by R. Lee Smith
“Cross-stitching,” Olivia said admiringly. “I bet that passed the time.”
“I’m on my third project already. He makes ‘em little stick frames and puts them up around the walls.” Anita rolled her eyes, pretending exasperation but plainly very pleased.
“Any reception on that cell phone?” Cheyenne asked.
“Are you kidding?” Anita laughed. “I keep it anyway. It’s got some pictures on it. You know…special ones.” She gave another little laugh, this one to disguise some pretty unpleasant-looking emotions. “Dumb me. The battery will be dead in a few days no matter what I do.”
“I brought a photo album,” Olivia said tentatively, unsure whether this would be a sore point, in light of the whole phone thing.
They looked at Cheyenne.
She looked back at them. “God, you guys blow my mind,” she said after a second or two. “I brought a teddy bear.”
Anita smiled. “That’s kind of cute.”
“You think so?” Cheyenne made a visible attempt to rein in her anger and said in a tight voice, “It wasn’t a childhood toy or anything, just some dumb thing I got at a Christmas party last year and hadn’t gotten around to getting rid of. I don’t even remember getting it that night, I was so fucking stoned, and I could just kill myself for it now because I had a fucking gun in the first drawer of the same fucking nightstand where I kept the stupid bear, and if I’d had my head on even a little bit straight, I wouldn’t even be standing here now.”
“Prob’ly not,” Anita agreed with remarkable mildness. She sat beside the madwoman and brushed back her hair. “You’d have been killed right on the spot, and honestly, if you’re gonna be the kind of person who’s gonna harp on all the time about fucking this and fucking that, I’d just as soon not get to know you.”
Cheyenne stared while Olivia looked uncomfortably from one to the other of them.
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Anita continued, now straightening the hang of the madwoman’s ill-fitting clothes, “these people are definitely comparing notes when it comes to us humans. Your bad attitude is everyone’s problem and I’m trying hard to get along with my guy.”
The redhead gaped for a second, then shoved herself off the wall (Olivia shot a glance toward their guard in time to see him rise to his feet and reach into the shadows for spear) and snarled, “Oh, I am so sorry I have such a bad attitude about being held captive by fucking bat-monsters!”
“Life is tough all over down here, darlin’.” Anita looked past her and raised her hand as a girl, presumably their last arrival, entered and was released to their company. “I ain’t impressed just because you can throw the loudest tantrum.”
Cheyenne balled up a fist and the gullan guard sprang forward, the spear actually making an excited little whoop of its own as he swung it up and ready for use. The gulla himself didn’t say a word and that silence, his intense and somehow feral focus as he aimed the killing head of his laughably prehistoric weapon unerringly at Cheyenne’s heart, made them all jump back. The new girl, who was halfway across the cavern with her arm up to wave, even gave a little scream, but he paid her absolutely no attention.
“Stop it!” Olivia grabbed at the redhead’s shoulder and shook it once, hard. “Just stop it! What is wrong with you?” To the gulla, in his language, she called, “There’s no trouble here. Please, you are frightening us.”
He stopped, but kept the spear up and sighted, his arm steady and poised to throw.
This was going to sound just marvelous when Vorgullum heard about it at the end of the day. So much for coming together in trust.
“I said, stop it!” she said, and it was a whole new tone, one she didn’t think she’d ever used before in her life. One she didn’t even think her mom had ever used. The others jumped again, not as hugely as they’d done for the gulla and his spear, but definitely with feeling. They looked at her and Olivia was grimly pleased to see Cheyenne color up a little, even if she didn’t drop her eyes, or her fist. “If you want to spend the rest of your life chained up in your lair, by all means, keep doing what you’re doing, but if you ever want to come down here and see another human face, you better lose the chip on your shoulder and start giving them a reason to think letting us meet is a good idea.”
Cheyenne thought about that, her eyes burning and lips pressed white. The gulla across the room watched as she slowly uncurled her hand and lowered her arm. When she backed up to a bench and sat down, so did he.
