you think she’s calling ‘cousin’?” another remarked, stumbling drunkenly alongside her as she was pulled back towards the campsite.

That halted the man who held on to her.  “Got a boyfriend?” he asked her.  “Where’s your cousin?”

She screamed for Kodjunn.

“She ain’t saying cousin, you stupid fucker, she’s saying cajun.”

“Missy, you want to shut up a second so we can talk to you?”

She screamed again.

The one that had hold of her punched her in the side of the head.

Her teeth snapped together, narrowly missing her tongue.  She stared at him, silent.

“Who’s it you’re shouting for, cajun or cousin?” her captor asked.

“Maybe it’s an Injun word for help.”

“She don’t look Injun.”

“Well, she ain’t getting any help either, so who the fuck cares?”

Olivia screamed for Kodjunn again.

Her captor, apparently deciding that her Indian heritage was a moot point, continued pulling her back to the campsite.  He was not long in reaching it.  There were two pickup trucks and a rusted camper parked there.  He hauled her over to the camper and opened the door.  Shoving her inside, he turned pompously to the others and said, “Wait your fucking turn, you goddamn savages.  Ain’t you got any manners?”

Olivia managed a last scream before he slammed the door.  Then she ran, but there was nowhere to go except to the back of the cramped vehicle, which was where he wanted her anyway.  He pushed her down on the filthy bed when she tried to scramble past him, already fumbling with the fly of his jeans.  He didn’t have to undress her; Bahgree had done most of that for him and all that was left was one shoe and the hanging shreds of her shirt.

Here I thought nothing new could possibly happen to me, Olivia thought, and shocked herself with a laugh.  I’ve never been gang-raped, so I guess I was wrong.  In a few hours, I am going to be one well-raped woman.

Her captor gave a cry of triumph as he finally managed to get his jeans down around his ankles.  He seized her knees and she put both feet on his fat stomach and pushed.  He went over with a crash and she tried to run over him, but there was just too much junk in her way.  He caught her by the leg, pulled her down, and even got her on the ground.  However, the same lack of space that kept her a prisoner also kept him from having room enough to spread her legs wide enough to allow his massive bulk between them.

“Aw fuck,” he snarled.  “Gimme a hand, here.”

She slapped him.

He looked comically shocked for an instant before punching her in the stomach.  When she doubled up with a croak, he clambered to his knees and pulled her backwards to the bed.

Someone shouted outside.

“Fucking…get over…stupid bitch,” her captor finished, finally heaving her struggling body back onto the bed.

Two gunshots.

He hadn’t responded to the cries of his confederates—they’d been doing drunken whooping all afternoon—but he responded to the gunfire.  “Shut up,” he said to her irritably, and listened.

Something heavy slammed against the side of the camper.  Someone yanked at the door, pleading to be let in, and then Olivia felt the whole vehicle rock as whoever was out there was wrenched away, along with the doorknob.  A high scream ended abruptly in a thick, ripping sound.  A heavy body hit the ground outside.  The head hit the camper.

Olivia’s captor stood up slowly.  His jeans were still around his ankles.  The half-erection he’d worked himself up towards was now trying to hide beneath his bulging stomach.  “Jesus,” he breathed, turning waxy pale right before her eyes.  “Is that your cousin?”

Olivia kicked him in the ass with both feet, knocking him on his face in the narrow aisle.  She cupped her mouth and screamed for Kodjunn.

A gullan roar blasted out an answer.  There were no other voices.  There was no one left to scream.

The man on the floor was trying to pull his jeans up, raving tearfully about how he hadn’t touched the woman, hadn’t intended to the touch the woman, was actually protecting the woman from the evil fuckers outside, and here she was, safe and sound, just leave him alone, okay?

Kodjunn’s claws punched through the thin door of the camper and pulled it off as easily as wings off a fly.  The gulla pushed his head and shoulders in through the little doorway and fixed his eyes on the human on the floor.  The Great Spirit was in those eyes.

Olivia uttered another scream, a wordless cry of primal relief.

Kodjunn’s head snapped up towards her.  He saw where she was, how she looked.

Then he was gone from the doorway.

The human and Olivia stared at the empty place with identical expressions of shock, but only for an instant.

That was when the body of the camper was vaporized.  Smokeless flame of unearthly temperature turned the brittle steel and plastic casing into a little fall of ash to be dispersed by the gentle summer breeze, leaving the camper’s base, furnishings, and garbage completely intact.

Kodjunn leapt up onto the foundation of the camper, smashed through the blackened toothpick that had once been part of the wall’s frame and threw the grimy oven end over end into the trees.  The man scrambled back, banged into the bed, then heaved himself out into space, less like a man jumping than like a man attempting to fly.  Kodjunn’s arm swept out and snagged him, his claws sinking into the human’s spinal cord as though it were the handle of a suitcase, and yanked him back.

Olivia closed her eyes and kept them closed until the screaming stopped.  It didn’t take long, realistically, but it took long enough.

After a moment of uncertain silence, she felt the base of the camper tip with the weight of the gulla.  “Olivia?”  He touched her shoulder, stood her up.  He probed at the worst of her cuts and bruises; his hands were too hot to be Kodjunn’s alone.  She kept her eyes shut.

“I gave them too quick a death,” the Great Spirit said.

“It wasn’t them,” she managed to say.  “They only just caught me.  Urga!”

“What of her?”

“She turned into a monster, she was going to kill me.  She chased me and I got lost and then I found this place and was going to wait for you, but Bahgree grabbed me.  I made so much noise getting away from her that these men found me.  That’s when I screamed for you.”

Kodjunn tried to say something and the Great Spirit interrupted:  “Ol—Enough talk!  Fly!”  He lifted Olivia into his arms, and then jumped into the air and took them away from the carnage.

Olivia opened her eyes only when the blast of Kodjunn’s beating wings filled her ears and even then, she didn’t look down.  “You saved me,” she said.

“There should not have been a need.”  The Great Spirit set Kodjunn’s jaw grimly.  “Urga will answer for the peril she placed you in.  She will answer for the evils she caused to befall you.”

Olivia felt herself start to beg him not to confront Urga, that Urga would kill her if he did.  But she realized then that Urga would kill her even if he didn’t.  Urga was the enemy now, just as much as Bahgree.

7

They flew until Kodjunn’s wings could no longer carry them both, and they went on foot through the forest, just the two of them.  The Great Spirit had left much earlier, either to face Urga or to work himself up towards the confrontation.  That he meant to do so on the night Urga came into season weighed heavily on Olivia’s mind.  Although she did not doubt he would remain furious, Olivia suspected that night might find him in the arms of his mate.

So deeply immersed in these unsettling thoughts, Olivia did not notice when the forest began to thin out until she was poised on a ridge overlooking a sleepy little community not unlike the one she’d been taken from.

Kodjunn, his eyes on his feet, walked into her shoulder.  He staggered back, steadied himself with her help, then looked out and saw the town.  A fleeting expression of abject astonishment gave way to disgust.  “Oh piss in my mouth!” he snapped, or at least, that was what Olivia heard him say.

“We’d better not try to go around,” Olivia offered.  “Better to find a place to rest until it gets dark.”

“I’m not resting this close to a hive,” he said, and right on cue, it started raining.

They looked up in surprise at the low clouds that had stolen over them unnoticed.  Well, not entirely unnoticed.  It wouldn’t have been near as easy a hike if they’d been making it under the summer sun, and Olivia had idly thought several times during that long day how nice it was that it was finally cooling off.  After so long surrounded by cold rock, it didn’t take much heat to make her uncomfortable.  And she was a Northwesterner by birth.  Summers were supposed to be cool and overcast.  And rainy.

Kodjunn closed his eyes, letting rain stream over him while his hands drew up slowly into fists.  Then he sighed and shook it off.  “We’ll rest,” he grumbled, kicking a stone over the ridge like a petulant child.  “Come.  We’ll keep at the edge of the forest and look for a safe place to sleep.”

Taking her arm, he turned and marched back into the forest, Kodjunn casting black stares down at the rooftops anytime he could see them through the trees.  He kept her close, his arm around her shoulders and one wing unfolded to shield her from sight as they walked.  She didn’t fight it; after everything that had happened, she felt like clinging herself.

“There!” he said suddenly, pulling her hard against him.

She followed his pointing claw and saw an old cinderblock shack up ahead, half-hidden in a nest of cedars.  It looked harmless enough to Olivia, but Kodjunn’s hackles were up.

“Get down,” he growled, pushing her to the ground.  “And stay low.”

She obeyed, but it was clear to see that the shack had been long abandoned.  Kodjunn was harder to convince, but once he’d peered in through the boarded windows, he was confident enough to smash open the door and beckon to her.  Within, the floor had disintegrated into flat, hard earth, but the walls and the roof seemed sound.  Enough light made it in through what remained of the windows for them to see that there were neither rats nor snakes, only a white-faced owl watching them disinterestedly from its perch on the shack’s only shelf.

“At least it’s shelter,” Kodjunn said, leaning outside to give the town one last mistrustful glance.  “All right?”

“More than all right,” Olivia said, basking in the dry air like a cat in sunlight.  “It’s wonderful!”

“Well,” he countered, looking doubtful, “I wouldn’t go that far.  I’d rather have a nice cave myself, but I think this is the best we can hope for in this land.”  He shook the rain off, annoying the owl, who stalked to the far end of its shelf and glared at them over its back.  “And it’s going to get cold.  I’ll be all right once I dry, but without the Great Spirit to provide us with benches, I’m afraid you’re going to feel the chill.”

“Benches?” she echoed, one eyebrow raised.

“Fire,” he said quickly, and struck himself in the head, the universal gesture for stupidity.

Olivia took a moment to reflect that if the Great Spirit were here, they could have a nice time explaining Freudian slips.  Since he was not, Olivia let the matter drop, and found a good place to stretch out for sleep.

Kodjunn paced the perimeter of the shack three times before coming to stand over her while she drowsed.  “Are you tired?” he asked at last.

“Aren’t you?”

He left her to pace around some more.  She dozed as slats of shadow moved across the dirt floor and the rain drummed down, and eventually he came back to her.  She could feel him standing over her, could feel the press of his stare and the weight of his thoughts, and she wanted to tell him it was all right now, that she was safe, that she wasn’t hurt, but she didn’t want to wake up enough to do it.  At last he lay down beside her, and that was all right. There was serenity in the silence, security in the feel of Kodjunn’s arm across her waist.  It had been a bad night and a bad day, but both were over now.

Kodjunn combed through her hair with his fingers, exposing her shoulder and kissing it.  His other hand brushed over the curve of her hip, pausing to gently squeeze her thigh.  “Olivia?” he whispered, the word strained across a hopeful thrumm.

Benches, she thought tiredly.  She pretended to be asleep.

Kodjunn touched his mouth to her shoulder again, this time to bite her delicately.  He slid his hand beneath her shirt, brushing at her nipple with the tip of one careful claw.  “Olivia,” he breathed again.

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask why in God’s name he would want sex now after all the times he had used her, but before she could work up the acid she had a sudden, vivid vision of how his eyes would look if she did.  She turned into his touch and looked at him.

“I thought that I might lose you,” he said.

She said nothing.

He drew her closer, until she felt the heat of his lean body pressed full against hers.  His hand slipped around her waist and cinched, possessively.  “Someday soon, I must lose you.”  His voice was thoughtful, slightly surprised, as if he had not considered this eventuality.  “How terrible it is, to care for another,” he mused.  “I wonder if our ancestors experienced these things, in those ancient days when they were free to love where they would.”

She rolled all the way towards him.  They were close enough to see only the eyes of the other, to breathe the same air.  “Can I ask you something, honestly?”

“Yes.”

“What is it about me, really?  I’ve had a long time to think about it and I’m completely baffled by what you people see in me.”

“I can speak only for myself.”

One corner of her mouth went up.  “Well, you’re the only one here, so I guess I’ll have to be content with that.”

“Compassion,” he said, without the slightest hesitation.  “I had never known it before I knew you.”

She thought about that.

“There is a healing way about you.  I don’t mean in your potions or the magic things old Murgull—”  He hooked absently at the air.  “—taught you.  There is a healing in your very soul.  No, you aren’t always gentle.  I’ve seen you match the tovorak roar for roar and never show a flinch, but I’ve seen you put your arms around him, even him, who stole you from your world.”  He paused then, and she could feel him struggling not to apologize for mentioning Vorgullum, no matter how obliquely.

The apology would be a hundred times more painful.  She put her hand on his arm before he could say anything, making herself smile for him.

“And just so,” he said, and breathed a sigh.  “There is not a one of us who would not tremble to feel this touch and know that you saw all the evil of his heart…and could forgive it.  For that touch, even for only its memory, we will let our females hunt with spears, sever a mate-bond, fight a challenger, and someday even fly again.  We will allow those who cannot hunt to have mates and raise children.  We will remember you, and perhaps one day we will learn there can be magic even in mercy.”

“How very comforting.”

He thrummed, low in his throat, and let his hand caress her bare flesh where he found it.  “You don’t mean that,” he said serenely.  “Never mind.  I find it comforting.”

There was a silence between them, a long and easy one, in which they lay and looked at one another while the rain beat on the roof.

“Kodjunn?”

“Yes, Olivia?”

“You are fully prepared to lie there all day and never ask me to couple with you, aren’t you?”

He rolled onto his back and howled with laughter.  When the storm eased, he said, still smiling at the ceiling, “Why yes, Olivia.  I am.”

“You can, if you want to.”

“No.  You have endured too much, too recently.”

He lay there, looking at the ceiling, not speaking.

Olivia listened to him breathe as the rain pattered above them.

“It’s just that he’s always with me,” Kodjunn said suddenly.  “And there’s no pleasure in that for either one of us.  And you are here, and I remember… how fine and kind you are…how you took me in your arms while you lay in blood and pain…and loved me.”

Olivia waited, but that seemed to be all.

And then, much later, as if there had been no pause at all, he added, “And he isn’t with me now.  And I want to savor that, savor you, now that I have you all to myself.”

“Kodjunn?”

He sighed.  “Yes, Olivia.”

“You’re still not going to ask me, are you?”

“No, Olivia.”

She rolled her eyes slightly, safe in the knowledge that he was not looking at her.  “Well, then you leave me no alternative.  I’ll have to ask you.”

He turned his head and arched a brow at her doubtfully.  “I refuse to take advantage of your good nature,” he said.

“Only females have the right to refuse,” she countered primly.

He opened his mouth, looked first startled, then thoughtful, then closed his mouth and smiled at her again.  “So it is,” he agreed, and reached for her.

8

Afterward, enfolded in his arms, Olivia stared out through the gaping holes in the roof of the shack and watched the sun set.

“I’m sorry,” Kodjunn said, “if you weren’t ready.  I know what those humans…that is…It just seemed to me that I might never have another chance to be with you, without him.”

She made a sleepy sound of agreement.  It would have been easy to use her power on him, to replenish herself with his energies during his lovemaking, and a terrible part of her had wanted to.  The feeling of emptiness and weakness about her was a bad thing to lie down with in the dark, especially with Kodjunn there beside her, his desire resonating with whatever hungry spark the Great Spirit had kindled within her, but…but she might never have another chance to be with him this way either.  She didn’t want to spend it feeding off him, leeching away his lifeforce while he thought he was making love with her.

