by R. Lee Smith
She turned to him, but he looked back at Cheyenne, who rattled her chains at him in a futile display of defiance.
“No one else speaks the name of Bahgree,” he said, frowning. “Only Mojo Woman. Mojo Woman had a demon, they say. Grunn says she spat out rivers, but so far, no one has thought to name it Bahgree. I think we should keep it that way.”
“Why?” Not that Vorgullum could do anything against the River Woman, she was sure, but by the same token, she couldn’t see how it would hurt for him to know exactly what they were up against.
“Two reasons. First, because you are pregnant and whipping the entire tribe into a state of frothing panic isn’t going to do you or the other mothers any good. And time is different for spirits than for mortals. Perhaps nothing will happen in the time we have on this world.” He fell into another thoughtful silence, staring at Cheyenne as she glared back.
“A good reason, I suppose. And the other?”
“I could be wrong,” he said simply. “I’m no spirit, to know the future of all things. I’m only a man, and men can be wrong.”
Olivia thought of Mojo Woman’s gaping maw gushing freezing water like the mouth of a living faucet, of the ghostly arm that birthed itself from the torrent and the white eye like ice turning to fix its hateful stare on Olivia, of the voice like a hellish chorus that couldn’t quite keep in sync.
“Olivia.”
She looked around to see him gazing at her with his sad, dark eyes.
“Go down to the feast. Let them see you. Let them touch you. Celebrate with them and remind them that a new life is coming. And if you get the chance,” he added with a sigh. “Bring me fresh meat to feed my mate.”
“I will.” Olivia retreated as far as the doorway, but then had to stop. “Kodjunn, how could something like this happen? Why here? Why now?”
For a long time he was silent. She thought he didn’t understand and felt like crying because she didn’t know how to make the question any clearer. Then, in a voice dark and slow with dread, he said, “The last time Bahgree came among us, it was at the hour of the beginning of our kind. Now, I fear she comes at the hour of our end.”
10
After so many lean days, to eat their fill of good, hot meat was an intoxicating experience, so much so that even Olivia managed to let go of her worries and just enjoy herself. She ate, she drank, she even allowed Tobi to haul her into the middle ring and execute a clumsy bump-and-grind to the Ricky Martin songs spinning out endlessly in Liz’s stolen disc player. When Olivia clapped her hands over her head and spun around, the gathered males set up such a thunder of thrumms and tooth-snapping that Vorgullum was compelled to pounce on the most vocal of them. All in play, she told herself, but she stopped dancing, because for play, it went on just a little too long, and even though the vanquished ones laughed as they backed down, some of them were bleeding.
After he had proven himself the victor, Vorgullum emphasized his position by pouncing on Olivia as well, swinging her up over his head as if she were a very small child and not his pregnant mate.
A gnarled hand promptly shot out from nowhere and landed a ringing blow on the side of his head. “Sap-brained idiot!” Murgull snarled. “So many young you have that you can toss this little frog into walls?”
Vorgullum immediately set Olivia back on the ground and looked sheepish.
“Goat-head,” Murgull grumbled, limping back to her bench. “Just what this tribe needs. Ha. Little goat-frogs.”
Vorgullum fanned his wings roguishly behind the old gulla’s back. “Many goat-frogs. Murgull tells me that there are three more sparking humans,” he said. “Anita, Liz and Ellen.” He dipped a wing in a shrug. “Liz is irritated. Doru refuses to let her hunt. She missed the taking of the herd tonight.”
“Doru refused?” Olivia echoed, amused. “Gormuck had nothing to say about it?”
“Perhaps. But to rephrase the wisdom of my loved mate, Gormuck wants to sleep with her. Doru does not.” He grinned in the direction of his chief hunter, who was standing with Tobi and Tina and looking as if he were working very hard to look happy. “So when Liz came to us with her spear in her hand, Doru looked at her.” Vorgullum swelled out his chest and spread his wings in a fair imitation of Doru and growled, “You can give that to me or I can take it, but you are staying right here, human.”
