by R. Lee Smith
She pulled it out possessively and put it on. She wanted pants to go with it, pants with a zipper which had the talismanic property of preventing her forcible undress, but there weren’t any in the baskets. She was forced to settle for a skirt. A nice, breezy, easy-access skirt.
God.
Unable to put off her return any longer, she reluctantly turned and took herself back to Cheyenne’s captor.
He was waiting for her, his back turned to her, facing the chasm wall, but gullan ears were very good. As quiet as she was, she’d taken only one step into that vast high-domed cavern, just one, and he turned around. He looked at her, then at the wall of the chasm, and back at her. His face underwent a myriad of expressions, beginning with reluctance and ending with resignation. “Come here,” he said impatiently, holding out his arms.
‘Look on the bright side,’ her inner voice said. ‘Either he’ll kill you or he’ll carry you up. Either way, it’ll be over and done with in just a minute.’
What a ray of sunshine she’d turned into.
His head cocked, his eyes narrowing. She realized she was smiling.
Well. She might as well get it over with. She went to him, let him put his hands on her and lift her; she even put her legs around him, because the sense of dangling over the depths when she didn’t was so unpleasant, and anyway, he’d either do it or he wouldn’t, right?
He started up, moving in awkward, rigid jerks very unlike a gullan. He didn’t look at her, kept his eyes fixed on the next clawhold, expressionless. His breath came in hard, methodic pants, in perfect rhythm with his climbing steps and heaves. She could feel his chest expanding with the force of them. She could feel his heart knocking at hers.
And then he stopped.
Smack in the middle of the Deep Drop, he stopped. He did not look at her. He did not speak. He hung on the wall and breathed in once, deeply.
Her arms around his neck began to tremble.
He pulled one hand out of the stone and slowly lowered it to her back.
“Can we…keep going?” she asked shakily.
His only response was a soft, thoughtful growl. His hand slipped over the swell of her buttocks and pulled at her, pulled her taut against his body and then down until she could feel the hot bar of his erection pressing up at her.
Oh Jesus, here? Right here?!
“I have to go,” Olivia said unevenly. “Vorgullum is expecting me.”
“Yes,” he murmured, and did not move.
Her claws were in her belt pouch, pressed flat between them, like her flashlight. She had no other weapons. Well, she supposed she could always take a stab at clawing his eyes out, but really, what good would any of that do? She might take him with her, but she’d be just as dead.
He shut his eyes, bent his head. Now his slow, strained breaths were blowing down at her, hot against her cheek and neck. It was too much like sex already.
She wanted to say something, but the only thing she could think of to say was, “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this,” and the thought of begging like that filled her with an hopelessness too great to swallow. If she begged, it was already over. If she begged, he would know it was over, too.
She said nothing, just clutched his neck and waited, expecting at any moment for his hand to move. It wouldn’t take much. Her skirt was already hitched up. He only had to pull his loincloth loose and shift it to one side, and he’d be in her. She could scream, but he’d only put that hand over her mouth and push, like he’d pushed the idiot cries of pleasure back into Bolga’s mouth, he’d push and push and when he was done…
She looked down into the echoing black of the depths.
He stirred, not his hand but his head, giving it a shake like a man coming out of a light sleep. He lifted his chin, opened his eyes.
Then he took his hand off her body and sunk it back into the wall. He kept climbing. His cock pressed and rubbed at her with every step. She imagined she could feel it swelling. And then she wondered if it was really her imagination.
When he reached the top, he placed her on the ledge, waited until she had crawled back, then joined her and straightened up. There, he studied her seriously. “You should go home,” he said at last. “And you should stay there.”
Olivia didn’t care what he thought of her now. She turned and fled.
Back through the winding tunnels, fumbling her flashlight out on the way and following its bouncing light back to the safety of the mainway, she ran. Now there were people, oh sure, now there would be, and they gave her plenty of startled looks as she tore past them, but no one tried to stop her. She ran until she reached the chimney to Vorgullum’s lair and stopped only long enough to get her claws, biting on the fastens and looking frantically behind her until they were on and she could clamber up into safety.
Vorgullum was in the sleeping room, spreading new sleeping bags on her side of the pit. He looked up as she ran in and had enough time to straighten up before she crashed into him. “This must mean I am forgiven,” he said, bringing up his hand to stroke down her hair. “What—”
Then he stopped. She heard him take a breath, a deep one, and hold it. His claws flexed, digging at her back. He thrummed.
“Oh God, I’m in season!” she blurted. Thoughts of Cheyenne’s captor, his hand on her ass and that awful emptiness on his face as he’d pulled her down against him, took a sharp turn in her mind and clicked into a far better place. She’d been in season and it’d had nothing to do with anything except dumb animal pheromones. Laughter came pouring out of her in a shaky rush of relief.
The sound of it snapped whatever had a grip on Vorgullum. He shoved her back, already tearing at his belt, fangs gleaming hungrily in the firelight.
“No, wait!”
He didn’t.