Kodjunn glanced uncomfortably out the nearest gaping slat.  “It’s dark enough, I think, for us to travel, but I’d rather not.”  He turned back to look down on her, drumming his fingers against his belt, a habit he’d unconsciously adopted from the Great Spirit.  “It’s the night of Urga’s season,” he added.  “By one cause or another, when he returns, he will want you.”

Something in his voice caused her to blink and look more closely at him.  “It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

He scowled, but not at her.  “If he were a mortal gulla who abused you in this fashion, he would be castrated and killed for it.”

“But he isn’t mortal,” she said after a tactful pause to let him cool.  “And this really is the only way he knows to give me power.”

“The only way he’s interested in knowing, you mean.   But he made you promise to submit, just as I swore to accept the pains of carrying him.  I know, I know…He released us.  That clears him of our right to blame him,” he said blackly.  “Not of the evil itself.”  He got up and stalked out into the rain.

After a moment, for want of something to do, Olivia rose and joined him.

They stood together on the lee of the shack, side by side, staring down at the lights of the town and listening to the distant music of some summertime small-town fair.  The air carried the scents of that lost lifetime—exhaust fumes, barbeque grills, and freshly cut grass.

“I suppose I can’t stand here and curse him for something he can’t help,” he said after a while. “And it doesn’t even make me feel much better.  The fact is…damn it, he is the Great Spirit!   And out of all the tribe, out of all the gullan on all this world, he chose me to carry him.  He’s a dickhead most of the time,” he muttered.  “But that can still overwhelm me.”

She stroked at the base of his horns.  “Me, too.”

“And because…I don’t think there is another way to save our race…and I don’t trust any other human in the whole world to face Bahgree but you.  But I hate him for it, anyway.”

“Do you think he’s evil?” she asked at last, not expecting that he would know immediately what she was talking about.

His answer came without even a heartbeat of pause.  “No,” he said, bitterly.  “He isn’t even aware that his actions are wrong.  You could sit and explain them for years and years, and still he wouldn’t understand.  He can feel a little uncomfortable with his methods, but only because you keep bringing it up.  When you lie beneath us and he has you, he has no remorse.”  Kodjunn cut his eyes away from hers and frowned into empty space.  “And I have no remorse.”

“Neither do I, you know.  For the most part.  Especially since he’s condescended to work on his technique.”  She studied him from the corner of her eye and finally leaned over to give him a little nudge with her elbow.  “That was the only good thing about the times when he was in you.  You were good.”

Kodjunn grunted stoically, sat there, and finally sighed and gave her a little smile.  “If you only knew what that cost me.”

“I can imagine.”

“He is such a rutting goat.  I know he knows ways to please you, he just doesn’t want to be bothered.  But he still wants you to do things for him.”

“I guess the same could be said of lots of people,” Olivia admitted.  “And not only men.”

“Stupid people, maybe,” Kodjunn muttered.  “Coupling should be about two people.  It should be a braided thing.  Ask Kurlun sometime, he would tell you there’s no shame in taking instruction if it makes the pleasure greater.  Even Vorgullum bent his neck to learn—”  Kodjunn broke off with a hard flinch and stared at her in horror. “Oh, forgive me, Olivia, I didn’t think!”

Olivia was still smiling, but it was more a thing of grief frozen into place on her face.  “I know,” she said.  “It’s okay.  It’s taking me a while to come to terms with it, too.  I’m always finding myself thinking things like, I’ll have to tell Doru this, or I should get those herbs for Tina.  It hasn’t sunk in yet.  I’m literally days away from losing my mortality, and it still hasn’t sunk in that yours is the last friend’s face I’ll ever see.”

Kodjunn bent to put his arms around her and wrapped out the world with his wings.  He was soft and warm and smelled only faintly of the blood of the humans from the previous night.

“Kodjunn?” she said in a muffled voice.

“Yes?”

“Can we go back inside?  I feel weird being naked in the rain.”

He drew back to arm’s length and stared at her.  “You feel better being naked in an abandoned human den?”

“Oddly enough, yes I do.”

He smiled, and stepped back, gesturing expansively with one arm.  “If I dared to leave you, I would go to the hive below and find coverings for you.  But of course, the instant that I left your side would be the instant he returned to me, and I think he would be so furious that he would burn my soul away.”

She wanted to tell him that the Great Spirit wouldn’t do anything of the sort but wasn’t sure it would be the truth.

9

They killed time, neither one of them commenting on the hours that slipped away or the uncertainty they both felt.  It stopped raining.  The owl flew off to do the business of owls.  Neither of them slept.  They talked about silly things, things that didn’t matter—the misadventure of her goat-hunt, his apprenticeship to the old sigruum—just to keep the silence at bay.  They talked because they knew it wouldn’t last forever, and as bad as they knew it would be when it ended, they did their best to savor what little peace they had.

Kodjunn was in the process of telling what should have been a very funny story about a luckless gulla on a quest to find the legendary brown bat of happiness when the Great Spirit returned.  He came in violence, roaring through Kodjunn’s jaws as his wings unfurled and sliced through the air like razors.

The ferocity of this possession surprised a scream out of Olivia.  Kodjunn’s gold-rimmed eyes turned on her at once, blazing.  He was lucid enough when he commanded, in a voice of thunder and fire, for Kodjunn to withdraw at once.  Then he was gone, and Kodjunn stumbled back, his hands to his head.  He looked at her once, the whites of his eyes showing in an expression of pain and pity, and then fled without speaking, leaping into the air from the front porch of the dilapidated shack.

The urge to run was hot on Olivia’s mind, but she didn’t dare.  Neither did she waste time with feelings of outrage or anger.  She summoned up her courage and lay down, removing herself from her body and filling it already with what little healing power she could find within herself.

No sooner had Kodjunn’s silhouette in the sky faded to a pinpoint than the Great Spirit reappeared, his body distorted by rising waves of power and fury.  He fell on her without even seeming to see her, and took her with screams of rage, ripping through her pitiful defenses as easily as if they had not been there at all.

She fought him without thinking.  He conquered without noticing.  Though every movement wracked agony through the core of her soul and psyche, she refused to surrender to the bliss of oblivion.  Instead, she reached out with her distant mind, and made her puppet arms enfold him.

Tenderness did what her struggles had not; he turned on her at once, sinking his fangs into her body, savaging her like an animal.  Olivia tried to calm her mind and steel her will, then dropped back into her body and embraced him.  The pain was immediate and overpowered any other sensation, even that of his weight as he slammed her brutally into the ground.  She grit her teeth against it, fighting for self-control, and began to move around him.

She could not afford to be cautious or timid, not with this bloodlust on him.  She fought him like an enemy, inflicting pleasure rather than pain, but with the same frantic energy, until his relentless assault on her body began to ease.  Then she flew from her battered husk to the very limits of her power and worked her body from beyond, not leading him to climax so much as driving him, as if he were a blind animal she led by bashing him with clubs.  When she had him trapped, she prolonged his release only long enough to be sure the backwash of his tremendous power could not kill her.

He convulsed hugely, snarling as he came.  Then he crashed atop her, his claws dug to the quick in her bruised flesh, and let his ragged breath pant against her neck.  Olivia waited, hovering out of mortal range, then came gingerly back into her body.

Agony.  She closed her eyes against it, not trusting herself to move or speak.  Nothing had ever hurt so much.  He’d bitten her, clawed her, struck her, battered her.  He’d spent his hate inside her together with his seed.

And now, in the first few seconds of clarity, he knew it.  He spoke her name in a desperate, shuddering moan and threw himself to one side.

She couldn’t quite manage to turn towards him.  She focused her power on knitting some of the damage he’d done, but the pain stole her concentration.  Her wounds healed slowly.  The hurt remained.

Olivia sat up slowly.  The Great Spirit was huddled a short distance away, his brow pressed against the ground and his eyes squeezed shut.

She crawled towards him.  He cringed at her touch, but did not pull away, even when she put her arms around him and drew him into her arms.  She stroked his head and whispered meaningless words of comfort.

Time passed.  The night was fading when he turned, pressing his face into her shoulder, and whispered, “Why?  You never did me wrong.”

“I was who was there,” she replied calmly.

He shuddered in her arms.  “I cannot be so cruel.  I cannot believe that of myself.”  Behind his denial, a cry of hopelessness and despair.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“I hurt you,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said.  It wasn’t all right, but she could cope.  I’ve always been very good at coping, she thought wearily.  “Tell me.”

“She came to me as she always does, just as though she had not intended to destroy you.  She held out her arms to me and I refused her.”  He took two quick breaths, almost as though he were about to break down into sobs.  “It is difficult for me to refuse.  It is even harder for her to be refused.  She has existed from the beginning in a constant cycle, to get herself with child, grow fat, give birth, grow thin, and come to me again.  Tonight, I broke that cycle, as I have done only twice before in all the ages in my memory.”

He uncurled himself from her embrace and gathered her instead into his.  “When she realized that I meant to withhold myself from her, she grew furious with me.  I commanded her never again to touch you.  She refused, and she came closer and closer to me, coaxing me to lie with her a little while.  Finally, I struck her.  There was fierce battle.  I forced her vow, but she is bound by it.  You are safe, Olivia Blake.  From her, at least.”

“You beat her?”

“She has no physical body to be injured.  That I strike at her at all is a far greater pain than any blow against her body.  Greater still than that is my rejection, my forceful severance of her endless cycle.  There will be an emptiness inside her until her next season comes, and that is worse than any wound I could inflict.”  He was silent a long while, then closed his eyes and quietly added, “But that is not true, is it?  For, lacking the ability to do her harm, I visited that hatred upon you, who never did me ill.”

“Is Kodjunn hurt?”

That brought a little light into his eyes.  “I…I do not know.  I was not careful in his body.  Will you wait for me?” he asked, drawing away from her.

When she nodded, he disappeared.  Olivia lay back on the dry earth and gingerly probed her injuries.  He had gouged out furrows along her hips and thighs, but the bite had been the worst of them; even now, it throbbed blackly beneath the smooth cover of her healed skin.  She was afraid to look deeper than that, afraid to see damage she couldn’t possibly repair without submitting to him again.  And she’d have to, she knew.

The Great Spirit appeared again, looking at once ashamed and relieved.  “He is bruised, but well,” he said, and stopped, looking down at her.

“I just need to rest a while,” she said, sitting up again.

He knelt by her side and placed his hand over hers.  “Olivia,” he said, troubled.  “Why do you not flee from me?  You know I cannot promise not to hurt you again.”

“I’m not fleeing anywhere.”  She managed a tiny smile.  “I haven’t done all this just to quit.  I’m going to keep my promise.  I’m going to save my son.”  She pulled him close and kissed him.  “And I’m going to lie here with you until your own pain ends.”

He traced the line of her cheek without touching her, pure torment in his eyes.  “Why?  After all I’ve done to cause you suffering, why would you still show me kindness?”

It was a good question.  She thought of Kodjunn and shrugged.

“It is your nature to desire?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I guess it’s mine to forgive.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE RIVER

1

Olivia’s first realization that she had fallen asleep came as she woke up, still snuggled close to the fuel-less fire the Great Spirit had provided, her naked limbs pressed tight to her body in a vain effort to maintain warmth.  Disorientated, she rolled slowly onto her stomach and saw Kodjunn sleeping by the doorway, his chin resting on his folded arms and his wings splayed slightly to either side of him.  At his feet was a bulging backpack with that undersea hero, Mr. Squarepants, saluting the world.

By the thin, hazy stripes of light that lay in ripples across Kodjunn’s body, it was late afternoon in the outside world, which meant she had not only slept, she had been asleep some ten hours or more.  This was mildly astonishing to her.  She could remember lying beside this fire, her fingers running through the thick pelt of the Great Spirit as he moved inside her; watching their two shapes entwining with spirit eyes and using the power that came from him in waves to paint health back into her aching body.  That much she could remember.  She could even remember the god withdrawing at last, combing through her hair with his claws before he rose and winked out like a candleflame.  She had continued to lie by the fire, letting thin strands of her power soothe away the last of the damage as she waited for Kodjunn’s return.  She hadn’t expected it to take long.  She certainly hadn’t expected to fall asleep.

Now Olivia sat up, running her hand over the smooth skin that had, only a few hours before, sported the ruined scars of the god’s savage bite.  There was nothing now, not even a faint twinge of pain or slight dimple.  Pleased, Olivia leaned over to check her hip for any sign of the gouges from the god’s claws.

At the soft sounds of her movement, Kodjunn raised his head and frowned at her ponderously.  Before she could tell him to go back to sleep, he blinked and stared around the dark corners of the shack, then shoved himself onto his knees and shook himself fully awake.  “I didn’t mean to do that,” he said apologetically.  He seized the splintered frame of the open doorway and heaved himself to his feet and spent a few moments working through a series of sinew-creaking stretches.  “But you looked so peaceful sleeping there, I just thought I’d watch you for a while,” he explained, yawning.

“I can’t believe I fell asleep,” she admitted.  “Usually it wakes me up.  Being with him, I mean.  Well, not necessarily just being with him, but—”

Kodjunn glanced at her with the gold eyes of the god, his host’s mouth quirking in an expression of deep, quiet amusement.  “Not necessarily?” he echoed, and then faded back and let Kodjunn laugh.

“Since I just appear to be digging myself in deeper, let’s change the subject,” she suggested, and Kodjunn took the straps of the backpack and carried it to her.

“I stole these while I was…waiting,” he explained, unzipping it.  “I had to guess at the fit.  I hope they aren’t too uncomfortable.”

“I wore a mountain goat’s pelt with a neck-hole cut in it once, I think I’ll be okay,” she said, accepting the rolled bundles of clothing as he handed them to her.  A pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and a package of three pairs of socks.

She put all three pairs on, which might make her feet too hot in a few hours, but which would almost certainly be an improvement over going half-barefoot though the rocky woodland.  The jeans were two sizes too big and about five inches too long, but when she looked up from rolling the hems Kodjunn was holding out a very serviceable designer belt with its two hundred dollar price tag still attached.  “Not bad,” she said, executing a few deep knee bends to try and work some of the new-denim stiffness out before shaking out her t-shirt and locating the way in.  “You’ve got a pretty good eye for… human…sizes,” she finished faintly, staring at the shirt.

“What’s the matter?” Kodjunn asked, alarmed.  He looked intently from her shocked face to the writing scrawled stylishly across the front of the glittery pink midi-shirt.

Goddess, it said.

“Nothing,” Olivia said slowly.  “Nothing, really.”  She tugged it over her head and pulled it down as far as it would go.  She took a quick self-appraisal—loose jeans and tight shirt, her belly button winking slyly over the waist of her hippie-belt, her hair falling unbrushed down her back…if it wasn’t for her sock-swollen feet, she’d consider herself at the height of fashion.  “Thanks, Kodjunn.”

He didn’t look at all convinced, but he let the matter drop and returned to the contents of the backpack.  “I thought you might be hungry when…I thought you might be hungry,” he amended simply, and handed her the pack.

He had provided three oranges, a small carton of apple juice, two triangular stacks of grocery-style turkey sandwiches, and a plastic package containing four enormous M&M cookies.  She was about to make a wry observation on the subject of just how much he thought she could eat at one sitting when her stomach snarled audibly so she settled for thanking him and taking the pack outside to eat.

She sat on the grass while he perched on a fallen gate post and they shared out the food.  Periodically, the god would come forward, turning his molten eyes west in silent contemplation before retreating again.  Kodjunn did not seem to be aware of these lapses in his conversation and Olivia decided it was impolite to mention them.

