by R. Lee Smith
“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 g
oing 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.”