“That’s the last time I do that,” Olivia said, no longer The Voice of Authority, but still cross. “If you’re not going to watch out for yourself, there’s no reason I should.”
“Um, hi?”
Introductions were made as the new girl found herself a seat, and they all ended up recapping their former occupations and what precious possessions they’d brought with them. Even Cheyenne muttered something about the teddy bear, leaving out the bit about the gun. The new girl listened very intently, as if she thought there might be a short quiz at the end of the day, and then said, “Well, I’m Liz, I’m twenty-one years old, I worked at the Burger Barn, and I brought my purse and, like, half the contents of my bathroom cabinet, so if any of you need change for the phone or some dental floss, let me know.” She paused there to look back over her shoulder at the gulla guarding them. “I have one of those,” she said. “But he won’t tell me his name. I just call him Needles, because he seems to think he was put on this Earth to poke me.”
The earnestness of this last comment, coupled with Liz’s sweet, childlike face, took them all by surprise. After a short, startled silence, Cheyenne started to laugh, and the others joined in, all but the madwoman, who simply sat and hugged her saucepan.
“Needles?” Anita echoed.
“Mr. Needles, if I’m feeling snotty.”
“So this is what you naked bats do together?” boomed a familiar voice. “You squeak and chatter! Oh, your ancestors should strike you down for your offending faces. Olivia! What are you doing here, with these ugly creatures?”
“Hello, Murgull,” Olivia said, with a small smile. “How are you this evening?”
Murgull ambled into the flickering, golden light of the common cave, casting a baleful eye on the group of women. Shadows pooled in the ragged valleys of her ruined face, and her eyes gleamed from the center of this devastation like lava pools. She showed the ragged, yellowing stumps that were what was left of her teeth in a snarl, and flapped her good wing in a sour shrug. “Evening, morning, sun-up in the spirit-world for all it matters to old Murgull,” she said. “Her teeth ache, her bones ache, her flesh aches. All of old Murgull is reminding her how short a span is given us, and Murgull’s time is almost up.”
“You are too terrible to die,” Olivia said.
“Ha! Too mean, too ugly!” Murgull gave out that low pitched, witchy cackle and patted coquettishly at the scarred half of her face.
“What brings you here?” Olivia asked.
Reminded of her purpose, Murgull’s heavy brows drew together like thunderheads swelling for a storm. “Old Murgull is looking in on little brown maggot, eh? No season comes to that one. Old Murgull is thinking maybe she should have a sniff. Off goes Murgull, but does she get there? No!”
Murgull stumped over and dropped an enormous satchel of food in Olivia’s lap. She put her hands on her ample hips and glared at them all. “Big brute catches Murgull’s arm. ‘Feed the humans,’ he says. Feed old Murgull? Oh no, just crawling, chattering maggots. Hah!” She glanced at the madwoman, then hunkered down with some effort and peered into the blank, serene eyes. “Should have eaten the food myself,” she grumbled. “Maggots deserve no better than bones.” She looked at Olivia. “This one is full of stars,” she said softly.
“We know.”
“Pity her. A naked frog alone in her own little brain. Pity her mate. No friend, no talk, no happy times making sparks in the pit. Just clean and feed and dress the frog. Pity them both.” She grunted, shrugging. “Pity is cheap.”<
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Old Murgull straightened and examined the other women. “Well?” she demanded, exasperated. “Eat the food! Murgull brings food and you gape at her with eyes like bugs! Great, fat fools you are! White and lazy, with no wings and naked, slimy bodies. You are like frogs some cruel foot has stepped on!” She turned and started galumphing out, grumbling under her breath. “Ugly, pasty, bloated leeches. Give them old Murgull’s blood, poor Murgull. Less precious than Murgull’s time.” Her mutters faded with distance, and were gone.
They all stared at the doorway in respectful silence.
“What,” Liz said wonderingly, “was that?”
“That was old Murgull.”
“She sounds just like my mom,” Anita said, awe-struck. “Gosh, if she could do it in Chinese, she could be my grandma, too!”