With the last of her injuries healed, a long day’s sleep, and a full belly, Olivia felt worlds better than the previous day.  As Kodjunn finished the last of the juice, she stood and stretched and shook out her hair, restlessly readying herself for the flight.  “Are you ready?” she asked, and looked around to discover that she had inadvertently addressed the Great Spirit rather than the host he inhabited.

The god glanced back at her, arching one brow.  “I am,” he said after a long pause to consider her.  “But I am not at ease.  I feel…something.”

Immediately, Olivia stilled herself and swept upwards and out of her body, far out to the very tether of her limitations, to scan the world around her with her spirit eyes.  She had used most of her night’s charge in healing, and the things she saw were dim; she did not trust the perfectly benign flux and flow of life that spilled out endlessly below her.

Can you tell where it is? she thought uneasily.

“In general, yes,” she heard him say, his voice muted as if by tremendous distance.  “But I suspect I know exactly from whence the danger comes, although I cannot see it.  Some days hence, we must cross the River, and having crossed it, follow the path it wends to the sea.”

But we’ll be flying, won’t we?

“We will,” he agreed heavily.  “And the fact would better fill me with calm were I not already well-versed in Bahgree’s treachery.  She means to do something, and her intentions hover over us now as swollen and ominous as thunderheads.”

Olivia flexed the core of her power, testing it, and then dropped back and into her body.  “You’ll just have to stay close then,” she said.  “I don’t suppose there’s much she can do against you.”

“She is powerless against me, as immortals may be reckoned.”  The god bared Kodjunn’s teeth.  “But she surely desires to hurt me and she can hurt me best by hurting you.  And now at last, she knows this.  I will stay with you.  I will stay until my host falls exhausted from the sky if I must, but I will stay.  I do not dare to leave you.  Not until we have crossed the River.”

“For once,” Kodjunn added, narrowing his own eyes darkly in the direction the god stared, “you won’t hear me complaining.  But…”

When he only trailed off and was silent, Olivia saw the gold of the god seep back into Kodjunn’s eyes.  “What is it you think you know?”

Kodjunn frowned, unable to address the god, and turned to address Olivia instead.  “If Bahgree’s intentions are evil enough that you can sense them from here, then whatever she’s planning must use as much of her power as she can possibly have in her bodiless form.”

“Very likely so,” the god agreed.

“Can you fight her?” Kodjunn asked quietly.  “So soon after Urga?”

Once more, the molten light of divinity spilled into Kodjunn’s eyes, but the god only looked down at Olivia without seeming to focus on her.  Slowly, his brows knit together and he showed one of Kodjunn’s fangs in a scowl.  “I will fight,” he said at last.  “And I will win.  There can be no other outcome.”

“You’ve never been this close to being defenseless before,” Kodjunn countered.  “And don’t argue with me.  You’re in me.  I can feel it.”

There followed a lengthy pause during which Olivia mused on how incredible it was to watch a man have a complete schizophrenic argument with himself.  Almost as amazing as seeing the Great Spirit interrupt Kodjunn in the middle of a word.  For some reason, she didn’t think either of them would appreciate the observation.  She folded her hands behind her back and watched them discuss the matter.

“What do you propose?” the god asked finally.  He seemed angry and tense and almost embarrassed, as if the idea of being beaten in combat by the River Woman’s ghost were more humiliating than anything else.

“How long can we delay this meeting?” Kodjunn asked, and the god snarled and drummed his fingers on Kodjunn’s belt.

“I dare not delay!” he spat, and took a deep breath to calm himself before continuing.  “And you are correct.  I dare not travel on.  Let me think.”

He withdrew completely from Kodjunn’s body and the two mortals, human and gulla, stared at each other for a moment in silence.

“Did that look anywhere near as funny as I think it did?” Kodjunn asked, and Olivia burst out laughing.

The god blazed forward again, cutting off Kodjunn’s answering smile with a dark scowl.  “West,” he rumbled.  “West to the sea.  And north from that point until we come to the place where the river pours into the birthing waters of the earth.  It will delay our arrival at the ancient meeting place by a handful of nights, but at least we will not be stilled here, like cattle dumbly awaiting their own slaughter.”  He seemed to become aware of Olivia for the first time in the conversation.  “Why are you smiling?” he asked curiously.

“Doesn’t matter,” Kodjunn said as Olivia reached up to cover her smile before it could widen and prompt the Great Spirit to ask again.  “Are you saying you’ll be returned to your full strength in that time?”

“No,” the god said. His frown fell back over him like a curtain as he brooded down on Olivia.  “But in that time, I can perhaps empower Olivia.  And she will fight.”

“What?” she said, startled, as Kodjunn said simultaneously, “You haven’t thought this through.”

The Great Spirit’s eyes blazed and he silenced both of them with one upraised hand.  “I have,” he said.  “And I see no other choice.  I know what you fear, my son.  You fear she will lose that battle and fall before the River in death.  You greatly underestimate Olivia’s power.  My fears are far more sinister—that we will come to the meeting place of old and when the times comes for Olivia to take Bahgree’s essence, she will be weakened from battle… and consumed.”

Olivia suddenly saw herself, her own jaw hanging down her chest, her eyes blazing with light and hatred, vomiting out gallons and gallons of icy water in an endless gush as she clawed her way through Dark Mountain over a tumbled heap of gullan bones.

The Great Spirit focused on her sharply, and she wondered if he had caught the thought.  But he said, “I have tasted the edge of Olivia’s power, and if I can be overcome by them, the ragged shade that Bahgree has become will stand no chance at all.  I believe that if we can cross the River, we might safely delay our travel a little while longer.  Long enough, I think, to build in her another charge.  Olivia,” he said now, “what think you?”

She wrapped her arms around herself and looked back at him unhappily.  “I think you’re probably right.”

He seemed to wait for more and when there was no more, the very corner of his mouth quirked up in a faint smile.  “I am waiting for you to tell me of its unfairness,” he said.

“Life isn’t fair,” she replied.

“You choose the strangest moments to come to wisdom.”

She curled the corner of her mouth back at him.  “I’ll always keep you guessing, big guy,” she said.

The Great Spirit raised both eyebrows and looked, just for a moment, utterly and unaffectedly shocked.  “Big—” he began and then his face underwent an expression of even greater surprise before settling into a wistful consideration.  He took her hands, very gently, and simply held them, gazing at her with that strange, almost loving, look. “Indeed you may.  For that alone, I would dare much to keep you.”

He cast one long, last look away over the treeline, and then receded from Kodjunn’s eyes.

Kodjunn shook his head with a rueful little smile and looked down at their hands, still joined.

“What?” she said at last, when Kodjunn didn’t move.

“I’m trying to picture that.  Undying eternity in the arms of woman who can still surprise you.  Not merely many years, but many thousands.  I would have thought that the Great Spirit has seen everything by now.  You can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to stand here in his shadow and feel him amazed by you.  If I thought I could, I’d paint it on the wall.”

“Just imagine how amazed he’d be by Tobi,” she replied, and Kodjunn threw back his head and laughed.

“Who is Tobi?” the god asked cautiously, his eyes narrowing.

“Another human,” she told him.  “She hunts, she swears, and she doesn’t like sex with males.”

“How is she different from you?” he asked and then leaned back, staring unfocused over her shoulder as he listened to something from Kodjunn.  Very slowly, he arched one eyebrow.  “Hm.”  Less his usual judicial sound and more a growl.  “Even I?”  A brief silence ensued, during which his face went thunderous with aggressive disbelief.  “She believes this only because she has never coupled with the right male,” he stated firmly, and this time Olivia burst out laughing, an act that won her a sharp look from the god’s molten gold eyes.  “It is truth,” he insisted.  “It must be so.  What female of healthy body and mind would choose to remain virgin the full span of her life when…”

Olivia wiped her eyes and looked up in time to see Kodjunn’s face smooth out with the god’s shock, and erupted again in peals of laughter.

“With women?” he gasped.  “With other women?  Impossible!  No woman would couple with another woman!”  And staring at Olivia, baffled and outraged, he demanded, “To what purpose?”

She had to laugh a little.  “I can’t believe you actually need me to point this out after all this time we’ve spent together, but people don’t do only the things that would make sense to you.”

He frowned, studying her through narrowed eyes. The silence lasted for a very long time, and if Kodjunn had anything he wanted to say, the Great Spirit would not relinquish control enough to let it be heard. She was beginning to think she’d insulted him and she’d better find a way to apologize when he said, “This is true.  And yet I strangely find that I cannot regret this.  You are, after all, one of those things which I cannot anticipate.”  He looked away, his brows drawing darkly together as he stared into the west.  “And Bahgree is another.  Come, Olivia.  We have yet a few hours of darkness.  Let us not waste them in talk.”

2

They went on.  Every minute there was darkness to hide them, they were moving.  When the sky began to grey up, they went to ground.  There was always someplace waiting to take them in—abandoned cabins, musty caves, close-knit groves of trees, once even an empty gulla-cave—and always game to be had.  The Great Spirit allowed them a little time to eat, but then expected Kodjunn to take himself away so that her real work could begin.

Any power she’d managed to pour into her reserves had been utterly depleted on the night of Urga’s attack.  She was starting over again, if not exactly from Square One, and she knew she was well behind where she needed to be if she was going to fight anyone at this unknown river they were destined to cross.  The Great Spirit worked at her for hours in sex entirely without pleasure, most often without even the little touches of affection he had been starting to adopt.  He would not let her use her power expect to heal whatever damage he did in the act; his cumming was a luxury he would not allow.  Sex was all that occupied him until night fell and their endless flight resumed.

The weather got warmer, marginally at first, and then with humid, breath-stealing intensity.  The trees were replaced by vast cattle-covered flatlands, and then by trees again—not the pines and firs and maples of the Northwest, but strange, boggy, vine-covered jungle trees.  She didn’t need to sleep, but she wished she could anyway.  There was no rest in the way she renewed herself, nothing to think about but what was coming.

She didn’t know where they were anymore.  Not on the Western coast, that was for sure.  Not in the U.S. maybe.  Kodjunn refused to fly close enough to humanity to see a road-sign or stumble on a newspaper, and when she asked the Great Spirit where they were going, he could only give her the most oblique descriptions:  The Pool Outside of Time, he would say, or the Birthing Place, or the Forgotten Waters.  Oh well.  She could hardly expect him to know the names humans gave their cities when he didn’t even know how to hold the spear he himself had conjured up.  She supposed it didn’t matter, really.  They’d be there soon enough, and names would be pretty pointless then.

There was less and less talk the closer they came to their destination.  Kodjunn was rarely out of the Great Spirit’s grip and while he was there, his golden eyes were always fixed on the world below, searching for Bahgree in every river they passed over.  There were a lot of rivers.

While he covered the ground, Olivia watched the skies, where Urga’s moon grew sullenly fuller day by day.  Somewhere, she knew, the goddess was still furious, unforgiving, denied her monthly conception and festering with hate.  She had no friend up there anymore, if ever she’d had one at all.

She stopped counting the days and just watched the moon, marking their passage by Urga’s light and when she was not quite half-full, they stopped for the day on a muggy hillock under overgrown palms, and the Great Spirit said, “Tomorrow.”

She looked at him, her heart suddenly pounding and her breath too short.  “Are you sure?” she asked.

He gave her a look and she ducked away from it, staring out over the jungle and trying to see the ocean in the distance or smell it on the wind.  There was nothing.

“Bahgree flows beneath our feet,” the Great Spirit said.  “Tomorrow, we must cross her River before we come to the shore where her energies are bound.  She will attack us.  She must.  It is the last opportunity she has before you become what she has been.  Prepare yourself.  The end is nigh upon us.”

The end.  One more day.  Perhaps not even a whole day, but just a few hours.  Before midnight, this could all be over.  Before midnight, she could be changed.

She checked her watch, wanting to see how much time she had to be human, but then just sat, staring at the crystal face with its twelve diamond chips.  Vorgullum had stolen it for her, his first real gift.  It was the only thing she had to remind her of him, the only piece of that life she carried with her.  She had nothing else—nothing of Amy, of Somurg, or Doru or Bodual, of her own self.  Just this five-thousand dollar watch…and it had stopped.

“Olivia.”  The Great Spirit reached out Kodjunn’s hand to brush at her cheek.  “Why do you cry?”

“Am I crying?”  She wiped at her eyes and sure enough, they were wet.  “I guess…I’m sad.  I’m scared.  It’s easy to do things when you don’t have time to think about the consequences.  I just don’t know if I can sit here all day, knowing everything that’s going to end and not knowing what comes after.”

She expected him to give her that baffled frown he did so well, or perhaps attempt to comfort her with one of his outrageously inappropriate macho observations on inherent female weakness.  She tried to be ready for it, tried to preemptively quash any offense before he blithely passed it out.

He surprised her.  Sort of.

“You do not always need to be strong.  Make your woman’s tears, Olivia.  We will go on when you are done.”

Considering the source, that was positively awash with sensitivity.

And then he did something even more surprising:  He left them alone.

Kodjunn sagged, exhausted as he always was after the night’s flight, but he wasn’t quick to stagger away so that the Great Spirit could return.  Instead, groaning, he lowered himself to the ground and stretched out over the damp, coarse grass.

It was the last night and Olivia knew this moment of rest couldn’t last, but she let that go for now.  She let it go, pretended to believe that there was nothing coming and nothing else to do but lie down beside him and snuggle up under his outstretched wing.  She cried until she was done with crying.  He put his arm around her and the sun came up over both of them.

“I’m sorry, Olivia,” he said at last, rousing her out of her drowse.

“I thought you were sleeping.”  She wiped self-consciously at her dry eyes.  “Why are you sorry?  None of this is your fault…Like fault matters at this point,” she said with a sigh.  “Like it could be anyone’s fault.  It’s like asking whose fault the flu is or who was to blame for Pompeii.  I should be glad there’s an end to it at all.  At least, I should be honored that I’m part of it.”

“Should you?”

“I used to have this teacher in school,” Olivia said, lapsing in and out of English without being aware of it.  Kodjunn didn’t interrupt her; she was scarcely aware of him either.  She’d be saying this even if she was alone.  Some thoughts needed to be heard out loud, that was all.  “My sociology professor, he of the Gilligan’s Island craze.  No matter what he would be on about that day—race or sex or politics—when it came down to the end of it, he would always turn it back on us.  ‘No one person can every really stop these problems,’ he’d say.  ‘But would you, if you could?  Would you die if it meant ending the race wars or bringing peace to the Middle East?  Would you really step up if meant your suffering and your death would make things better?’”

Kodjunn listened, but didn’t answer.  She rolled over to check his eyes, but they were still black, still his.

“When it comes right down to it,” she said hesitantly, “I didn’t step up.  I was pushed into this.  Sure, I stayed after he gave me a choice, but that could be my own stubborn pride wanting to be in control.  I don’t want to be here, Kodjunn.  I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to me.”

“Will you go on?” he asked.

“Yes.”  She shivered, glancing against her will towards the moon.  “But I don’t think that means anything.  I’m the go-along sort.”

He laughed at her.

“It’s true.  My God, everything that you people think is so brave about me is due entirely to me just…going along.”

