Olivia

by R. Lee Smith

  Rats.

  She screamed her scratchy scream and stabbed at the sound with her climbing spikes, yanking her feet up behind her. She struck sparks off the cavern floor, jarred her arm up to the shoulder, and was bitten at the same time near her left hip.

  Olivia thrashed in the blackness. They swarmed on her, biting and screaming their ratty war cries. Olivia scrambled back until she struck the wall, trying to gather her feet up beneath her where they would be protected. She slashed and struck, beating wildly at the stone, sending up a raucous din as her iron spikes struck and struck at the stone.

  Suddenly, her spikes punched through living flesh, and the rat sent up a shrill cry, scrabbling and biting brainlessly at the rock. Its struggles waned and stilled.

  Olivia continued to press on its body, listening desperately for the others.

  Slowly it occurred to her that there were no others, at least not now.

  She yanked the rat off her spikes and flung it away. It smacked wetly into the other wall and Olivia began crawling again, her panic lending new strength to her knees. She had managed maybe twenty feet when she heard a new sound, that of blunt claws tapping on the tunnel’s floor.

  The feet slowed, then stopped. Silence.

  Olivia froze, not breathing, sensing the other out there listening as hard as she to determine what was in the tunnel.

  Good God, she thought suddenly. What am I keeping quiet for?

  She sucked in breath, concentrated on her voice, and let out a ragged croak. “Help! Help me!”

  “Who—?” Kodjunn’s voice abruptly silenced, perhaps because the answer didn’t matter, and he started forward rapidly. “Where are you? Keep talking!”

  “Here, I’m here!” she gasped. Her voice was a little stronger, but not much. “Rats! Help me! Help me, I—” She stopped as the image of Cheyenne rose up in stark relief against the ragged backdrop of her mind. Despite her disbelief and self-disgust, she heard her own tortured voice saying, “I got lost, I dropped my spikes and stepped on them. I can’t walk, and there are rats!”

  He reached her, fumbling his hands clumsily over her head in the dark, and then lowering himself carefully to gather her up. “Where are you hurt?” he began, and then he was sniffing. “I smell bl…blood…”

  He went suddenly silent, his hands digging at her slowly, becoming painful and then surpassing it. Like a scent they cannot smell, Murgull had said. He didn’t even know what was happening to him.

  “I’m hurt,” she said. “I need help. Please, Kodjunn!”

  The sound of his name seemed to bring him out of it, but not very far. He pulled her into his arms and stood, but didn’t start walking, and his muscles only seemed to be locking up tighter and tighter. It was as though she had been plucked up and dumped into the arms of a stone statue, one that had come to just enough terrible life to breathe.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Take me to Murgull.”

  “I left a candle burning,” he said, a statement so nonsensical that for a moment, she thought Murgull had made the wrong potion after all and he was hallucinating. “I have to…I have to…”

  “Go back for it,” she told him. “I can wait—”

  “No.” His arms tightened with bruising force, then very slowly eased.

  “You’re hurt. I have to…”

  Breathing. Just breathing.

  “Hurry,” said Olivia. This was bad, but maybe it wouldn’t get any worse. If he could get her out of here fast enough, get her to Murgull—

  He started walking, lurching like Frankenstein’s monster back down the passage, hissing through his teeth with every step as though his were the feet cut to the bone. It couldn’t have taken as long as it seemed, but darkness, pain and fear run in their own time. It seemed that hours passed, hours, before she saw the glimmers of golden candlelight and smelled tallow burning and smoking in the air. He had left not one candle, but many, set all around this abandoned cavern, here in the ruins where the wasted ones had laired.

  It wasn’t a very romantic setting, if this was where he was meeting his secret lover. A sleeping pit had been scratched out in the center of the room, but it was empty. A brass brazier, tarnished by years and neglect, lay on its side in one corner, the ironwork of its legs rusted through. Kodjunn’s pink Powerpuff backpack sat up against one wall, unzipped around a water jug and a few unlit candles. The only furnishing at all was a single bench, and it was there that he set her down and knelt to examine her feet.