“Little brown maggot,” Olivia mused. “Now who would that be?”
“Maria, maybe,” Cheyenne remarked, biting into an apple. “She’s Mexican or something.”
“No, they call her the Mojo Woman,” Anita put in. “My guy talks about her all the time. She’s always going on about the bad mojo she’s going to put on this guy or that one. Freaks them out.”
“Could be my roommate,” Liz offered. “If they took me, they probably took her. Karen’s blonde, but she’s awfully tan.”
“Heck, I’m tan,” Anita said, holding out her arms and giving them a dubious frown. “Maybe she meant me.”
“No, because she left again,” Olivia pointed out. “Anyway, she could have meant just about anybody with brown hair.”
“What was she talking about, sniffing? Or that other word, season? I mean, what…” Anita looked back at the empty mouth of the commons, then at the gullan guard watching over them, and finally at Olivia again. “What are we really doing here?”
Olivia looked at Cheyenne.
The red-head folded her arms and looked coolly back at her. “Go ahead,” she said. “You’ve got this speech all worked out, haven’t you?”
Liz and Anita were waiting, apprehensive.
Olivia sighed, sat down, and started talking.
6
Vorgullum came to take Olivia back to their chambers early in the evening. Olivia offered brief, rather vague highlights of the day’s conversations on the way back through the tunnels (all but the important one, which had not been as unpleasant she’d feared it would be; “I figured,” had been Anita’s only comment on that regard, although Liz had cried for a while), and as she climbed up the narrow chimney into the entry room, she asked, “Have you spoken with old Murgull yet?”
“Not since this morning,” he replied, climbing up behind her. “Why?”
“Oh,” she said, shrugging. “She was so cross at being sent to feed us, she made us think she was on her way to do something important.”
“Everything is important to Murgull,” he answered. “Unless it is important to someone else, and then everything is a tremendous burden.”
“Are you afraid of her?” she teased.
But he looked at her quite seriously. “Oh yes.”
“Even you? The tallest of all gullan? Great leader of Hollow Mountain?”
“Great leader,” he mused, not without a certain pleasure. But then he shook his head and turned serious. “She is older than any gulla here, the oldest in the whole world, perhaps, and she knows things. Woman-things. Man-things.” He thought about it, and actually suppressed a shudder. “Spirit-things. She is life and death in this place. She heals and she hurts…and she loves no one. Your Mojo Woman could not be the ground beneath old Murgull’s crooked feet,” he finished, and started to lay out food on the bench by the fire.
“She’s not my Mojo Woman.”
He grunted, then paused with a heavy loaf of bread in hand, and looked at her. “But is she anyone’s Mojo Woman? Are her powers real?”
The words Of course not were right there, dancing on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed them. Maybe it was a mean way to do it, but it was the way Maria coped with all this, and who was Olivia to take that away? “What do you think?” she asked instead.
“I think she’s full of air,” he replied at once, and frowned mightily. “But even air can kill if it goes bad. Grunn believes her. And he is not alone.”
“What do you want to do about it?” Olivia asked, coming to join him.
He made room for her. “Kill her,” he said, and tore the bread in half. He offered her some, studied her expression while he held it out, and then set it on the bench and said, “There are some who say talk, simple talk, can’t be dangerous. I think it can. And when minds are weak, as so many of our minds are weak,” he admitted sourly, “talk can be more dangerous than spears. This Mojo Woman, her mouth is full of poison. She has bit into Grunn and he is biting into others. I want it stopped.”
“If you kill her, do you know what that will do to the rest of us?” she asked softly. “Do you know what that will do to the trust some of us are trying to make between us?”
His jaw clenched. He looked away.
“And don’t think you can kill her and just not tell us, because sooner or later we’ll hear about it, and the longer you let that secret fester, the worse it will be when we do.”