“Not everything.”  He put his hand on her belly and rubbed lightly.  “But even if it was…is not peace-making worthy of some regard?  Go along, you say, but you don’t go along in the direction we have always gone.  You go along to make things better, but I would be here no matter what he asked of me.  Not because I believed in the quest, but only because the Great Spirit appeared to me, because he gave a command and I could only obey.  I have given him my body.  I have given him my life.  That is going along, Olivia, and when it is done, I will return to the mountain.  I will go along with my leader’s will and take a second human female to be my mate and live in horror of me.  I will raise the children of my first…whose captivity surely worked to kill her.  But when I paint the story of this journey in our archives, I will make you radiant, Olivia.  I will make you tall.  I will tell every generation to follow us that you were the courage and the goodness that delivered us from our own shadows.  And perhaps we will go along in your path.  Perhaps we will be better.”

I thought such evil of this man once, Olivia thought, laying her hand over his where it rested on her body.  It was so impossible to imagine how she could have ever seen a murderer or a demon in the face that looked down at her now with such love.

“I should go,” Kodjunn said, not moving.  “He needs to be with you.”

She rolled onto her side, cupping his cheek in her hand.  “I’d rather be with you once more.  Just once more.”

“I’ll have my time with you,” Kodjunn said, stroking at her hair.  “We’re nearly there, to the place I’ve been dreaming of.  I’ll have my time with you there and keep the memory with me for the rest of my days.  But he needs you now.”

He started to rise.  On impulse, Olivia caught her, pulled him back down, kissed him.  His body settled slowly atop her, relaxing over her, covering her with his warmth, his weight, his love.  But the kiss was all he gave her, his first kiss, and as clumsy as it was, she wanted it to go on forever.

It didn’t.  He slipped away, smiling, and then the wind of his wings hit her and she was alone, watching the pink sky turn blue.  Her last sunrise as a mortal.

Then the Great Spirit was there, surrounded by his own radiance and towering over her like, well, a god.  He turned his burning eyes down on her, then out at the rising sun.  He waited, not watching her, while she undressed.  It wasn’t like him; usually, he was on her the instant he arrived, making the most of every minute.  To have him staring down the horizon when she was naked at his feet unsettled her.

“Tomorrow,” he said again.  “Are you prepared?”

The Great Spirit did not rhetorical questions.  Olivia took stock of herself, pushing out of her body to examine the brightness of her power.  From here, she could see the glittering pinpoints of humanity all around her.  She could see Kodjunn in the distance, his colors fading as he slept.  She could see a dim rush deep underground: Bahgree, clinging as close as she could come.  She could see the living spark of every bird and beast surrounding them, and over it all, a faint golden haze that might have been the living soul of Earth itself.  From here, the whole world was a muscle that Olivia could flex, if she wanted to.

She dropped down into her body.  “I think so.”

“There will be battle when we cross the River.  You must not engage her then.  You must be at your fullest when we come to the pool where her power is bound.  Let me combat the River Woman.”  He paused, then glanced at her with the barest hint of a smile.  “I know it is in your nature to fight.  I trust you will be able to restrain yourself.”

“I’ll try.”

His eyes dipped, lingering on their slow travels down to her naked sex.  With a throaty rumble, he knelt and slipped his finger into her, which was as close as he ever came to foreplay without encouragement from her.  She didn’t mind this time.  It was far more familiar than his unnerving meditation had been and Olivia did not protest it, only spread her legs and watched his smile broaden as he tested her.

“You are very strong,” he said, catching her leg and moving it impersonally around him so that he could enter her.  “I have chosen Bahgree’s successor well.  Fear nothing, Olivia.  You shall survive tomorrow’s ordeal and emerge a goddess.  My children shall be restored.  All will be well.”

He concluded his words of comfort with a self-congratulatory ejaculation and settled atop her, thrumming to himself as he went about his work.  That was how it was for him:  simplicity and sex.

Olivia pushed out of her body to that place without time to wait for nightfall.  As an afterthought, she might her body put her arms around him.  Then she turned her spirit face to the sky, where she couldn’t have to watch either the Great Spirit’s empowering copulations or crazed Bahgree’s underground contortions.  She stared past the rising sun into the universe itself, and saw it all.

Tomorrow, he said.  But did one more day mean, really?  She had changed too much already to ever go back again.

3

Her day passed and her night began where the Great Spirit raised himself from her badly-used body and called her name, directing her down into flesh.  Then he was gone, presumably to wake Kodjunn and bring him back for the night’s flight.  Olivia healed her hurts and stood up.  She didn’t need to eat, but Kodjunn would, and anyway, it was difficult not to make some passing effort at a normal routine, to cling to that fantasy for just a little longer.

But how normal could this hunt be, when she could see the lives around her, even here in this body, all the pale sparks of animal life crawling and flying and dreaming and dying?  She didn’t even need to go to them; at her thought, just a thought, they came to her, submitting to her will like the goats and the elk and the bears that the Great Spirit had sent during their exodus from Hollow Mountain.  The truly scary thing was, she didn’t need to use her power for this.  She had absorbed enough of the Great Spirit’s essence for it to become natural, as much as breathing.

So she took two of the small wood ducks that sat at her feet and, her will satisfied, the others fled in squawking animal distress.  Fire was beyond her—she hoped it was still beyond her—and so she cleaned her kills and waited for Kodjunn.

The Great Spirit did not at first understand the need.  She watched him take stock of his host, and then, with an expression that was half endearing concern and half infuriating impatience, he ignited the ground and took himself away to let Kodjunn eat.

The ducks cooked.  Kodjunn limped to a tree, cut one of the dangling vines, and drank from it, wincing at the bitterness of the juice.  He stretched his wings, winced again, and found himself another vine.

“How are you holding out?” Olivia asked, knowing it was a foolish question.

He was kind enough not to make fun of her, even with a glance.  “Well.  I thought of what you said.”

“What did I say?” Olivia asked, surprised.

“That you thought you should be honored to be a part of all this.  I wondered on that last night, in my dreams, on waking.”

“Wondered if you were?”

“Wondered why I was,” Kodjunn corrected, smiling.  “I already knew I felt honored.  Was it blind of me, that was the question.  After all of this, all that I have been a part of, is it foolish of me to feel honor when I am taken by the Great Spirit, when I am used in this small role, to carry Olivia to the renewal of my kind?”

Her name in his mouth was soft, reverent as a blessing.  She smiled, but her belly was hard and cold.  “You make me ashamed,” she said.  “It should be an honor, I know it should be.  It’s my own son I’m saving, isn’t it?  But…”

Kodjunn returned to the fire and hunkered to turn the ducks, seeming untroubled by her uncomfortable lapse into silence.  “It’s all right,” he said.  “I understand.”

“You know, I doubt that.”

“Did you never imagine yourself as part of some great quest in your youth?  I know I did.”

“Of course,” she admitted.  Ridiculous fantasies that they were, filled with knights and wizardry in her pre-teens, handsome rebels and post-apocalyptic dangers after that, and ultimately the very banal daydreams of moderate wealth, charm, and maybe a motorcycle.

“This can’t be the part you thought you’d play,” Kodjunn continued.  “Or how you thought you’d play it.”

“Well, no.  But then, I didn’t even know what sex was until I was twelve.”

That clearly surprised him, but with an effort, he shook it off.  “I mean to say, in my own youth, the adventures I dreamed of taking were a hero’s.  There were demons to face and vanquish, dangers to survive, enemies to combat—”  He shrugged, dipping his horns in a gullan blush.  “Females to woo and mate with.  You know.  Things to do.  If not terrifically imaginative, at least they were dreams of action.”

“I get you.”

“Your dreams must have been the same,” he went on, his attention taken by spitting duck fat.  “Or better.  Your reality is so fierce, I can only guess what your fancies were like.”

Olivia made a non-committal sort of sound, watching him.  She was beginning to see what he was trying to say, but she couldn’t really agree.  She’d never been the hero, even of her own childish adventures.  She really was the go-along sort.

In the mountain, she’d somehow become a hero.  God alone knew how that had happened, but she had.  She’d been a leader, a champion, even a warrior on occasion.  She hadn’t always liked it, but she had gotten used to it.  And now, she was taking that power and all she had learned to do with it…was to be a concubine to the most insufferably chauvinistic being she could ever imagine.  Sure, she was breaking curses and saving lives, but she was doing it all on her back.  She didn’t feel honored at all, she felt disappointed, and disappointment made her feel selfish and small.

It was a great thing, wasn’t it?  It was a great thing and she was going along to get it done, fearful and sad…and disappointed.  The gullan who spoke her name with such reverence deserved better out of their hero.

“I like feeling sorry for myself, I guess,” she said.

He laughed, opening a duck.  “Don’t we all.”

“What will you tell them when you go back?” Olivia asked, and immediately felt her face heating up.  “I mean, I’m aware that we’re not exactly at the end of it all yet, but…we’re sure not that far from it, and…and I might forget to ask again.  What will you tell them?” she asked again, knowing she was pleading with him, but not sure what she was pleading for.  “When you paint me tall and all the rest of that.  What are you going to say?”

“About this?”  Kodjunn looked around at the jungle, chewing thoughtfully.  “What is there to say about this?  These are lands the tribe will never know.  And honestly, if there were dangers and demons every step of the way, I’d never tell them.  Our dangers don’t need to be any more real than paint on a wall.  One picture is enough for this journey, one picture to show them the darkness through which you came for the sakes of those who stole you cruelly away from your life and fit you into theirs.  What will I say about you?”  He met her eyes again, gazing levelly and without awe back at her.  “I will say that you were Olivia, that you were your own self throughout.  That you were courageous and you were good.  And…And being good can be so much harder that just being brave.  Let them love you for your courage.  I love your goodness best.”

She had no answer for that.

Kodjunn returned it, then pulled a face and said, “Yes, I hear you, Great Spirit.  I’m hurrying.”

“You might hurry better without speech.”

“I might,” Kodjunn sighed.  He bent over his second duck, grumbling, “Hurry and hurry when it is me, but all day long is not enough for you to be in my bones.  Great goat.  It would serve you right if I took cramp and fell right out of the damned sky.”

4

The River, the Great Spirit called it, and Olivia had heard the capital R every time.  Now she saw it and understood why.  River was too small a word for what lay in their path.  She still didn’t know where they were, but this river was surely on someone’s map.  The Mississippi, maybe.  The Parana.  The Amazon.  Names were superfluous.  It was the River, and Bahgree had come with it to meet them.

She didn’t know if she could see it because of the Great Spirit’s power in her, or if Bahgree just wanted to be seen, but there she was—a colorless, shapeless thing tumbling through the currant below them, as playful and as vicious as an otter.  When she came to the surface, she made faces and sometimes laughed, the sound watery and horrible to hear.  When Kodjunn, following the serpentine curves of the River, came too close, she made snatching claws out of towering jets of water.  When the Great Spirit came to fill the gulla’s body, she made full breasts and a glistening sex, undulating in grotesque lust as she cackled, and these were the worst times, because no matter how fiercely the god spat his answering curses, Olivia could always feel Kodjunn’s possessed body responding to her.

“Go around,” Olivia said as Kodjunn banked away from yet another wave of grasping arms.  “Leave her alone.  Just go around.”

“There is no ‘around’!” the Great Spirit snarled, glaring down.  “No path that will not take us days and days out of our way.  It must be here!  It must be now!”

Kodjunn approached the River.  Again, he was driven back.  The damn thing looked miles across when Bahgree swam inside it; they’d be over her and helpless for a whole minute, maybe two.  Which didn’t sound like very long until one saw those hands reaching up, fifty feet high, a hundred.  More.

“Look to the moon!” the Great Spirit warned.  “As it grows, so grows Urga’s power!  She will not give us days to find safe passage!  Nor does this forest span out forever!  And when we come to the end of it, there do we find your people, human!  Shall they be easier to cross than this bodiless witch below us?”

Bahgree gibbered and writhed and beckoned.

Olivia shuddered.

“Up,” the Great Spirit commanded.

They had crossed a hundred lakes and streams on this journey, but this was the first time Olivia was afraid.  This River had power even without the lunatic spirit riding it.  She held on tight to Kodjunn’s neck as the Great Spirit urged him higher.  Distance alone couldn’t save them of course, but there was no point in making it easy for Bahgree to take them.  So they flew up, high up over the shrieking, breathing jungle, all of them looking down, trying to see the hand of Bahgree before she struck.  They were looking down, God alone knew how high, where the air was thin and cold, but the River was still wide and Bahgree’s face still danced over it.  They were looking down.

Olivia had no idea what caused her to look up.  It was as incomprehensible as looking away from the man aiming a gun at you, only to see a plane crashing down on top of you instead.  There was no reason, no warning.  She just turned her head, looking away from Bahgree’s mad, hungry dance, and up over Kodjunn’s shoulder, in time to see Urga dive out of the silver slice of the moon, her legs lengthening into lances of bone, her wings shining like the face of the River below them, and her eyes…ah God, her eyes…

There wasn’t time to scream.  Urga slammed into them without impact, without weight.  She kept her oath; Olivia felt only that silvery tingle as the goddess drifted intangibly through her, and then she was out and turning, hovering impassively in space to watch them.  Her legs were drawing back up into their original shape, but they were different…black…black in the moonlight.

Kodjunn coughed.  Olivia’s belly was hot and that heat was spreading.  She looked up as the Great Spirit looked down, his golden eyes round with shock.

“I bleed,” he said, his brows puckering.  “This body bleeds.”

Kodjunn’s arms were loosening.  The Great Spirit didn’t seem to notice.  He looked at Urga, floating impassively with them through the sky.  “Betrayer!” he bellowed.

The River was below them, opening wider and wider, like Kodjunn’s arms.

“I will see them all dead,” said Urga in her moon-distant voice, “before I give you to another.”

“I curse the day I dreamt you into life!” the Great Spirit roared, and let go of Olivia to cut his claws at his mate, but she remained serenely out of reach.

“Then curse me.  Only me.”  Urga caught the back of Olivia’s shirt (she never touched her skin, though, not so much as a finger), tugging her free of Kodjunn’s failing grip.  “Only me,” she insisted, dropping Olivia behind her, but of course, they were already falling, falling together toward the River’s grasping hands.

The Great Spirit slashed Urga open, but the wounds bled only white light and closed again.  Urga glided up against him, enduring blows and lethal claws without resistance, wrapping her legs tenderly around Kodjunn’s hips.  She spread her wings and their descent turned to swooping flight, just the two of them.  Kodjunn roared, the River rose up, Olivia screamed, and the world broke apart.

5

Water bashed into her from behind, then closed her inside its monstrous fist, yanking her down.  She could still see them for a second—Urga like a second moon with her wings full around her, motionless; Kodjunn in tatters, battering at her as he was borne away—and then the water was too thick, blacking out her eyes and numbing her ears.  She could feel Bahgree’s eager fingers at her mouth, trying to pry open her locked jaws, to be the thing she breathed in when her aching lungs ran out of air.

Olivia visualized the golden armor that had saved her once from Urga, pushed it out with a bubbling cry, and heard Bahgree scream in frustration.  The River churned, a storm of black water on every side.  Which way was up?  Olivia darted out of her body to orient herself and Bahgree snapped into sharp focus right before her.  Before she could move, the River Woman was on her, shrieking as she wrapped her soggy claws around Olivia’s neck—again with the neck—and tried to shove her head into Olivia’s mouth when she screamed.

Olivia bit, grappling with the twisting, keening wraith that rode her out through the aether.  The River boiled around them both, alive with Bahgree’s rage, and somewhere in there, Olivia could see the faint golden flicker that was her own body being carried away.

Don’t fight, the Great Spirit had said, but she didn’t have time to sit around and let him save her, if he was even coming at all, and not, well, cumming somewhere else.  She had no illusions; the Great Spirit was who he was.  Olivia yanked her legs up and locked them around the waist of the thing struggling with her, holding her fast.  This is not my body, she thought, letting go of Bahgree’s wrists.  This is my spirit, not my flesh.  She can’t choke me here.

