by R. Lee Smith
“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.”