  “Bleeding,” he hissed, and pulled in one hard, shuddering breath. “Need…to bind it.” He cast his eyes around desperately, but apart from a half-dozen guttering candles, the room held nothing.

  “Here.” Olivia struggled briefly with the catches, then pulled her homemade shirt off. She held it out with one arm, covered her chest with the other, and shivered in the cold. “Use this.”

  Kodjunn took a deep breath, snatched the shirt and tore it into strips. He crawled back to the very edge of reach and began to wind it tight around her left foot. It hurt, but it was a whole different kind of pain, not the raw and savage agony of an open wound, but a dull throb that was infinitely more bearable. When he had them both bandaged, Kodjunn dropped her and hunched further over, his head now nearly touching the stone floor. He took breath after shaky breath, and finally looked up at her, his eyes showing the whites all around. He reached out with one hand, slammed his claws into the bench at her side and pressed his other palm over his bulging loincloth with a ragged moan.

  Olivia watched him suffer helplessly.

  During spring break in college, she had once arranged to go camping with a group of girl friends. One of them, through a poor knowledge of field botany, watered the wrong bush and managed to acquire poison ivy inside her vagina. They had been driving her to the nearest hospital, three of them holding her while Olivia drove. On the way, the girl had managed to free a hand and scratch. Olivia had chosen that moment to look in the rearview mirror.

  The expression on that hapless girl’s face and the expression Kodjunn wore now was exactly the same: unspeakable pain disguised as carnal pleasure.

  Cheyenne had really thought things through.

  “Kodjunn,” Olivia said softly, gritting her teeth against the brief flare of pain in both her feet as she shifted on the bench to straddle it. “Come here.”

  He jerked his head towards her, then away, breathing hard. “No,” he panted, but his hand was scratching at the stays of his loincloth.

  Steeling herself against the agony crawling up her legs like poison, Olivia pulled her skirt up. “You need me,” she told him, and it was true. Damn Cheyenne and damn that stupid potion, but it was true and there was really nothing else she could do.

  “No!” he panted, pulling his loincloth loose—not off, but just loose, just enough to let the straining rod of his cock free where he could seize it—and worse than that poison-ivy agony eating up his face was the humiliation burning through the whole of his body as he began helplessly to masturbate in front of her. He buried his head in the crook of his arm, his muscles so tight that she could see the ripple of veins even through his pelt, and jerked himself through his fist, groaning, “You’re hurt!”

  “So are you.” She reached down, and he let her take him, let her take away his punishing hand and replace it with her own, even though he wouldn’t look at her. He was hot in her hand, hot and harder than she ever thought it possible for a man to be. She’d heard the word ‘steel’ used far too liberally without realizing that it could be like this, like steel beneath the thinnest cover of his sensitive skin, and that true steel hurt more than any woman could really understand. Her heart broke for him a little then. This wouldn’t bring him any kind of pleasure; this was going to be hell. “Come here, Kodjunn. Please.”

  It might have been his name. It might have been the please. He rolled an eye toward her, squeezed them shut again, but when she spread her thighs around the bench, he rose up and crawled, trembling, over her. He shivered once, turne
d his face away and penetrated her.

  He made an awful sound. Olivia suddenly remembered the horror of that moment, the first night, when she could feel her body building to climax utterly independent of her pain and panic and fear. If it were possible to give a memory a voice, then she heard it now, ripping itself in rusty shreds from Kodjunn’s throat as he drove to the hilt inside her.

  Murgull’s potion did its work very well. Kodjunn threw his whole body into the act of sex, heaving and sweating and scarcely touching her. Even the flat board of his muscled stomach flinched back when it slapped against her and his flanks shivered uncontrollably in the grip of her thighs. He came and came, climbing steadily towards a climax of thunderous proportions, and when it overtook him at last he bayed with wretchedness and pulled back and out of her and huddled on the ground.