The pressure at her neck subsided, not all at once, but slowly, like she was turning down the volume on the radio.  Bahgree’s face rippled in surprise and something else, something furious and lost and fearful.  She tried to get away then, but Olivia had her and now Olivia let her know it.

She punched her fist into Bahgree’s face—It isn’t flesh.  It’s only water—and grabbed onto her there, on the inside.  Bahgree shrieked, jittering wildly on the end of Olivia’s wrist as she drew back her other arm and drove it into Bahgree’s chest.

Let go let go let go of me bitch you are let go you are my own my daughter one of mine let go oh you’re HURTING MEEEEE

Olivia opened her hand around the pulsing, throbbing, living thing that her mortal mind could only perceive as Bahgree’s heart and—

LET GO LET GO YOU ARE MINE ONE OF MINE YOU CANNOT DO THIS

—crushed it in her fist.

Bahgree’s voice became a piercing shriek that Olivia could feel and taste as much as hear and then there was nothing, only water.  She hung there, poised for a counterattack that never came, remembering only when her spirit-sight began to blur that her real body was still out there somewhere.  Drowning, by the feel of it.  She found the tether that tied her to her body, but it was disturbingly slack, giving her only the dimmest resistance to follow as she hunted for herself.

She was going to be dead by the time she got there, she knew that, didn’t she?

Yeah, she knew it.  Shut up about it already.

There she was, tumbling through the River like a broken log, just a flicker of life-light in a cloud of swelling black.  Olivia threw herself at her lifeless, water-tossed body, expecting to come up kicking at the bottom, if she came up at all.  Weight crashed into her, and pressure, and noise, and the next three seconds were the worst she’d ever had to get through—the battering rocks and logs, the crushing agony of her lungs, the confusion, the convulsions, never knowing even if she was vomiting water out or breathing it in—but at least it only lasted three seconds.

Then she was dead and it was all okay.

A MOMENT OUT OF TIME

Olivia came home, all her body aching as if she’d spent the day under a box of bricks instead of in the front office at Gibson’s.  She put her purse on the bookshelf and her keys on the desk.  She was too tired to cook dinner, too tired to order out.  All she wanted was to get out of these pinchy shoes and go to bed.  There was a light blinking on the answering machine: Mom, no doubt.  God.  She’d call tomorrow.  It wasn’t like the world was going to end if Olivia just went—

Home.

Olivia came home, climbing up the narrow chimney to the first of Vorgullum’s many rooms.  Her arms hurt, as if she’d climbed all the way out of the mountain that morning and then mostly fallen back inside.  She took her claws off, sat down on the nearest bench and rubbed at the old, raised scars on the soles of her feet.  Oh, she hurt.  Why did she have to hurt so much?  When was she ever going to adjust and start to feel like this was—

Home.

Olivia came home, because it was always home, wasn’t it?  No matter how old you got or how long you’d already lived at that cheap little two-room at the edge of town, it was always home when you walked up the driveway where that big yellow bus used to drop you off, always home when you opened the door on the smell of spaghetti and caramel apple pie just because Mom knew it was your favorite, always home when Dad put his arms around you and called you his Punkin.  Twenty-four years old didn’t matter and three years of college didn’t matter and Bobby and his half-assed talk of maybe marriage didn’t matter when you came home, when you finally got to be someone’s little girl again, when you were picked up and taken in and taken care of, when you were—

Home.

Olivia came home down a dark stone corridor and out into the golden light of the forge.  Sudjummar was at his anvil, tapping shape into a spear-head with his hands and rocking a cradle made primarily from an ancient dynamite crate with steady strokes of his left foot.  Somurg chewed his fist and gave Olivia a punch when she lifted him into her arms, then opened his eyes and gave her his frowning, toothless snarl.  She sat on the edge of the table between a half-finished fry pan and a broken pick, bringing Somurg to her breast as she watched Sudjummar work.  In a moment, he would finish, he would find some cheerful subject to get philosophical about, he would come and put his arms and his broken wings around her, and he would make her feel at—

Home.

Olivia came home, pouring herself down a thousand rivers to burst from the crust of the Earth in a flume of steam and spray.  Here, she stretched out her consciousness through rivers and lakes, over falls, up geysers, into pipes, out of faucets.  She was falling from the sky in storms, trickling over bodies in shower stalls, filling glasses and passing in swallows into human throats.  The world was a muscle and she flexed it, bringing all her seven billion hosts together as one under her will.  She was whole now, she was alive, she was—

Home.

Olivia came home, bucking in abandon and crying her pleasure to the whole mountain as she rode Doru down from the heights where he sent her so easily, so often, so well.  She fell back, her hands grasping at his broad chest as he arched, back against Bodual, panting and thrumming in her ear as his movements became more urgent.  It would be so simple for her to push out of her body into space, bring the three of them together in sync for a single shared climax, but she didn’t.  She groped for Doru, reaching back her other arm for Bodual, and when they both had her, held her, she gave up all restraint and just came—

Home.

CHAPTER FOUR

JOURNEY’S END

1

Air battered her lungs.  Once.  Again.  Again.  Olivia thrashed.  Her chest spasmed.  She threw up blindly and was thrown onto her side to choke on air like razors.  Someone’s hand hammered on her back.  Someone else had her head, holding it up out of the mud since her neck was as weak as green reeds.  The Great Spirit couldn’t manifest next to Kodjunn…Had she been found by humans again?

Olivia forced her eyes open long enough to see a gullan face above her, but it didn’t come in clear.  The sun was up, that wasn’t the problem, but her eyes hurt too much to focus.  She closed them again.

“Is she breathing?  Olivia, are you breathing?”

Familiar voice.  She couldn’t tell whose.  Her ears were pounding, water-logged.

“Yes.  Yes, I think so.  Olivia, look at me.”

That voice was unmistakable.  Even as strained as it was, only one gulla had a voice that deep.

Olivia’s hand swam through the air and struck a broad chest covered in wet fur.  A very broad chest.  A mastodon, he’d called himself.  “Doru?” she croaked.

None of this could be real.  She’d cracked her head on the edge of Cheyenne’s pit and fractured her skull and dreamed up this whole thing.

“It’s me, Olivia,” Doru said.

All a dream.  Olivia got her eyes open again and sat up with help from four hands.  The jungle was there and it still looked real.  The River was there, flowing quietly by like it had never reached up and pulled Olivia down to drown while a crazy ghost tried to kill her.  She was even on the other side of it, which all but proved this was a dream.  And Doru was there, and Bodual was right beside him, and as hallucinations went, they looked good.

“Where’s Kodjunn?” she asked, wincing.  She needed to fix herself.  The Great Spirit said not to use any more power, but he didn’t have to live with pain.  “Is he all right?”

“He isn’t here,” Doru said.  “I saw…I don’t know what I saw, but he’s not here.  He was…taken.  I couldn’t follow him, Olivia.  I had to find you.”

Through the foggy confusion of the night’s memories, she saw Kodjunn again, thundering away at Urga in the Great Spirit’s voice as he was taken away.  Toward the Forgotten Waters?  Away from it?  And to what purpose?  Good mate that she was, Urga would never try to harm the Great Spirit, but what about Kodjunn?  He was one of the full-moon children, one of those sacred few who embodied the souls Urga herself conceived.  She had to know that, didn’t she?  She’d never hurt her own son…would she?

She had to get out of here.  She had to go on.

Olivia looked at the River, the gently-flowing River, and the tangle of deadfall, broken canoes, rotting plastic, and all the other flotsam at one of nature’s many U-bends where she’d doubtlessly washed up.  She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she wasn’t far from the place where Bahgree’s energy was bound.  She could feel the pull of her destination, physically feel it, light as a single thread tugging at her shirt, maybe, but it was there.  It was enough to follow.  She could go on alone if she had to.

She did have to.

Doru and Bodual were still sitting there, stubbornly real, looking back at her.  She reached out a trembling hand to touch Doru’s face, then Bodual’s arm.  They couldn’t be here.  They just couldn’t.  How many hundreds of miles had they come?  How many thousands, maybe?  They couldn’t be here!

“I couldn’t let you go,” Doru said hoarsely.  “I tried.  But I thought… you might need me.”

“How did you—”

“I saw which way you went when you left the aerie.”  Doru shrugged.  “I went that way.”

“He told me he was leaving,” Bodual added.  “Like he expected me to say his goodbyes for him and not follow after.  He’s big, but he’s stupid.”

Doru didn’t react to the nervous attempt at an insult.  All his attention remained fixed on Olivia.  “We saw you a few times in the beginning, but we could never seem to catch up.”

“I don’t remember Kodjunn ever being that fast,” Bodual interrupted.  “Or being able to fly for so long.  He never seemed to land!”

“Even after we fell behind, we kept finding your dens, so we knew we were going the right way,” Doru said.  “We lost you only once…but we just kept going.  Last night, we picked up your trail again.”

“The coals were still warm at your fire.  And then we came to the river and saw…”  He and Doru exchanged glances.  “I don’t know what we saw,” Bodual confessed.  “But we didn’t want to get very close.  We were flying around, and then we saw you.”

He’d lost weight, Olivia realized, looking at him again.  They both had, but on Bodual, it really showed.  He didn’t have a lot to lose.

“We saw you fall,” Doru was saying.  “And Kodjunn…kept going.  Olivia…”

“Go home,” she said.  She rolled onto her belly and put her palms in the mud.  First one foot, then the other, and then she heaved herself upwards and stood, swaying.  Everything hurt.  Did that even need to be said?  Her chest hurt when she breathed.  Her throat hurt when she coughed, and she had to cough a lot.  Her pruney skin hurt where her wet clothes rubbed on it and hurt even worse as it dried in the open air.  Her feet hurt when they had to take her weight.  Her hair hurt on her head and her blood hurt in her veins.  She supposed she was glad she was alive and all that, but oh God, everything hurt!

Never mind.  She had to go on.  Her legs shook a little, but they held her.  She took a few practice steps, never turning her back on the River, but the River ignored her and flowed on.  Everything was flowing on.  Even time.  Especially time.

She started walking.  Bring out your popcorn, baby.  The last act was about to start: In Which Our Heroine Marches to Glory.  Not a dry eye in the house.

“No.”  Doru caught her by the arm, and when Doru catches something, by God, it stays caught.  He stepped in front of her, his broad face set and his horns lowered against her.  “Olivia—”

“I have to finish!” she cried, struggling in absolute futility against his grip.  “Let me go!  I’m stepping up, goddammit!  I am going to finish this!”

“I know you are,” Doru said quietly.  “And I’m going to carry you.”

2

The River opened up at the edge of the world and emptied into the sea, and right where the two waters met, there was an island.  Doru circled it twice, suddenly trembling with exertion after hours of effortlessly carrying her, then flew back to the mainland and dropped onto the beach.  “I can’t,” he panted, and fell heavily to his knees.

“I could try,” Bodual said uncertainly, but he didn’t argue when Olivia simply shook her head.

“I don’t think you’re meant to go,” she told them.

“We’ll rest here then.”  Bodual took half a step away from her, looked at Doru groaning on the ground, and then back at her.  “For a while.”

She hugged him, and felt his arms tight to the point of pain around her.  “Make him go home,” she whispered.  “The tribe needs him.  They need you.  You can’t wait for me forever.  Please, make him go home.”

“I can make him,” he whispered back, and pressed his lips fiercely to her cheek.  “But who’s going to make me?”

She let go of him, bent down and kissed Doru’s brow.  He caught her arm, pulled her back, and made her do it right, his hands on her body and his breath inside her one last time.  Then he released her and covered his eyes.  He didn’t watch her go.  Bodual sat down in the sand beside him, his arm resting around Doru’s broad, shaking shoulders, and the two of them stared at the jungle as Olivia walked away.

The tide was in, but the waves had a way of breaking around the island, not on it.  It wasn’t hard for Olivia to swim out.  In fact, the closer she got, the easier it became, as if she weren’t swimming as much as lying on the water and being pulled toward it.  She climbed out onto the shore feeling stronger than when she’d waded out and started swimming.  It was little more than a few hundred meters of rocky ground raised up over the waves, a few dozen overgrown bushes, and at the center of it all, a wide, flat rock, oddly rippled, like a pool someone had turned to stone after dropping something into its shallows.  There was no sign that anyone had ever been here before them, no litter of beer bottles or discarded sandals, no weathered pier or rusty tie-downs for passing boats, no footprints to break up the water-carved dunes, not even birds nesting in the bushes or paddling near the beach.  Nothing and no one, apart from Kodjunn.

He lay naked in what little grass grew on the island, his useless wings spread out on either side of him, the shreds of them snapping in the ocean wind like a torn tarp.  He didn’t move when Olivia ran to him and clumsily fell down at his side, but his eyes opened with golden light when she put her hands on him.

She recoiled as the Great Spirit said, “You came.”

He didn’t move.  The sand beneath him was stained black in the moonlight.  Stained and churned around, as with a very particular kind of violence.  He’d been with Urga.  He’d used Kodjunn to be with Urga.  Kodjunn, broken and bleeding.

“How could you?” Olivia whispered.  “Couldn’t you just once—just once!—be a man and not a…not a rutting goat!”

“It was the only way I could keep her with me,” the Great Spirit said without emotion.  “The only way I could hold her from further vengeance.”

“Get out now.  Get out so I can fix him!”

“This body is beyond your power, Olivia.  Beyond all power.  When I depart it, it must succumb.”

“No!” she shouted.  But when she pushed herself out to the place where she could see his damage, all she saw was blackness, death wrapping him so deeply that her hands on his chest were sunk in it all the way up to her wrists.  The only light in him at all was the gold of the god, and even that was dim.  Nevertheless, she tried, gathering her will and preparing to pour whatever she had—all she had—into him, to bring him back.

“Don’t,” Kodjunn said.

Olivia’s spirit spun around and there he was, sitting in the sand, whole but tired, where he could watch his body die.  He let her fly to him, even stroked her hair when she wrapped her spirit arms around him, but otherwise didn’t move.

“I can fix you!” she insisted.  “Kodjunn, you know I can!”

“Not and still do what you have to do.  Look around you, Olivia.”

She did, and with her spirit eyes saw the true pool, the Binding Place, pulsing with unnatural life within its imprisoning stone, and on every side of it was Bahgree—Bahgree’s face in every sliding slick of foam, Bahgree’s hands snatching from every wave that lapped the shore, a hundred Bahgrees rising and submerging and swirling around them.  Never dead, always watchful, Bahgree.

“Then wait,” she said.  “Wait until I’ve done it and I’ll—”

“He has to unbind the pool,” Kodjunn said quietly.  “He has to leave me to open the way.”

Her mouth worked in silence.  Her eyes couldn’t give her tears, not here, but she was crying anyway, crying with her whole soul.  “Then make him fix you!  Make him do something!”

“He is,” Kodjunn said, stroking her hair again.  “He is enduring my death for me so that you can say goodbye.”  He smiled a little.  “I dreamed of this, do you remember?”

She turned around and saw their bodies together on the with the ocean behind them.  He lay there sleeping and she knelt beside him, her hands resting on his naked body and her hair falling down around them both.  It was just as he’d described it, and it was horrible.

“I’m going back inside now,” Kodjunn said, his eyes already fixed and dreaming.  “Please don’t cry, Olivia.  Don’t let that be the memory I take with me into eternity.”

