by R. Lee Smith
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 s
un?”
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!”