  They both lay there, breathing, and then he began to cry.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he moaned. “I didn’t want for this to happen. Ah, damn me, your feet! Your feet and I—” He clapped both hands over his eyes and bent himself in half.

  Olivia shut her eyes and kept them shut until she was certain she wouldn’t join him in tears. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “Look at me.”

  He did, a quick, disconsolate glance over one slumped shoulder.

  “This was not your fault,” she said, trying to smile. It didn’t fit quite right, but she kept trying.

  “You always flinch when I touch you. Everyone whispers about me. Ever since she came.” He spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “When I went to the storeroom for food, Doru and Mudmar stopped talking to look at me. What did I do that was so horrible? I only did what our leader told us to do, I did what all the others did, why are they all staring at me?”

  Olivia felt a slow sinking in her stomach. She could only look at him, and listen as a wealth of misery and loneliness came out of him.

  “She attacks me, she hits me, she tries to escape. I try to touch her and she tries to kill me. I have never coupled with her. I go to Chugg.” He stopped, breathing hard, and then exploded, “I have to go to Chugg, because the others won’t speak to me! Golgun spit at me!” He covered his face again, shuddering. “I deserve it. I deserve it all. I rutted with you. I took a wounded, helpless woman and I rutted with her.”

  She tried to pat his arm and he wrenched away from her. They sat, not touching. Years passed.

  At last, he brought his head up and looked around at her. His gaze dropped to her feet and he winced with sympathy. “I have some water,” he said dully, and got up to get it from his backpack.

  She drank just to have something to do and he hunkered down at arm’s length and took a long, critical look at her.

  “What happened to your neck?” His voice held a faint tremor, the fear that he might have caused her this injury without knowing.

  “I fell down,” she said. No human would ever believe that. If he had better light, he probably wouldn’t believe it either.

  “Your feet are badly torn,” he said.

  “I dropped my climbing claws. I guess, in the dark, I must have stepped on them.” She remembered the ripping, scraping, savage feel of those spikes cutting into her. “And slid,” she said. “And a rat bit me.”

  “Rats,” he muttered under his breath. “We don’t see many of them this deep, but they still get in. They eat whatever they can and foul everything else, and they’re always crawling with fleas. We kill them whenever we find them.” He must have realized he was babbling because he broke off and edged further from her. She could see his nostrils flaring, feel the slow drag of his lungs as he caught her scent, the scent of Murgull’s potion. He dropped his arm to cover himself, twisting away to try and hide the shame in his eyes, or the desire.

  You poor bastard, Olivia thought tiredly. She spoke his name, reached out to brush her fingers along the rough base of his horns. He flinched, then leaned cautiously into the touch. His hand hesitated towards her, settled lightly atop her thigh. “You can look at me if you want to,” she told him.

  He half-rose, dropped back, took a deep breath, and rose again. He was erect again, a hot brand against her thigh that carried the rhythm of his pounding heart straight to her as it drove deep and slow inside her. He groaned softly, lifted her hips, and began to move, but not as frantically or furiously as before. That was encouraging. It was a powerful potion, but Kodjunn’s body still had limits, and once they were exhausted, they could move on. To that end, she touched him, reaching up to stroke his cheek before twining her hands around his shoulders and pulling him down to her.

  He resisted, but obeyed, lowering himself in stages until he lay belly to belly atop her. She held him, letting him feel her combing at his back, his sides, his hips, and felt his shudder at that intimate contact with far more clarity than the vigor of his thrusting. His hands tunneled unexpectedly beneath her, wrapping her wholly in his arms as he pressed his mouth to her throat, thrumming softly against her skin.

  It was nothing, really. Nothing but heat and friction and the feel of a warm body above and inside her, but that was a combination that occasionally synced and it did tonight. She felt it start for her—pinpoint spasms that flitted over and through her, spreading out like ripples in still water until all her being aligned to his rhythm and began to build toward climax. Her breath came faster; she pressed her lips together on the moans that wanted out so that he could hear her humming, and his own movements quickened.