She could have held him back, she sensed that.  No one had been strengthening him all this time, teaching him how to bend his power and use it for a weapon.  He only had to be the host that carried her here, only had to be strong enough to host the Great Spirit’s divine essence.  She could have held him easily, but not without hurting him, and so she let him go.

Olivia fell back into her body, into tears and pain and the awesome weight of the flesh.  She saw the golden light fade out of Kodjunn’s eyes as the Great Spirit left them.  She wiped her own dry and bent, shaking, to fill what sight he had left with her face.  She pressed her lips over his and took in his breath and told him that she loved him.  She felt it when he smiled.  She felt it when he died.

She slipped out at once and looked around, but he was gone.  Urga stood in his place, glowing as the moon, expressionless.

A thousand words flooded Olivia’s mind, a thousand black emotions.  She could say nothing, do nothing.  Grief paralyzed her.

“Why will you not die?” Urga wondered distantly.  Her head tipped.  She looked beyond Olivia to something in the real world.  “Those are mine.  If I wish, I could reach into their soft clay and will their hearts to burst.”  She lifted one slender arm, reaching as if the mountain were right in front of her and all its inhabitants at her mercy.  There she paused, looking down at Olivia again.  “Which do you love best, mortal?  Which of your many mates?  Which child do you carry highest in your human heart, he who you spawned, or perhaps one of those plucked from the dead one’s womb?  Tell me how to hurt you best.  If I must guess, I will take them all.”

“I hurt you once when I was only scared of you,” Olivia said.

Urga’s bland face grew slowly shadowed.

“If you make me hate you,” she went on, bringing all her power up from the heart of her where Urga could see it burn, “I’ll kill you.”

“Nothing immortal can die,” Urga said after a long pause.

“Only because immortals have no fear of death,” Olivia shot back.  “And mortals don’t have the power.  But I’m about to have both.”

Urga’s fingerless hand curled and slowly withdrew.  She looked… uneasy.  “Did I not heal at your behest and give your human acolyte a child?”

“And were you not just threatening my tribe?”

“I saved your life.”

“You killed Kodjunn!”

“Olivia.”  The Great Spirit’s unmistakable voice sounded behind her, his brilliance slowly turning the aether around them to gold.  “It is time.”

Olivia looked back at Urga.  “You better be gone when I come out of this,” she said.  “You just better.”

Urga drifted back, but did not leave.

“Olivia, it must be now.”  The Great Spirit’s voice was urgent.  What did it matter to him that Kodjunn was dead and his moon-mate was threatening to kill every other gullan she’d left behind in the mountain?  It was all going to work out just fine for him, one way or another.  Even if Bahgree triumphed in the end, the Great Spirit would still get laid.  Olivia hated him in that moment; she hated them all.

She returned to her body and stared into Kodjunn’s lifeless eyes for a long time.  Then she stood up.

That’s right, just go along, she thought.  There’s no one to paint you tall now, you know.  You can finish this thing any way that you want.

But she would finish it, she knew that.  She’d finish anyway, she’d finish grieving and resentful, she’d finish full of hate, but she’d finish because the same lives that Urga could snuff out so coldly were still in Olivia’s hands.  She’d finish because it was her son too; it was Amy’s daughter; it was the unknown child that Tobi might let Doru name Mykel, and it was Beth’s and Wurlgunn’s miracle.  It was the future, nothing less than the whole damned future, not just for Dark Mountain, but for all of them, and so of course she was going to finish.

The Great Spirit knelt and put his palm in the center of that flat, ripply rock.  The moonlight seemed to thicken, the pale rays of its light hung suspended in the air, trapped and held, like Bahgree’s power, until she could see nothing but the crown of the Great Spirit’s horns, his powerful arm thrusting through the haze, and the black rock itself.

A drop of water appeared on the stone.

Olivia glanced up, but the skies were clear.  She looked down and the drop had become a small pool, the size of a silver dollar, but welling steadily wider.  It began to move, pulling itself towards the center of the stone.  Like quicksilver, it left no trail behind, skittering in a thick mass over the hump of a ripple into the valley behind it.  It rested, growing, then stretched out an arm, found a gripping place on the next ripple, and pulled itself onward.  It rested again, spreading, its surface rippling as if it were panting for breath, then surged ahead and over and on until it spilled out into the shallow bowl at the very center.  It grew…boiling…alive.

The moonlight burned out brighter and brighter, reflecting off the caught water with blinding brightness.  Olivia looked away, blinking, and watched Bahgree’s waves come in, white caps streaming out like hair over a thousand frantic, covetous faces.

“Here was my union with the River Woman sundered in violence,” the Great Spirit said.  “Here was that power broken and bound.  Here did it become the curse that has devastated my children.  And here, at last, it ends.”

The light in the water intensified briefly, so bright now that for a moment, she could feel it as cold upon her arms and face as sunlight would be warm.  Then it died away and the pool was dark, smooth, utterly without reflection.  It waited and all the world was silent.

“Come forward, Olivia Blake, daughter of Bahgree.  Come and take back the power which was made at the dawning of this world and become what you are meant to be.  By virtue of your blood’s birthright shall mine be renewed.  Descend, a daughter of Bahgree,” the Great Spirit said, holding out his hand.  “And rise as my mate and mother of all.”

Somewhere, invisible, Urga was watching.

Olivia took the Great Spirit’s hand and stepped into the water.

3

The world fell away, throwing her into blackness without dimension, without end.  Blackness, but not darkness; she could see herself easily, in such stard contrast to the engulfing nothing that even the fine hairs on her arm, until now invisible, seemed almost offensively garish.  She couldn’t see the Great Spirit, or the sand beneath her feet or the stars over her head, but every drop of water in every single wave was there, a bead of perfect clarity that could not be ignored.

And she could see the water of the pool crawling up her legs, stupidly and gleefully boring its way into her flesh, into her pores.  She could feel it, like a million microscopic worms, swimming in her blood.

Olivia dropped (onto what?  There was nothing!) with a caw of disgust, clawing and shoving at the water, only to have it flow up her wrists, her arms, her shoulders.

Do not fight it, daughter.

She spun, a scream on her lips, and there was Bahgree in the blackness, crouching, watching her.  Water poured down the currants of her hair and up her arms again.  Something long and shiny swam inside her—an eel or a giant fluke—sometimes coming close enough to the surface to shine a flat, fishy stare out at her, but Bahgree’s expression was strangely serene.  Her calm magnified, not cloaked, her madness.

Struggle is futile.  Embrace me, my child, this creature said, creeping closer.  I am eternity, divinity, and death.  What are you but youth and hope?  Youth fades, mortal one.  Hope curdles into despair.

The water washed up her neck, over her lips, into her mouth and up her nose, into her open eyes.  It entered greedily, refusing to be taken in swallows, but thrust itself down her throat with purpose and living intent.  She staggered back, choking and retching, her hands flying to her stomach as it began to bulge.

You cannot win this battle, daughter.  But only embrace me—  Bahgree laid her hand upon her rippling breast, noticed the eel, and reached in to pull it indifferently out.  Embrace me, she said, crushing the thing in her fist and tossing it aside, and I will work wonders with you.

Olivia doubled over, gulping water, fighting for control against the invading thing inside her.  She was changing.  She could feel herself changing, feel her mind warping into a crucible of strange new lines of thought.  Her flesh, oh God, her flesh was moving, rippling and bubbling like the water that raped its way deeper and deeper inside her.  Soon, they would be one and the same.

Bahgree laid her hand on Olivia’s breast, her fingers pouring up along the currant toward Olivia’s mouth.  Embrace, she crooned.  Even I can be kind.  Do you think I will kill your son?  Never!  They will all be my children now.

No!

Olivia clawed her way free of the contorting husk of her body and out where she could see it.  Her flesh was just a wash of poisonous light and shadow in constant flux.  There was nothing that she recognized, nothing she knew as only Olivia.

It is too late for you, Bahgree told her, bending lovingly to caress this monstrous, frothing form.  Her hair drifted forward, caught itself in the current, and flowed upwards to fill Olivia’s throat, each strand waving like the delicate arms of a jellyfish.  Her head collapsed, streamed inside her.  Then her arms, her breasts, her hips.  Her legs became streams, her toes stretching out to playful rivulets for Olivia to swallow.  But I will keep you with me, always.  When all the rest of the world has forgotten love, I will yet show them your face.  Let no one born of me ever forget who brought me back to life.

Bahgree was there—Bahgree, where Olivia had been.  There was no way to separate them, no way to force her out.  The water kept coming and coming and Olivia could only keep taking it in.  She fought, but her struggles were waning.  She was Bahgree, now and forever.

Wait, what was she doing?  The Great Spirit hadn’t been teaching her how to strip power away from herself all this time!  Bahgree was in her, and maybe that was the worst thing that had ever been in her, but it sure wasn’t unprecedented.  Olivia flew up, past the place where the world dissolved to blobs of light.  From here, she looked down and saw only power.  From here, it was as simple as it had always been:  Power could be translated.

She stopped trying to fight, stopped trying to pry the River Woman loose from whatever might be left that was Olivia.  There was no contaminant at this height; there was only energy, pliable to her will, energy that had helpfully rooted itself in her already.  That made it easier.

Bahgree shrieked at the first touch of Olivia’s mind, but she had insinuated herself too well; there was no wrenching free.  Olivia watched her body pulse as the energy invading her was first subdued, then absorbed.  The sound of screams penetrated even this high place, but they were of little importance.  She concentrated on the light’s wild fluctuations below her, closing her mind to time, and worked it slowly into sync with itself, with her.  It wasn’t easy—the levels of focus and control it required were immense, like playing a thousand games of chess at once while flexing each of her six hundred fifty muscles in precise order—but it finally began to happen, and once it began, there was no stopping it.

She was no one’s daughter now.

4

Olivia dropped back down into a limbless, wildly-morphing mass of water.  The look of it disturbed her, so as soon as she was back inside, she pulled it all tight into the shape she remembered, vomiting out the excess as she squeezed it from herself, and giving it the look of flesh.

The world was still black, but now the blackness seemed cheaply false, no different from the way Elvis images jumped off black velvet.  It was tasteless, but she didn’t have to live with it anymore.

Her new thoughts flexed, realigned.  She stood upon the beach in a puddle of water atop an oddly rippled rock.  The Great Spirit’s hand enveloped hers; she considered this, then turned away, allowing her arm to turn to water rather than deal with the unpleasantness of speech, of friction.  Her arm reformed as she moved (not walking, but only moving, and leaving no trail behind) along the beach.  She watched the waves roll in.

“Olivia, it is time.”

What was his voice but another wave?  Olivia closed her eyes and looked beyond, shuffling through lives without interest.  She could pull them to her, any one of them, from any distance.  They were no different than the cells of her blood, tumbling together in her veins.  They were made of water, as she was, and one drop becomes indistinguishable when it falls into the sea.

The beautiful, the dancing, the eternal sea.

“Olivia, my children!”

Children?  She remembered now.  The children, those brought forth from their two kinds, those this world could not welcome.  The Great Spirit was waiting for her, waiting to hear her offer oaths so that he might take their bloodlines and weave them into this world’s tapestries, but why?  Why, when it was as simple a thing as taking the waters of their lives and bringing their countless colors into sync with the sea?  There!  A thought and they were whole!  A thought, and every child born—to human, to gulla, to both—belonged to her.

One of these was her own.  She did not feel the urge to look in on him, but she did wonder why not, in a distracted sort of way.

The Great Spirit drew back, alarm burning out of him as bright as the sun as he watched her bind the bloodlines of every kind of people to the firmament of this world…without him. He raised his hand to touch her, but seemed to think better of it when she glanced his way.  “Olivia,” he said again.  “You must take your place at my side.”

Anger struck her, not her own, but burning at her from the side like a splash of cast-off—
water

—coffee.  Olivia turned and gazed at Urga.

“Declare yourself my mate,” the Great Spirit urged.  “One last battle and the way is clear.”

“Battle.”  Olivia raised her hand and brought the sea up and around Urga as ice, trapping her mid-transformation, her jaws gaping as for a scream.  Rage?  Pain?  Fear?  It did not seem to matter enough to speculate upon.  “Why?” she asked, examining the frozen form of the moon.

“You cannot trust her to forego her vengeance!  Her many faces are deceit.  Olivia, you must challenge her!  It is not enough for me to set her aside, you must confront her and end her spiteful curse!”

Curse.  That’s right, there had been a curse.  Urga’s curse, that no gullan should come whole into this world unless it came through her.

But that was her right, wasn’t it?

Olivia opened her hands and looked down at the water pooling in her palms.  Droplets fell from her fingertips.  Onto a corpse, she saw.  Not one of hers.  She began to ignore it, then paused and looked down again.  She knew this carcass, she knew she knew it, and she knew it had mattered once that it had died.  Now it did not.  Why?

“There is no love in this form,” Olivia said, frowning at her hands.

The Great Spirit hesitated, then said simply, “No.”

“You did not tell me there would be no love.”

“It is eternity,” he said.  He glanced at Urga, frozen and forgotten.  “Olivia, there must be a challenge.”

“Must there?”

“You must break her to your will, or she to hers.  It is eternity.  There can be no unknowns.”

Eternity.  She knew now how long that was.  She, who could count the drops that filled the oceans, looked ahead and saw every hour outside of Time, and she was cold.

Yes, but he’ll live, she thought vaguely.  This son of hers she had no interest to see, he would live.  That was the price, wasn’t it?  That was the bargain she had made.

She looked down, down past her dripping fingers to the still, slack, staring face of someone who had loved her only minutes ago.  She looked away, across the gentle waves to the two figures sitting together in the sand, and beyond them, to the mountain filled with people she had given up her mortality for.  She looked and saw, among the billions of flickering human lights, the two, still grieving, who had given her a mortal life to give up.

“Olivia!”

The power was hers to do with as she pleased, but there was no pleasure.  The power was hers to do great things, but she had no interest to see them done.  The power was hers to see her loved ones safe until the end of all their lives, but she loved no one.

Olivia brought Urga out of the ice.  She came out hissing and staggering, fell to her knees, and stared up at Olivia in hateful silence, waiting.

Olivia said, “I can see now, how to kill you.”

Urga’s fingerless hands became hooks, became claws, became hands again.

“And so I will win any combat between us.  Because no matter the hurt you inflict on me, you cannot kill an immortal and I can.  Pain is so temporary.”  Olivia knelt slowly beside the body on the beach, gazing at it.  “Death is forever.”

Urga’s wings unfurled and folded flat.

“You know that, of course.  You’ve dealt death often enough against the mortal lives you’ve eliminated, the lives you’ve helped to make.  This life.”  Olivia touched the corpse.  It felt unpleasant, but she did not take its water away.  This was important somehow.

Urga did not move or speak.

“I will not fight you for the word ‘mate’.  I will not fight for the privilege of being penetrated in your stead.  But I will kill you, Urga, if you do not promise me now to take back your vengeance and never to cast a curse of death upon any living thing again.”

“My children are none of your concern.”

“I am not interested in fairness,” Olivia said.  She touched one of the mottled paint-signs on the corpse’s chest, traced it with her fingertips.  “Conceive as you have always conceived.  Birth your young through gullan wombs.  But allow even those you do not touch to bear their young without blight.  Your age of vengeance is ended.”

“They are mine.”