She tried to say his name, tried to back up, to make him take a moment, see her, something! But he lunged at her first flinching step away, seized her, threw her down and fell on her. He didn’t care about her clothes; the skirt tore a little as he shoved it up and out of his way, but apart from that, he showed no sign that he even knew she was wearing them.
‘It’s the shirt,’ she thought as he grappled her thighs open. The curse of the tie-dyed t-shirt. She was never wearing it again.
Then he was there, snarling into her face as he punched into her, pushing her back over the smoky-smelling sleeping bags with the force of his first penetration. She tried to be ready for it; there was no being ready for it. He split her, tearing the breath from her body, and then he was fucking her, the gullan fuck, pounding at her with the stone of his uncaring cock until he had battered his way all the way inside her.
She tried not to struggle and struggled anyway, screaming his name in bursts broken by his powerful thrusts. Out and again, he plunged into her, his movements growing more ragged and more violent with the passing of every eternal second. She could hear nothing but the sounds he made, snuffling and grunting over her like some great rutting beast (‘Elk are passionate, right?’ that detached, laughing part of her said), could see nothing but his chest and the straining cords of his throat as he arched his back. Whatever there was in him that was Vorgullum was gone. Whatever was left, reveled.
She could feel it when he came. He kept on thrusting as savagely as ever, even as his cock jerked in the throes of release; there was nothing in his snarling face to indicate pleasure or even awareness of his orgasm, only that mindless animal grin. If anything, he pumped even harder, shaking her beneath him with greater ferocity until the last fit of his semen hammered at her bruised womb and he fell heavily atop her, as still as death but for the rapid panting of his breath against her ear.
But it was only the first time, and he was already hardening again.
Olivia caught him by one ear, twisting it until he opened his burning eyes and looked at her. “You claw me again and I’m leaving you,” she said.
His lips curled back in an uncomprehending animal snarl. He reared back, yanked her with him, and drove at her agai
n.
8
In the aftermath, Vorgullum rolled with great effort onto his back and said, “You are magnificent.”
Without opening her eyes or attempting to draw herself out of the sprawl in which he’d left her, Olivia replied, “And you’re a prick,” in toneless English.
He got up. Soon, she heard the soft scrape of flint and steel and then there was light behind her eyes and the smell of burning animal fat in her nose. He came back to the pit. She could almost feel the scratch of his eyes on her overused body as he peered down at her. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I tried not to hurt you so much…I think I tried.”
“Am I bleeding?” It did not seem worth the agony of movement to check for herself.
He prodded gingerly at one thigh, sniffed a few times. “No.”
“Then I’m not hurt.”
He did not reply, and the silence gradually took on weight until Olivia had to raise her head and look at him. He at once looked away.
Damn it. Damn him.
“I’m not hurt,” she said again, and tried to sound like she meant it, in spite of her sore muscles, in spite of the scratches cut into her arms, back, and shoulders, in spite of the pure hell he’d set in the whole of her insides, in spite of everything. She even managed a smile.
He nodded once and turned away, using as an excuse his need to set the candle down, but even after he’d done it, he only stood there and faced the wall. At last, quietly, he said, “I wish things were not as they are.”
But they were. And so he was thinking of healthy young.
Olivia bit down hard on the rest of that bitterness before it could root too deeply. “You’re a good man,” she said instead, and settled back into her new sleeping bags, now rumpled, torn, and soaked with sweat and semen. “Thank you for the new bedding.”
He continued to stand beside the pit, watching her, perhaps. “Shall I take you to the baths?” he asked finally.
As if he actually thought she could walk all the way to the Deep Drop. Olivia bit down some more and answered, “Later, please. For now, sleep is better.”
“Sleep is always good, Doru says.” He came a step down into the pit, bent to brush the back of his hand along her bare shoulder and arm. “You are a good mate to me, my Olivia.”
She smiled again, her eyes shut and jaw tight, and patted at his hand.
He left her and Olivia slept.
She woke some time later (without the sun or television to help her, her sense of time was grossly unbalanced. The stuffy headache and twinge in her back indicated she’d been asleep for hours, even as her sandy eyelids swore it had been mere minutes only) to see him come in through the doorway with a fresh jug of water. He saw her push herself partway up and made a hushing noise in her direction.
“It is night,” he said. “Sleep.”
“Thirsty,” she muttered, and he gave her the jug. When she had taken several swallows, she handed it back, saying, “How is everyone out there?”
He shrugged his wings and began to undress. “We have had no kills since my last hunt, but there has been some meat from our traps. There are no injured, no dead. And Horumn says Bolga is doing well. So far. Murgull asked after you. She passes along her hopes that you are this moment spawning a thousand bald, winged frogs.”
“How considerate,” Olivia yawned.
“So I said.”
“I was with Murgull all day,” she said, falling back into the sleeping bags. “Why didn’t she tell me I was in season? Is that really the sort of thing you people like to be surprised by?”
“Females can’t smell another female’s season,” he answered, as if the idea itself were ludicrous.
And males couldn’t smell it when a woman got pregnant, the way Murgull apparently could. Pheromones.