Olivia burst out laughing.
Vorgullum ran his eyes across the tribe until they settled on Liz, who was encouraging one of the female gulla to take a few dance steps while Ricky Martin banged on enthusiastically. “Soon there will be six babies in my mountain, and ours will be the first,” he said, smiling. His hand slipped around her waist, beneath the hem of her quilted shirt to rub at her rounded belly. “The others will see life come to us, our strong and healthy Somurg, and there will be no more fear. We will have a hundred young.”
“Was that the communal we, or just you and I?” she teased.
“You and I. In fact,” he murmured, drawing her firmly out of the commons and towards the mainway. “I think I should take you straight to the pit and train with you, so we aren’t out of practice when the time comes to make a new spark.”
“I hardly think we’re in any danger of that,” she said, smiling.
“It depends on how we train,” he said ominously, and carried her up the chimney to his lair.
In the entry room, he set her down, but did not release her. Instead, he turned her in his arms to kiss her, running his hands over her in rising passion as he peeled away her clothing. His tongue explored her mouth with unpracticed enthusiasm and growing confidence, but he kept her hands firmly at her side and would not allow her to return his embrace.
“It was a long hunt, my Olivia,” he whispered. “Five hours I stood in the freezing wind, my feet sunk in snow. Five hours, alone with Kurlun.” He slipped his hand between her legs and rubbed slowly back and forth, stroking at the damp folds of her sex with his thick fingers. “Kurlun…who has had some chat with his Amy about human pleasures.”
His thumb pressed down gently over the little nub crowning her pussy, a touch so unexpected that she bucked at the sensation without warning. Vorgullum, smiling, lifted her. His arm behind her held her steady, held her pinned close against him, while all her weight rode the hand between her thighs, where he stroked and ground and teased as he walked. Olivia sank her own small, insignificant human claws into his shoulder, gasping and groaning until she felt stone at her back and knew herself to be trapped between it and him.
“Have I neglected you, my mate?” he murmured, slipping only the very tip of his finger inside her, a torment of promise he as swiftly withdrew, and all the while his thumb played at her clit. “And so eagerly you have sought to please me, to learn the ways of my desires. I am ashamed.”
The first gusts of purely physical response swept over her and through her, and as she shivered in its golden grip, she was exquisitely aware of Vorgullum’s mouth on hers, kissing her as though he were trying to breathe in the pleasure he had given her. She kissed him back, trying to hum for him—a somewhat mismanaged effort, but heartfelt.
“Here.” Gently, he lowered his arm and let her find her own balance, but kept his hand at her sex, his fingers dipping torturously into her wet well as she squirmed. “Are you ready?”
“Ready?”
He turned her firmly around to face the wall, pulling her back against his body, his hand moving only as far as needed to continue caressing and teasing at her clit. “For me,” he growled, the thrumm of his intent turning his words to dark silk, and then she felt the hot head of him pressing at her from behind. He mouthed at her shoulder—less a kiss than a hungry bite—and slid his other hand up to cup and knead her breast. “Tell me you are ready.”
She stammered without words, her hips moving in helpless jerks, frantically trying to impale herself on his evasive fingers. Tell him? Why should she even have to tell him? If she could hear the greedy suck of his fingers as he worked them in shallow passes back an
d forth, back and forth, then so could he. And even if he couldn’t, surely he could smell her!
“I insist that you tell me,” he murmured, and now there were claws at her breast, carefully pinching and rolling at her nipple, and this was what he talked about all day with Kurlun, waiting for the sun to set so that the hunt could begin? How did a subject like that even come up?
“I am!” she gasped, pushing hard against the wall, thrusting back at him, begging with every part of her body and not only her voice. “I am! Please! Now!”
“Because you want me.”
“Because I need you! I need you! Vorgullum, now!”
His fingers at her pussy opened, admitting the agony of air on her most secret self…then closed again, stroking her. “A little louder,” he said mildly.
“Wh-What?”