“I take them from you.  All of them.  Those living, those yet unborn… those dead.”  Kodjunn.  His name was Kodjunn.  “You have only to refuse me again and I will not press further.  I will only kill you and take them anyway.”

Urga considered.

Olivia took the wounds from Kodjunn’s body.  She sensed that she could make it breathe if she chose, make its heart take up its rhythm, but she did not.  Life was more than the workings of a body.  Even in this state, she knew that.

“Will you take my mate?” Urga asked.

“No.”

The Great Spirit stepped back, his light flaring with emotion she could see, but not identify.

“Then I give you my word it shall be as you command.  My blessing remains with those I bring forth.  My curse ends.”  Urga raised her wings and lifted herself into the sky.  She hung there in the darkness, full and round and glowing with cold light, until the clouds passed over her.  When they receded, the moon, and only the moon, remained.

The Great Spirit looked at Olivia.  It was not in his nature to ask for favors, or even clarifications, only to give orders and see obedience.  She knew already he would never give the one command he must wish most to make.  He too had no comprehension of death.  She supposed he must fear her, in some vague way that even he didn’t fully understand.  The thought gave her no satisfaction; happiness was love.

“I have all the power in the world,” she told him.  It was not a boast.  “I can do whatever I want with it.”

He looked away.

“I don’t want this.”

“So I see.”

Olivia gazed down at the body.  “He said that he would paint me tall.  He said that I would be Olivia throughout and I would be good.  It should be important to me that this is true.  It should be…and it isn’t.”

“So you will usurp me,” the Great Spirit said.  “You will take the world and all its children for your own.  Ha.  There is no mouth that does not drink from your blood.  You could have them all.”

“I could,” she said thoughtfully, and looked out at them, all of them.  “But I won’t.”

He frowned at her, took a single cautious step.  “No?  Will you consent to be bound here then?”

“No.”  She faced him, not smiling.  “This is my power.  I can do whatever I want with it.  Even give it up.”

The god’s mouth dropped open, soundless.  He stared.

“I’ll always keep you guessing, big guy,” said Olivia, and let it all go.

It hurt, much more than taking it in had done.  There was a moment when she wondered if she was about to die, but the moment eventually ended and she was still there.  Insignificant, exhausted, filled with pain, but still there, and still, by God, Olivia Blake.

Kodjunn’s eyes were still open.  She closed them.  “I know this isn’t the ending you were expecting,” she said wearily.  “I guess I don’t have the right to ask for favors anymore.”

“You will have anything within my power.  Anything.”

“Take care of Kodjunn.  Don’t just…wave your hand over him.  I know you can, but…please.  Find him a good place.  Do it right.”

“Yes.”  The Great Spirit bent and lifted the body into his arms.  He looked down into the face that he had worn throughout this journey and his molten eyes dimmed.  It was a long time before he looked at her again; something in him was changed, and it stayed changed.  “I thank you, human.  I thank you…Olivia.”

“I thank you, too,” she said.  Why not?  Thanks, like pity, was cheap, and she knew he’d want to hear it.  She put her hand on Kodjunn’s chest and stood on her tiptoes to kiss the Great Spirit’s mouth.  Then she turned around, stepped out of the puddle of now powerless and unremarkable water, and looked out over the water.  The sun was coming up in the east.

She started walking home.

THE END

April 1994

November 2009

Also by  R. LEE SMITH:

Heat

The Lords of Arcadia Series:

The Care and Feeding of Griffins

The Wizard in the Woods

The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

The Army of Mab

The Scholomance

Cottonwood

Coming Soon!

Last Hour of Gann

Excerpt from The Scholomance

By R. Lee Smith

Mara came home on a Wednesday with a mild sunburn and a bank receipt for eighty-three thousand dollars stuffed indifferently in the front pocket of her jeans. The house looked empty from the street, but her mother was in, sitting in the front parlor with the lights off, working on her second bottle of wine. Mara was tired and inclined to let her, but when she walked in and dropped her bags at the foot of the stairs, her mother said, “Your little friend sent you a letter,” and everything changed.

Mara paused, one hand on the banister, and looked back. She wasn’t aware that she had any friends at the moment. “Who?”

Her mother didn’t look up. Just sat and stared at the wall and sipped her wine. She wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t even remembering things, although there were plenty of photographs on the wall where her blank eyes rested. Caroline Warner was empty tonight, and so much bigger than the space her skin enveloped.

She was like this more and more often these days, whether or not anyone was around to see her. Usually Mara was content to let important matters slide until her mother felt like being lucid, but tonight she was jet-lagged and worn out, so she reached in and gave the blackness inside her mother’s head a light slap. Her mom jerked hard, spilling wine over her chest. In the darkness, the spreading stain looked uncomfortably like blood. Immediately, a feeling that was not guilt but probably should have been welled up and Mara thought, ‘There might have been a better way to handle that.’

But it worked. Color and life came slowly up from wherever they’d been buried. Caroline Warner looked dully around and thought, ‘Such a strange child.’

There was no love in the thought. Mara couldn’t remember if there ever had been.

“I have a letter?” she prompted.

“Are you home?”

“Yes. You got a letter for me?”

“I dreamed about you…I think.” She was fading out, thinking of the past, but in ways so blurred, even Mara couldn’t be sure if the things she saw had really happened. “Did you…take care of things?”

“Not yet, but I put the money in the bank in Nevada. I can call the firm tomorrow. My little friend…?”

“Your little friend sent a letter. I had to…I had to pay the postage due.”

“I’m sorry,” Mara said patiently. “Where is it?”

Her mother drank wine and thought, ‘Those aren’t my eyes. Those aren’t Cade’s eyes. Where did those awful, awful eyes come from? Jeepers creepers, just like the song. Where did she get those eyes?’

Christ, she could be at this all night. Mara ignored her mother’s mental ramblings and started looking for the damn thing herself.

The kitchen was trashed, and unless the care service had just up and quit while Mara was away, all this mess had happened after the girl left for the day at six. She’d be tempted to make some angry midnight phone calls, except that Jenny’s cheerfully illegible handwriting was down in the log: good apetite for din., quiet to-day but active!! Active, right. It looked like her mom had just opened up every Lunchsnax in the fridge, taken one bite, dropped it, and opened up the next. When did this happen? When did her austere, somewhat brittle mother turn into a crazy person? How did a woman go from a little chronic depression to…to wallowing in her own frigging Lunchsnax?

She needed to hire a live-in, that was all there was to it. Another damn brain in the house, one that wasn’t prone to peaceful lapses into nothing. God damn it.

Caroline appeared in the doorway, lightly swaying on her feet. She wasn’t drunk. “Is your father home?”

“He died two years ago, Mom. Where did you put my letter?” Mara dragged the garbage bin over and started gathering up wrappers and food indiscriminately, her lips pressed tight together, seething as she stared at the undeniable clarity in her mother’s mind. It was laziness, pure and simple. Caroline wasn’t crazy any more than she was drunk, she just wanted to be. Being crazy was easier than picking up after herself, easier than living life and doing things. Who wouldn’t want to be crazy and just let someone else pay all your bills?

“When…When is he coming back?” Her mother’s voice shook. She was thinking of the girls. There had been a lot of girls. “I need to call him.”

“He’s dead, Mom.” The hell with it, she’d leave the mess for Jenny, along with another hundred bucks. Two hundred, and orders for a refrigerator lock. And if Jenny pocketed the change, as Jenny so often did (in her cheerfully dishonest way), so be it. Mara was not in the mood to deal with it, and throwing money at the things one was not in the mood to handle was the Warner way. “He’s not coming back. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Oh no.” Caroline Warner began to cry. Amazing that she could do that and drink at the same time. She cried and wished she were back in Venice, back on her honeymoon when Cade still loved her. She wished she were back in a time before this horrible, ice-eyed person ever existed.

“I missed you too,” Mara muttered, and shoved herself into her mother’s head.

‘Postage due’ meant the post office, so Mara started there, calling up an image of the quaint little brick building to see what resonated. She thumbed through half a dozen memories before she found one in the right time frame (or at least, one with her mother in a stained blouse and uneven hair, looking vague as she walked with fat, happy Rosalie up to the glass doors. Rosalie made this a Monday or a Wednesday.), and pulled it open for closer inspection. The letter was a big manila envelope. The amount due was $18.03. Seemed excessive.

Mara let the memory spool out through her phantom hands, watching closely. Her mom came home, made poor Rosalie work too damn hard to make sure she got fed, and then went upstairs. She shuffled vapidly through the house and finally put the letter in the linen closet where she picked up some clean sheets. ‘That horrible person will be home soon,’ was the thought behind this lifeless act. ‘She’ll be home and tired. She should have fresh sheets to sleep in.’

As always when offered glimpses of her mother’s caring, however indistinct, Mara felt a surge of hopelessly mingled pity and anger, and something else, something that ought to have grown into some kind of tender feeling, if only it had known nurture. She closed herself out more gently than she’d torn her way in, and gave her mother a weary pat on the shoulder. “Go to bed, Mom,” she said, giving the words a push to make them root. “Don’t drink anymore tonight. Just go to bed.”

“I’m waiting up for your father. He’s…working late tonight. He works so…so hard for us.”

She could have told the truth again. She probably should. But her mother would take herself to bed as soon as she’d been ground down long enough by the command Mara had left inside her, and anyway, she’d bullied her mother’s muddled brains enough for one night. Mara left her bags where they were and went upstairs, rubbing her tired eyes.

She took the envelope from the linen closet into her room and sat down at the desk where she used to do homework, where she kept all their financial papers now. This was the only piece of personal correspondence she’d received in a long time. Two years, at least.

Mara Warner, said the envelope, and it had to be a friend, all right. Her parents were not nickname people; the whole rest of this wide world knew her as Kimara. Her father had wanted a son. Her mother, thanks to a smudgy ultrasound, had expected to give him one, and so they had planned out only boy’s names. Malcolm Cade, she was supposed to have been. The delivering doctor’s name had been Jonif Kimara, and that was good enough for the likes of her. Malcolm Cade would be preserved for the next child, preserved forever as it turned out. Life was funny.

Mara Warner, in the middle of the envelope. Neatly-lettered. She didn’t recognize the handwriting. Beneath it, her mom’s address. Mara’s address, since she’d never really lived anywhere else, unless you counted college. And in the upper left-hand corner, another name: Connie Vitelli.

‘Your little friend,’ her mom had said, and God knew Mara only ever had the one—then, now, or anytime in between—but all the same, she hadn’t expected to see this. Connie was gone, run off to find some Romanian fairy tale from which there was only a slim chance of coming back and, one would assume, no mail service at all. Gone away with just six words left behind her and none of them goodbye. Gone away when Mara’s back was turned, just like the sixteen years between them never mattered.

Mara’s hand strayed up to her throat, touching the cheap gold-colored chain for a cheap, gold-colored locket. Her birthday present. The very best birthday. Best Friends it said on the outside. “Best friends,” Mara murmured, looking at her letter. “Right.”

*               *              *

The friendship was, like all the great ones, a total accident. Mara never would have met Connie if crusty old Mrs. Matsuo hadn’t forced her second-graders into alphabetized double-rows for every possible occasion, even the walk to the lunchroom. Every day, sometimes twice a day, Vitelli, Constance stood side by side with Warner, Kimara.

Mara, who had been living with the worst faces of humanity all the years of her young life, had already stopped trying to make friends and would have been content to stand and stare at the back of Underwood, Trevor’s blonde head without ever speaking, but Connie was lonely. Lonely was a bit of an understatement, really. Little Connie was one of those friendless and fundamentally forgettable people who are born under a cloud of gloom and are pretty much fated to go through life unloved because of it. It used to be that such people could at least join a monastery (or a convent, as the case may be) where personality didn’t much matter, but in these fine and enlightened modern times, little Connie suffered ostracism without end: shunned by her peers, misunderstood by her family and overlooked by teachers, with nothing to look forward to but cruel jokes in the high school crowd, dateless weekends rolling over into desperate sex with strangers, failed efforts at counseling, and ultimately, a one-room apartment and half a dozen cats. Connie Vitelli was one of Life’s Great Throwaways, even at the tender age of nine, and yet one day, this wretched creature glanced over and interrupted her own hazy funk of human misery to think, ‘She always looks so sad. I should sit with her today. Maybe she’ll be nice to me.’

Mara did not consider herself to be sad, but even then she knew she wasn’t happy. Who could be happy, living like this? Over nine hundred kids went to Frieda Kahlo Elementary School, along with sixty-plus adults. The little ones were nothing but nerves, afraid of teachers, afraid of schoolwork, afraid of the buses, the playground, the bigger kids. The older ones were already turning ugly on the inside, learning how to lie, how to cheat, how to dominate and feed off each other. The grown-ups were the worst of all, because even the ones who still loved you had enough reasons to hate the job that it stained everything they thought about you, and there weren’t too many left who loved you in the first place. All those minds in constant motion, and the Panic Room back then was still just concrete walls and one big-screen TV she couldn’t turn off. No, she wasn’t happy.

But sad?

Connie didn’t sit with her that day, but she wanted to. She sat at the other long table in the lunchroom and watched Mara eat her apple slices, wanting to be with her, wondering if she would be nice. Those thoughts had a cringing quality, all jumbled up with rejections both real and imagined, and yet Mara found herself starting to listen for them if they didn’t come in clear enough on their own. Through these slippery, frantic touches, she learned that Connie was in the middle of seven children, that they were not only Eye-talian but very Eye-talian, that the world at home was noise and shouting all the time, whether angry-shouts or happy ones, and everything was shared there, nothing new, nothing her own, nothing special and for only Connie. There was no niceness, in other words. There was love and there was family, there were hugs and kisses and cookies, but never niceness, and never (maybe) would there ever be.

Mara thought about this when she went home to her own big house behind the green gate. Her mother was arranging flowers, thinking only of flowers, unaware of Mara’s presence in the house even when Mara walked right by her. She thought about this when she passed her father on the stairs, saw him give her one of his distracted, polite nods, and heard him think, ‘Strange sort of child. Wonder where she gets it from? Intelligent enough, but look at those eyes…if it wasn’t for that nose, I’d wonder who’s been digging my potatoes,’ and then his mind would go off first in fuzzy waves of blame for Wife, who could not keep the babies he put in her except that one, the strange one, and never the son, never the Name, and then to even fuzzier thoughts of whoever the girl was at the moment and when he could get away, what reason he’d have to come up with this time, and such a fuss such a damned-awful fuss but better than a divorce by-God, and oh her thighs/hips/breasts, whatever. Mara’s room was always clean, always tucked away and tidy, and the house was distant enough than everyone else’s lives were only flashes of light and movement in her mind’s horizons, unless the Robbersons got very drunk or that-Kimmy-girl-next-door snuck in her boyfriend at night for the sexthing. Niceness was all around her, Mara thought, but it sure wasn’t very pleasant.

The next day, Connie didn’t sit with her either, and she was making her tummy cramp with the indecision of it all. Mara ate her school macaroni and drank her milk and just listened as Connie agonized. Would she be nice? There were mean kids on the bus, big kids who kept tugging on her braids and laughing and calling her names like wop, dirtywop, names she was afraid to ask Mama what they meant. She thought they would be nice once, too. No one was nice, that was the thing. Mama said just make friends, everyone wants to be friends with a pretty little girl like you, but no one wanted to be friends. No one thought she was pretty. No one was nice.

How true, Mara would think On the inside, no one was ever really nice. The best people in the world were ugly if you looked deep enough.