Vorgullum pinched out the candle, casting them both into the black. He came down into the pit to join her, his body warm and fur-soft against her back and his arm a welcome and familiar weight across her sore side. “Olivia, my mate,” he murmured. “May I ask you something?”
“Of course,” she said, expecting something Murgull-related, perhaps to know what she did during her hours alone with the tribe’s most feared and infamous gulla.
He surprised her. “What is that thing you are wearing on your wrist? Almost all of you have one of some color and shape. What is it?”
“We call it a ‘watch’. It measures time.”
He digested this for a while, then brought her out of a light drowse by saying, “What is the measure of time now?”
“I don’t know,” she said sleepily. “Mine is broken.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Why do you keep it, then?”
She shrugged as best she could, lying down. “It reminds me of home. It reminds me of a world that needs time to be measured. It makes me happy.”
“Would it not make you happier if it worked?”
“Yes, it probably would, but since it does not, I have to be happy while it’s broken.”
His breath blew soft against the nape of her neck, steady and slow, lulling her easily back toward sleep. And then:
“Olivia?”
“Mm?”
“I want you to be happy.”
“I know.” She yawned, reaching back to pat comfortably at his thigh. “I would be happy if I were sleeping now.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
She was aware of him lying awake even as she fell steadily towards oblivion, but now, at least, he wasn’t trying to talk to her. Olivia passed into a deep, suffocating sleep and dreamed once more of the moon, never really certain whether she was watching it, or it watching her. It disturbed her, enough that she was almost grateful to be jostled out of it for the second time by Vorgullum trying quietly to light a fire.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she groaned, dragging part of a blanket over her head.
“I was asleep,” he replied, scraping away with that stupid flint and steel. “Now it will be morning. Late morning.”
She uncovered her eyes. “Seriously?”
“You can sleep if you like, my mate, but I should be hunting with the others. The forests are full of humans now, which means the game will be in pockets easy to find.” He paused to blow fire gently up over the mossy log until it caught, then leaned back and looked at her devilishly. “But dangerous.”
She sat up, playing along, although she was in no condition to seduce anyone at the moment. “Oh, my mate, you brave and fearless hunter, to fly so boldly into the very claws of danger!”
“Antlers, I think you mean.”
“Whatever, as long as you come back to me in glory. There is nothing I love so much as my mate hot with victory.” And on that romantic note, she tossed back her covers and limped off to the bathroom.
“I really wish you would stop doing this to me just before I have to leave,” he called. “You have no idea the things people are saying about me.” He muttered for a moment, and then raised his voice to her again. “What will you do when I become so distracted with thoughts of you that I’m mauled to death by a bear?”
She reappeared in the pit room door and draped herself against it provocatively. “It would never happen. My great and daring hunter would surely defeat anything so paltry as a bear and bring me a belt of its teeth and claws. ‘This is the work of mighty Vorgullum,’ I will say. ‘How much more savage is my mate than this lowly beast!’”
He paused in the act of gathering up his loincloth, his head cocked on side to study her with a singularly thoughtful eye, and was about to reply when a male’s booming, laughing voice reached them, shouted up from the mainway.
“Vorgullum, does she have you chained to that damned pit?”
He jumped, flustered and snarled a wordless reply, then hurriedly donned his loincloth and ran out. She heard him cursing and landing quite a few muffled blows between the ribald laughter of his fellows.
“Enough of that, are we going hunting or not? Where is my spear?”
“I
believe Olivia had it last, ask her!”
“Yes, use your mighty spear, Vorgullum! You can scare the deer to death!”
Their voices receded into the distance, leaving Olivia laughing under her breath as she dressed. Climbing spikes in hand, she dropped down the chute and entered the mainway. Although a bath (and the opportunity to clean and dress her pit-wounds) was high in her priorities, the reality of the Deep Drop was still a daunting one, and she made her way first to the commons, where the hunters were gathered to give Vorgullum a hard time before heading out, and where she also saw three gullan females and several humans sitting in a circle.
Curious, Olivia started for them. As she drew near, she saw they were arranged around a huge tin tub, which appeared to be filled with narrow strips of bark soaking in water. The smell was quite pleasant, woodsy and strong, and made her think oddly of the pet supplies aisle at the Shop-A-Lot she frequented. Or used to frequent.
“Mind your pull!” one of the gullan warned, reaching across two others to call a flustered Ellen’s attention to something in her lap. “You are too loose. Tightly, tightly!”
“I don’t want to break it,” Ellen protested, but Olivia could see her tugging at the spray of bark strips in her hands.
“If it breaks, it breaks,” the gulla shrugged. “Best to break it by learning the right way than to make all a basket in the wrong way.” She glanced around, saw Olivia, and started. “Oh, it’s you!”
“Hello again, Thurga.”
All the women looked up, but their hands were too busy to wave. “We missed you yesterday,” Tina remarked.
“I was busy,” Olivia replied. She figured she could just leave out what she was busy doing. “What are you working on?”
“Not working,” one of the gulla replied smartly. “Horumn has been chewing nettles all night and all day, so here we are, pretending to work and keeping out of her reach.”