“After all the times you have lured me just so far and no further, so that any ear in the mainway could hear me in the ruins of my dignity, by the Great Spirit—” He stroked at her clit again, bringing her almost there, almost, and growled into her ear. “—I will have a vengeance now.”
Olivia sucked in a tight breath and released it in a keening cry: “Vorgullum, have me! I need you! I need my mate inside me now! Oh please!”
Even she could hear the distant flutter of startled laughter somewhere in the tunnels below. Vorgullum heard as well, snapped his teeth smugly in the direction of the chimney, and finally pushed deeply inside her.
She came at once, so violently that she could actually see it bursting behind her eyes in colors never found in nature. Her knees buckled; she sagged into the steadying grip of his arms, bent even further over so that he could go even deeper. With the shockwaves of climax still humming through her nerves, he thrust at her, rocking her with strong, steady force. It was too much and not enough and just when she thought she was getting a handle on it all, that she could weave herself in and find some kind of symmetry to the pace he set, he dropped his hand to her clit and brought her to a second titanic convulsion.
Olivia could not even put a name to the sound that came out of her—a high, groaning, wolfish howl that spooled out and just hung there, shaken into panting grunts at the very end that matched the power of his rhythm. She didn’t, couldn’t, hear anything else, but Vorgullum must have because he snapped his teeth again, chuckling to himself in triumph as he drove at her.
“This was what you wanted,” he mused, his fingers and hips working faster, not in sync but in harmony. “‘Look at me,’ you said. ‘Hold me and stay with me.’ And I did not understand.”
She was incapable of any kind of reply, could only comprehend the meaning of these sounds in a peripheral sort of way. She did not feel the rough rock under her hands or think about who might be listening out in the tunnels; she did not know how wildly she writhed in his enclosing arms or hear the urgent animal cries she made; for the first time in months, she had completely forgotten that she was pregnant. All she could know, all she could feel, was the ominous crest of some great, impending explosion, its ignition just beyond her senses, and she was straining towards it, and it was the sun, just like the sun, and the sun—
Went out.
Blackness on every side. Blackness within and without her. Blackness, and all she could hope for in those first startled seconds was that she had knocked herself unconscious in the grip of the world’s greatest orgasm, because if she hadn’t, she’d had a heart attack and died. And poor Vorgullum, seriously.
“Behold me.”
The lights came on, light in the shape of a man, difficult to look at. Not too bright, not blinding, but difficult all the same, difficult in a way that made her eyes and her mind and her whole soul want to cringe away. Behold him, he’d said, so she had to, but beyond that terrible man’s shape, she saw nothing.
“Olivia,” the light said. It came a step closer, raised its arm as if to touch her, shining its unthinkable brilliance into her. “Have you eaten?”
-bang-
The rock and the cave and Vorgullum’s roar and climax splitting her down to her atoms and Olivia shrieked, not knowing where she was or what she was doing but only savaged in the jaws of sensations beyond her control. Her body spasmed, firing off bursts of pleasure entirely independent of her ability to perceive them, and then Vorgullum was crushing her against the wall, panting into her ear with smug little grunts of laughter.
That didn’t just happen, Olivia thought, utterly dumbfounded.
“This battle was mine, I think,” Vorgullum was saying cheerfully. He straightened up, supporting her as she struggled for balance in her body and her mind. “But I could put up a second challenge if you disagree.”
“Could you?” Olivia managed. She was a little amazed by how normal she sounded. Out of breath, yes, but normal.
“Perhaps not immediately.” He bent to nuzzle at the side of her neck, and that was all right, that was all the way back to here and now in the real world, and she was even able to relax some and enjoy it. “You’re still shaking,” he observed, in a tone that suggested he meant to take the credit for it.
She let him. Even the best sex in the world lost a lot of its appeal when you realized you’d been having it with a crazy woman.