  They came together, she crying out against the muffle of his shoulder, he straining and silent above her. Then she tried to hold him, which was in retrospect a stupid thing to do, as Murgull’s potion was still saturant in her hair and on her skin, but he wouldn’t allow it. He backed away, keeping his eyes averted as he adjusted his clothing to cover himself.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. Her feet pulsed and groaned with hurt.

  One of the candles began to gutter madly, throwing huge shadows to dance upon the wall and giving them both something else to look at besides each other. For a moment, that was all she saw: the light, the shadows, the ragged surface of the cavern wall. She saw the tool marks next, well made, smoothing out the natural face of the rock into something that was almost even. And then she saw flecks of earthen red and charcoal black, and as if a great mental switch had been thrown, she saw the picture: countless gullan on their knees, dark bodies thrown back and mouths hanging open to emit either pale fog or streams of water, something anyway that flowed together into a single ominous shape, but this was too badly degraded by time to make out.

  “I suppose you must be wondering what I am doing here.”

  Olivia looked at him. He didn’t meet her eyes. “I know that few come here,” she said. “But if you don’t want to tell me—”

  “Few come here,” he agreed, his gaze moving restlessly over the walls where other images caught little splashes of poor tallow light. “Some people think there are angry spirits here. You know about the wasted ones? One of those forced into the depths after the White Fever took them was the tribe’s sigruum. He had dreams no other sigruum ever painted, and he continued to paint them here, even here, in the depths. I come to study them.”

  “Why?”

  He looked surprised. “I thought you knew me. I’m the new sigruum.”

  “You?” She tried to reconcile his face with what Sudjummar had told her about mountains that didn’t exist and a world that needed to be changed, and couldn’t quite manage. “But you’re so young!”

  He ducked his head, then shook it. Clearly, he’d heard that before. “I began to dream when I was still a child,” he said. “I always knew I would be sigruum…I always thought I would be a good one. Now this…this human business…” He sighed, and said heavily, “I can’t be sigruum now.”

  “Why not?”

  “A sigruum must have the respect of his tribe. He must have…self-control.” He passed a hand over his eyes, then stood up and faced her. “Olivia, I didn’
t mean for this to happen.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Kodjunn.”

  He made no effort even to look like he believed her. Guilt and grief were pouring into him like cement, weighing on his very bones. “Blame aside, Vorgullum is my leader. I…I have betrayed him.”

  “It’ll be all right, Kodjunn.” She didn’t try to say that again, and not just because such assurances were meaningless. He was sinking into his own unpleasant little world; she didn’t think he’d even heard her.

  “I don’t know why I did that,” he said. “I only know…I wanted you. I needed you.” Each admission was its own killing cut. He covered his eyes again, then turned stiffly away and began to put out candles. “I rutted with you.”

  “Do you need me to carry one of those?” she asked lamely.

  “No. I have made this trip in darkness many times before. I only use the candles to see the stories. I would have left them burning, but smoke damages the paint.” He paused over the last tallow, his shoulders slumping as he stared down into its little light. “That is a sickening excuse. I don’t understand…why I did that to you.”

  “Please stop saying that,” she said. “Please. I can bear anything but that.”

  His head bent.

  “This was not your fault,” she said again. “You don’t need to suffer for it. I’m glad you were here—”

  He looked at her, stricken.

  “—because I still need your help. Please, Kodjunn. Take me to Murgull now.”

  He put out the last candle, plunging them into the black. The next thing she felt was his hand flitting at her arm before he gathered her up. Then his breath blowing warm against her neck.

  Please let that be the end of this, Olivia thought. Vorgullum could go for hours when she was in season. Please let this not be the same.

  He started walking.

  She had no idea how long he carried her through the dark caverns. It had seemed like hours before, but now, it only seemed a few moments before the lanterns hung below the Deep Drop came into view, and there he stopped and looked down at her.