“And the longer I let her live, the more power she claims to have!” He scowled and took a savage bite of bread. Chewing took a long time. He was noticeably calmer when he swallowed and said, “I can trust neither to Grunn’s good sense nor Mojo Woman’s mercy, so I will trust you instead. Perhaps, when she sees there is nothing to fear from us, she will abandon this evil whim of hers. The Great Spirit knows, she’s not the worst of them.” That seemed to remind him of something, and he reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a magazine. “Our sigruum found this for you in our archives,” he said. “I told him you like to look at human books.”
She unfolded it with some trepidation, studied it in silence for a few seconds, then started to smile. “Oh my,” she said in amused English. It was an ancient copy of TIME magazine, the one with the cover showing the cosmos and the words “God is Dead.”
“Is it a good one?” he asked.
“A very good one. Give the sigruum my thanks.”
She read bits and pieces to him over supper, stopping quite often to explain terms and words. He accepted, after a brief debate, the concept of the planet Earth, and after a much longer debate, the fact that humans lived everywhere on the planet, and could keep in near-constant communication through mediums such as this magazine. She tried to sell him on the idea of television and radio, but when he proved utterly incapable of visualizing something broadcast instantaneously from one point on the planet to a million separate points, she gave up. She didn’t even try to explain broadcast satellites.
“The moon is a rock floating in the sky,” he said, for the tenth time and still just as dubious as he was the first time.
“Yes,” she said wearily.
“Then why doesn’t it fall down? When I throw a rock into the air, it falls. If I forgot to flap my wings, I would fall myself!”
“There is something called gravity, which means that bodies with mass are pulled together. That’s why we can’t jump off the Earth and fly to the stars.”
“Mass is what? How heavy a thing is?”
“How heavy and how dense,” she explained, again, covering her eyes.
“What is this dense? I know, I know! Two things of an equal size, where one is heavier than the other. Like lava rock: Pumice is light and obsidian is heavy. Because there is more…what did you call it? Matter? More matter packed more tightly into obsidian?”
“Yes,” she said, surprised, peeking at him. “Obsidian has more matter compressed into the same space. That makes it more dense.”
“The lighter rock is larger, but has less mass,” he mused. “The Earth, this planet,” he interrupted, pointing down, “is lighter and has less mass than the sun, which only looks smaller because it is far away. So the sun pulls us around it in a circle you call an orbit, and the
Earth is larger and has more mass than the moon, so we pull it around us in another orbit.”
“Yes!” she said, straightening up.
He considered this for a very long time. “Then how is it,” he began in frustration, “that the Earth is not pulled all the way into the sun? Or the moon all the way into the Earth? What keeps gravity from crushing everything together? Why will it pull a pinecone to the ground but not a pinecone into me? I have more mass than a pinecone!”
Olivia shook her head, saying, “That’s a good question. I know there’s an answer, because I had to learn it once, in school. But I’ve forgotten now. Maybe one of the others knows.”
He seemed disappointed, but he didn’t disbelieve her. At least, not out loud. Instead, he took the magazine and turned pages until he came to the photos of Earth as shot from space. He stared at these for a long time. “This is…Earth? We live here?”
“Yes.”
He inspected the photo, as though hunting for signs of life on the tiny Earth. “Have you ever been in space, Olivia?”
“No. You have to be special for that.”
He looked up intently. “You are special.”
She smiled. “Yes, but I meant that you have to know more about gravity than I do. And how to fly the machines that take you out into space.”
“Humans have walked on the moon,” he murmured, and shook his head. “Have they been to the sun?”
“No. The sun is too hot. Humans would burn up and die long before they got there.”
“Ah.” He turned the page slowly, inspecting the pictures rather than the meaningless jumble of words. “My kind believes that the moon is the belly of the Urga, the Great Mother, swelling with new life as she chooses which among us shall have the honor of bearing her whelp. Your kind thinks it is a rock. My kind believes that the sun is a glowing coal pit, banked every night and brought back every morning by the Great Spirit to warm himself. Your kind thinks it is…?” He glanced at her expectantly.
“A flaming ball of gas,” she finished, smiling. “I like your way better. It’s more poetic.”