11
The first thing she wanted to do the following morning, once Vorgullum had left her (still thrumming to himself in a satisfied way), was find Murgull. Whatever she had seen—or thought she saw—was not something she felt comfortable speaking of with any gullan, but it had sat in her heart all night like a fishbone stuck in her throat, and it was either tell someone or choke on it. A part of her knew that the tribe’s sigruum would be a better choice of confidant, that he might even be able to tell her what it meant or (and this terrified her) help her to summon the vision back.
These were precisely the reasons she did not go to Kodjunn’s lair. She didn’t need to be believed and she didn’t want anything explained. She just wanted to pull the memory of that otherspace and its man-shaped radiation out of her so that it could be crushed and forgotten. If it meant submitting to Murgull’s open hand upside her head for getting girly over nothing, so be it. She would welcome that (so she could tell herself, knowing full well that nothing of the kind would happen), but when she reached Murgull’s secret room and worked its ingenious door open, all the words she’d been planning how to say went tumbling out of her head.
Murgull was not looking well.
She sat on her throne of bones, her face turned toward the fireplace where nothing burned, and everything about her seemed sagged and labored. Her eyes were closed and did not open, even though she must have heard the door grinding over its rails. Her hand squeezed and scratched endlessly at the dead, scarred flesh of her neck, but the movement was somehow devoid of life, like the shambling walk of a zombie.
“What do you want?” Murgull growled, startling her.
Dread worse than anything her vision could inspire punched in through her guts and gave her heart an icy squeeze. “Are you sick?” she blurted.
The old gulla sneered, then sighed. “Murgull is old, little sister. Just old.”
Olivia came inside, the door hanging open with all its secrets revealed, to lay her hand on Murgull’s brow. She refused to be shaken off, but pursued the thin patch of hairless flesh beside the gulla’s pointed ears and found it hot; pursued the pulsing vein at her scarred throat and found it shallow. Alarmed, she realized that Murgull’s skin seemed oddly loose; the body beneath, diminished and somewhat slack. “When did you last eat?” she asked.
“Ah, you pest! You biting flea! Horumn sets a bowl aside every night! Enough, eh? Let old Murgull be.” She glanced at her, made a face, then heaved a sigh and struggled onto her feet. “Down, then. Let me have a look at you.”
Olivia started to protest, but Murgull gave her a smart slap on the shoulder, so she scooted to the edge of the bench and lay back, spreading her legs and hitching her heavy robe up around her hips.
“Have to bite at Horumn’s ears, eh?” Murgul
l mumbled. “Find a birthing bench and make it ready. Too soon is better than too late.” She used her right hand, the claws of which were kept round and very dull, to gingerly probe inside Olivia. Her other hand prodded her belly from the outside, turning the baby this way and that so that Murgull could feel it.
Olivia closed her eyes and tried to tune it out. As often as Murgull demanded these examinations, she had never gotten used to them. Murgull had given her instructions in sex that could make a sailor blush, but having a baby embarrassed her. She shook her head minutely, disgusted with herself.
“All is well,” Murgull pronounced, limping over to the table to splash something acrid and unpleasant-smelling over her hands. “Strong life is growing stronger. The soul is fast inside him. If he had to, he could come out today, and maybe he would survive.”
Olivia struggled to right herself and pull her robe back over her naked thighs. “When will it happen?” she called
“Old Murgull says, oh…three cycles hence, when the moon is at its fattest. A very good omen, to birth the same night as Urga above. Perhaps you truly will bear the Great Spirit’s son, eh? Now come with me, little sister. Come to see Amy-maggot. Olivia will learn how to feel inside a woman.”
Olivia pulled a face. “Oh, ugh! Do I have to?”
Murgull nodded, patting her on the shoulder. “No one else but Olivia. Come on, then, be brave. Old Murgull thinks the other maggot will be more horrified even than you.” She cackled, and led the way from the room.
12
Amy tracked Murgull with her eyes while Olivia counted off her pulse quietly. “No, I haven’t been bruising any worse than usual, and why is Olivia still here?” There was new steel under the suspicion in her voice that said she was done answering questions until her own got answered.