by R. Lee Smith
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 unt
il 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.”