On the third day, Mara picked up her lunch tray and went over to Connie’s table. “Can I sit here?” she asked, and as Connie gaped at her with the shiver-wide eyes of a feral cat on a sidewalk, she added, “I like the way you wear those ribbons in your hair, all braided in,” because she knew about the mean kids and how Connie had to sit so still while Mama did the braiding and then cried in the bathroom because the mean kids would pull on them and it was dirtywop hair. “It’s very pretty,” Mara said, and that was all she had to say.

That was the beginning of sixteen years. She liked to think about that day—the way they’d traded bits of their lunches, those first hesitant Connie-smiles, the slow gentling of her frantic Connie-thoughts as she decided that maybe, just maybe, this was real and Mara was her friend—but she never dreamed of it. She could make herself dream it, she knew, but what was the point of that? She could have made Connie ask her to sit down, too (even at eight, she was already beginning to learn how to reach into someone’s head and make them think of things, although it would be four more years before she could do it every time), but that would have made everything that followed into a lie. Mara had been born psychic; she knew all about lies. Connie was the one person she wanted to be entirely honest with.

That was probably a mistake.

“Do you ever wish you were magic?” Connie had asked one night—one fateful night, as the writers might say. It was a sleepover at Connie’s house and they were in their pajamas up in the living room, tucked away on the floor in sleeping bags (Mara’s sky-blue new one, bought for this event earlier that afternoon, and Connie’s ancient army-surplus one). Connie was coloring. Fairies and dragons. She did a lot of those. “Like, that you had powers?”

If ever there were to be lies between them, it would have to come now, because that was the unavoidable question. Mara felt at Connie’s familiar rhythms of wistfulness and daydreams, knowing it would all change if she told the truth.

But she had never lied to Connie. Connie was her friend. Her one and only.

She said, “I do.” Said it with all the solemnity of a bride in church. Said it and then had to prove it. And when the shock and fascination faded (children were remarkably resilient to both, Mara had found) the wistfulness remained and the only change was envy. Not fear, not distrust, not even a bright flare of paranoia as she thought back at all the unpleasant things Mara might have overheard, but only envy. In retrospect, that was bad enough, but at the time, Mara had been relieved.

“I wish I had what you have,” Connie had said, coloring her fairy’s hair purple. “I’d give anything to be magic.”

The obsession began there. Mara really thought so. If not for that confession, that stupid hour spent doing card tricks, Connie might have stayed with fairies and dragons for another year or two and then gone on to boys and ponies like a normal kid. Instead, with undeniable proof before her that mystical powers existed, Connie had tried to make herself receive them, and no amount of failure could ever slam the door that Mara had opened. Gone were the sleepovers with coloring books and popcorn. Now it was all meditation and Freemasonry and Zener cards and the books of Charles Fort.

Mara tried. Best friends always try. But in the end, the truth came out: You could teach someone a foreign language with immersion and with enough time, even the accent would come out. You could teach someone with no musical talent to play the piano well, if not with any real passion. But no one could just teach someone to be psychic. It was not perception so much as connection, and somewhere inside Connie, that connection simply wasn’t there.

Long after she recognized the futility in Mara’s compliance, Connie never gave up. From that moment on, her pursuit of finding magic all her own came before everything and everyone. Every week, every day, it was something new: vampirism, mesmerism, levitation, transcendent chants, tantric sex, voodoo, Ouija boards and pendulums, animism, totem quests, and the Scholomance.

Always the Scholomance. That damned Devil’s Scholomance. All the others came and went, debunked, outgrown, or just plain impossible to prove, but the Scholomance hung on.

“It’s a school,” Connie said, that first time she’d ever dragged Mara off to the library to hunch over a book of badly-illustrated European ghost-stories. “A real place—”

“Oh Connie…”

“—deep in the mountains of Transylvania,” Connie stubbornly continued, now gripping her book in both hands, as though she feared it would be snatched away and maybe burnt. “And all kinds of magic is taught there by demons, real demons! And only ten people get in at a time, and listen, listen! ‘There they are trained for ten years, overcoming obstacles and surviving ordeals, and when the course of their learning is expired, nine students are released—” Here, Connie looked up, actually flushed with her excitement, as any girl her age might appear if poring over one of those teen celebrity magazines she’d ought to be obsessing over, if not for Mara and the lies she wouldn’t tell. Breathing hard, making certain that Mara had heard the discrepancy in number and was giving her full attention, she bent back over and hoarsely whispered, “—released to find their homes, but the tenth is given over to the Devil and detained as payment for all the glammar learned there.’ Imagine.”

Mara patiently sat quiet and let Connie do the imagining for both of them. She never expected such a ridiculous story to hold Connie’s attention, not for more than a few weeks, much less all those years, but there it was and there it stayed. All through high school and all through college, the Scholomance remained. Every few months, just when Mara would dare to hope the dream was finally dying, Connie was call her up with some new rumor, some new idle comment thrown away on one page of some obscure book, some new ‘fact’ that absolutely must be explored.

The Scholomance could only be entered once each year, or every ten years, or once a century, or under a solar eclipse, or only after all the present students had passed from its halls. Its magic was taught by demons, or by the half-human sons of King Solomon, or by deathless wizards, or by the Devil Himself. Only ten students at a time could enter its halls, only three, only fifty, only one.

But in all this ever-changing nonsense, one thing remained constant, anchoring the rest of the legend to a seeming of possibility, of truth: The price of tuition was always the tenth graduate.

“You really like those odds?” Mara asked once, only once.

“Ninety percent is better than anyone else could ever give me,” Connie answered. “Even you.”

And so Mara let it go, and that was probably her second mistake, but who could blame her for it? Who would ever believe that the Scholomance was real? How could Mara ever have prepared herself for coming back to the dorm that night and finding no Connie, but only a note with one line on it in Connie’s pink pen.

I think I can find it.

That was all. Not even goodbye. And for all the good it did, Mara tried to find her, but all of Connie’s notes and books and scrounged-up Scholomance nonsense was gone. Asking questions and tapping at minds for three days told her only that Connie had gone to the airport. What little research Mara was able to do on her own placed the Scholomance in the Transylvanian region of Romania, in the mountains, in the center of a lake, or perhaps even floating around in the sky like a dark cloud, invisible without the full moon behind it. Fairy tales.

Romania was not, she supposed, a really huge country and Transylvania narrowed that down even more, but it was still plenty big enough to hide Connie. Mara considered flying out after her, but in the end, she did not. A chase would be very dramatic and noble and all that, and surely it would work in the movies, but life was not the movies. Mara could not pick out her best friend’s most familiar and beloved mind from all these surrounding her right here in this stupid dorm unless she was very close, and so there would be no chase, no heroic flight to Romanian mountains, no rescue and no reunion. Connie was gone and all Mara could do was wish her well and hope she came back on her own and give this damned thing up for good.

She didn’t.

The days passed. One of Connie’s brothers came to get her things and left, baffled and furious with her for not being able to tell him where his little sister had gone (Mara could have at least shown him the note and said the word Scholomance, but she didn’t. Connie was the only one who ever had honesty alone out of her). Mara started playing cards to make up Connie’s half of the rent and learned how to temper big wins with frequent, inexpensive losses so that people wouldn’t realize how good she was. The Panic Room evolved many monitors and lost its chair. Mara’s father had his inconvenient heart attack in the bed of his twenty year-old girlfriend and Mara went home for the funeral, witnessed the first of her mother’s many slumps into depression, and just stayed there. Life went on. There were no phone calls, no postcards. No Connie.

And now, two years later, a letter.

The envelope was thickly padded. Her address on the front of it had been neatly-written, but not in the loopy scrawl she remembered coming out of Connie’s pen. There were a lot of foreign stamps, hence the outrageous postage due. There was no return address under Connie’s name.

Mara got her thumbnail underneath the seal and slit it open. She looked inside, and between the sleeves of bubble-paper, saw another envelope—smaller, pale, rustic-looking. She shook it out into her waiting hand.

A strange urge came over her in that moment. Before she’d even turned this second envelope over, much less opened it, Mara felt a piercing impulse to take it right back to the Post Office and mail it. Not to look at it, not to read it, not even really to get rid of it, but just to…just to send it on. It was the right thing to do.

The urge faded. Mara tried to hold onto it, tried to chase down whatever weird, paranoid place inside her had launched it, but it was gone. The envelope, however, the envelope remained.

The letter and envelope were one, made from a single sheet of thick paper, folded together into a clumsy square. The edges looked slightly chewed, as if someone had sealed them by gumming them. When she did finally turn it over, her address was there, looking back at her just as it had been on the outer cover, and yes, it was Connie’s handwriting now, the familiar balloony letters slanted—she’d been in a hurry when she wrote it—but it was definitely Connie’s. Still no return address, but only her name, written large, needing to be seen, pleading with her. No stamps here, either. Just the envelope.

Mail it.

Mara closed her eyes, but the urge was already blowing itself apart, not violently, but in the easy manner of a smoke-ring—inexorably adrift, impossible to snatch back, spreading out to invisibility even as the smell of it lingered. Frowning, she began to work the envelope’s seams open, smoothing it out into its original form.

What the heck kind of paper was this? It wasn’t just thick, but dense and soft, almost more like cloth than paper. And a weird size too, nearly twice the size of a standard sheet. One edge was rough, as if it had been hastily torn away. The other edges were oddly blunt to the touch, slightly curled under, like the pages from a very new book.

All of this, Mara noted. All of it seemed important, the way that little things will seem in the face of something bigger, the way that a spilled glass or a loose hair can seem important only in the same room as a murdered body. Because what was written on this very odd sheet of paper was just as jarring in its way as any corpse. It wasn’t long, just a few lines, and it wasn’t in pink ink, but it was Connie’s handwriting and it hit every bit as hard as the last note she got.

South of Altenmunster. West of Lake Teufelsee. Look for the door on Halloween night ONLY.

I was wrong about this place. Please come and get me.

*              *              *

Mara slept on the plane. It was a good place to sleep, a safe place. Maybe even the only safe place. Surrounded by the drone of the engines, the tinkle of ice on glass, the meaningless babble of businessmen-thoughts and stewardess-thoughts and pilot-thoughts (which were not always relaxing, but usually predictable), Mara surrendered her consciousness and retreated to the cozily controlled part of her mind she’d named the Panic Room to watch her dreams. They were dreams of Connie. She was not surprised.

She didn’t have to watch to wake up rested anymore, but she did most nights anyway. Habits were hard to break, and besides, dreams were almost always more interesting than looking out through the Panic Room’s windows and sorting through the tangle of minds that laid a constant siege to her peace. So she watched, hovering at a comfortable angle over the screens (she used to need a chair in order to lean back like this, but she’d outgrown it around the same time she’d outgrown the need to watch) where her dreams played out. It was her and Connie tonight, sitting up in Connie’s living room, both in their pajamas. She already knew where this one was going. She had this one a lot.

Connie was only eight in the dream, the age she’d been when they met, while Mara was twelve, the age she’d been when they’d actually had the conversation that was about to replay itself in some demented fashion. She was always older than Connie in her dreams, which was funny because in reality, Connie was older than her by about ten months. Still, you didn’t have to be a shrink to understand the symbolism: Connie was always going to be the kid in their strange, doomed relationship—always the one who needed help, who needed comfort, who needed attention and extra love.

She was always going to need to be saved.

“I wish I was what you are,” little Connie was saying, still in that same hot, frustrated, hopeless voice—the one just made for haunting dreams like these. “I wish I could do what you do.”

“No, you don’t,” dream-Mara said, as she always said in these dreams, words she had never said to the real Connie. Maybe if she ever had, things would be different now. Life was full of empty maybes. “It isn’t like you think it is. It isn’t fun at all.”

“I tried to be you and I couldn’t.” Little dream-Connie’s skin was coming in grey around the edges, curling in on itself like burning paper. “I tried to be what you are and I couldn’t. I fell down and skinned my knees and got mud on my new dress. I can’t get up, I can’t go home, I can’t go anywhere without you.” Grey, all grey, Connie’s arms and Connie’s face and Connie’s hand-me-down baby-heart pajamas, but mostly Connie’s voice, turning to ashes right in her throat. “I wish I had what you had,” dream-Connie whispered, just beginning to crumble. “Because look at me look at me look at me now.”

Mara touched the screen as it began to go dark. She didn’t turn it off. She didn’t have to. She’d learned that dreams only lasted a few minutes, but there would be more of them and they’d all probably be about the same.

But she didn’t have to watch anymore. That was something.

Mara looked out the window at the Mindstorm and all that it had for her tonight: Snatches of song, stranger’s faces, blurs of motion, screams, shouts, laughter, sobs—the lunatic babble of the two hundred and six people sharing this flight, surrounding her with their combined insanity. Those closest to her came in clearest. The woman sitting in front of her dreamed of cooking a chicken while a man-not-her-husband stood naked on the kitchen table, stroking his erection, saying, “Choose, Susan. You know you have to choose,” and the woman wept and wept and cut up her chicken. Beside her in the aisle-seat, a man in his forties sat and dozed and thought not seriously about trading in the minivan and getting that Porsche, always wanted one, but May-Dee was going to be driving in another few weeks, and really, if she was going to crash something (and kids always did), it may as well be the minivan than a Porsche. Sitting next to Mara, loudest of all, a wide-awake May-Dee counted days over and over, digging grooves into her brain and Mara’s as she wondered if she was late, was she really late, was she just late or was she caught, oh God, caught pregnant, caught up and why hadn’t she made him wear it? The stewardess walked by, her thoughts blending into bitter focus as she neared—five more years, I swear to God, five more years to retirement and then I never have to see these puling little shitsacks again, five more years and I’m golden, five more and if that bitch in C-3 pukes one more time, I’m going to break the fucking bag open on her fucking head—and then faded out again as she went back into Coach. The pilot spiked briefly—HolyChristwhat wasthat?—but Mara was used to jittery pilot-thoughts and sure enough, he relaxed and drifted away. Nothing much here, just two hundred and six strangers screaming out their strange little lives. Quiet night, compared to the flight back from Tahoe. Lord, she loved to fly.

Another dream was starting: Mara in a dark place and Connie crying somewhere out of sight. Connie, who wasn’t just lost in Dreamland this time. This time, Connie was lost for real.

“And I’m going to find her,” Mara said, watching her dream-self stumble through the dark maze of her own mind. She reached up by habit to touch her throat and saw, through another screen, her real-life fingers twitch towards the real-life locket hanging around her neck. A cheap, childhood birthday present, nothing more, from the only best friend Mara Warner ever had.

Connie kept crying. The dream died away and she let it go, leaning back in empty space to watch the Mindstorm and wait for another one to start.

The Scholomance

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Copyright

BOOK I HOLLOW MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER ONE HORROR

CHAPTER TWO CAPTIVE

CHAPTER THREE REFLECTIONS

CHAPTER FOUR PEOPLE

CHAPTER FIVE COMING TOGETHER

CHAPTER SIX TRIBE

CHAPTER SEVEN SHADOWS

BOOK II THE GREAT SPIRIT

CHAPTER ONE DARK MOUNTAIN

CHAPTER TWO BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER THREE CHANGES

CHAPTER FOUR POWER

CHAPTER FIVE LOGARR

CHAPTER SIX LAST DAYS

CHAPTER SEVEN FAREWELL

BOOK III OLIVIA

CHAPTER ONE JOURNEY

CHAPTER TWO URGA

CHAPTER THREE THE RIVER

CHAPTER FOUR JOURNEY’S END

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Excerpt from The Scholomance