by R. Lee Smith
“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 doi
ng 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!”
