Olivia

by R. Lee Smith

  “It was a dream!” Horumn exploded. Then, rapidly, as though to excuse her outburst, “Sometimes a dream is just a dream! You’re all losing your mind over this because the Great Spirit touched her once before.”

  Kodjunn cleared his throat and sat up. “You’re right, Horumn. How many stories are told of the Great Spirit or Urga appearing once and never again? And how much folly has come from a gulla chasing such visions? Tovorak Woonag saw the Great Spirit as a child and spent the rest of his life trying to make himself worthy enough for a visitation which never came.”

  “Yes!” Horumn agreed, pouncing on the example. “And he led his tribe to one disaster after another!”

  “So let us have a test,” Kodjunn suggested. “We will stand you and Olivia outside and ask the Great Spirit to strike dead the one who is wrong.”

  Silence.

  Horumn and Olivia both stared at him, conscious of every eye in the room open and upon them.

  “Horumn?” Kodjunn prompted.

  As one, the gulla and the human looked towards each other. Their gaze met and held as the entire tribe watched.

  The sounds of breathing seemed very loud.

  “Well, look,” Tina said reluctantly, and now she spoke in gullanese. “Even if someone does come to look for us, they won’t be looking everywhere. I guess we only have to worry about getting this much distance behind us for the first few days. After that, we can make good, warm camps and transport our people and supplies more carefully.”

  There were murmurs of agreement as flying gullan eyed the grounded ones, but Tina’s mate grabbed at her wrist, glaring disapprovingly as he hissed, “No one asked you to speak, woman!”

  “These are wise words,” Vorgullum said, moving his stare from Horumn to Gullnar. “I hear them, Tina.”

  Tina was released. She rubbed her wrist, pointedly not looking at her mate as she stalked over to where Tobi and Doru huddled and sat with them instead. Doru, watching Gullnar, tucked his folded wing around her.

  “What say you, Eldest?” Vorgullum asked quietly.

  Horumn grumbled under her breath and finally looked at Olivia. Just looked, as opposed to glaring or sneering. Resignation aged her. “You don’t want to be here either, do you?”

  Olivia sighed, and placed a hand over the bulge that was her baby. “What do you think?”

  “Fine. No challenge tonight.” Horumn lay back down and folded one arm over Bolga’s sleeping shoulders.

  Olivia threw a glance over her shoulder at Kodjunn as she started to lie back down and he offered her a faint smile. Shaking her head, she curled back up in Vorgullum’s arms. It was still a long time before she could sleep.

  16

  Lorchumn crawled out of the snow bank the next day at dusk, froze at the top, and slid back down. He looked wide-eyed and almost panicked, and the sight of him sent of ripple of fear through the waking tribe. Seeing him, Olivia had a heart-stopping moment of terror when she wondered if all she’d managed to do with Urga’s warning was move them all directly into the path of some massive search and rescue operation.

  “Goats!” Lorchumn hissed, leaping over two gullan to grab a spear. “Goats everywhere and all upwind!”

  A muffled scramble for weapons ensued as a dozen gullan and Tobi slipped out through the snow pack.

  A short time later, there was a bleating cry of alarm, several animal screams, and then silence.

  The gullan women at once began to spread out the coals for cooking with a resolute, almost grateful air. Vorgullum appeared in the opening, trying to tug a carcass behind him into the caves.

  Olivia had never seen a mountain goat before. She’d always pictured them as being, well, goat-sized. Bigger than a dog, but smaller than a cow, so to speak. Although this animal did, technically, fall within that range, it was easily as big as Vorgullum and must have weighed some three hundred pounds.

  “One for each of us,” Vorgullum panted as he finally managed to haul it inside and drop it by the fire. “Olivia! This hide will look better on you. Help me get it off.”

  There wasn’t time to do a proper curing of the hide. He gave her a knife and had her scrape the blood and fatty residue off the inside layer of the fleece, then cut a hole in the center and had her pull it on, wool-side out, to wear like a Mexican poncho. Messy, smelly, and imperfect, but, as Vorgullum distractedly observed, it would keep her warm until there was leisure enough to do it over, assuming they ever bothered.

  They filled up on goat-meat, eating as much as they could manage and bundling up the rest. What they could not carry, they would leave behind and fetch later, from the safety of the next camp. As soon as it was completely dark outside, Horumn saved some coals and put out the fire, and they all filed out into the snow to take off again.

  Vorgullum swept his eyes over his tribe and, satisfied that all were present, said, “It will be another long night of travel.”

  “So if you’ve got to go,” Amy interrupted. “Go now.”

  He eyed her blackly, then shrugged his wings and nodded.

  17

  Five days and nights passed in this fashion. Each day, just before dawn, someone would find a hiding hole just big enough to contain the tribe and secluded enough to be safe for a fire. If their food supplies were getting low, game came to them—usually goats, but also deer, moose, and once, a handful of bears, which the superstitious gullan (who knew damn well bears don’t come in handfuls) didn’t want to kill. Night by night, the glow of human habitation grew sparser; they left the distant towns behind them, and then the roads, and finally even the little sparks of houses went out and they flew over darkness.

  As the morning of the sixth day began to lighten the horizon, Olivia tugged at Kodjunn’s silvery mane to make him look at her. “Put me down,’ she ordered. “Put me down, I need to see.”

  He obediently tipped a wing as a signal, then swooped low to the ground and landed on an uneven peak. She climbed out of his arms, took a few steps, and peered intently at the horizon. All around her, gullan were dropping curiously out of the sky and waiting for her to speak.

  The tree-line looked familiar, as did the peak of the mountain on her left. There was the lake, just up ahead, but there should be a valley here somewhere, a green clearing with a smaller lake and a few evergreens sitting in the hollow scooped out between two rows of mountains, and she didn’t see it.

  “Is this the place?” Vorgullum asked, scanning the forest. He didn’t bother to keep either a hand or eye on Cheyenne, who sat docilely at his feet.

  “Not quite,” she hedged. “But I think we’re very close. There should be a valley, between two mountain ridges.” She hunkered down and drew lines in the snow.

  He studied the drawing closely, looked at the rising color in the east, then waved some of his hunters over. “Scatter,” he commanded. “Look for this place. The rest of us will stay here.”

  The gullan jumped into the air and soared off.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re lost,” Amy said, close by.

  “I’m not lost,” Olivia replied obediently. “I just don’t know exactly where I am.”

  They waited as the sky grew lighter and lighter. The first arc of the sun had just come up over the tree line when they heard a baying cry of gullan excitement. “I found it, I found it! Exactly as she said!” Wurlgunn came in a little too low, smacked his legs against the rocky ground, flipped over and knocked himself out on an ice-pack.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Beth grumbled, slogging through the snow. She lifted up his head, patted his cheeks, and waited for his eyes to flutter open. “Lover?” she said sweetly.

  “Found it,” he mumbled.

  “Which way, oh hunter of my heart?”

  He lifted his head out of her hands, looked left and right, then dropped down again. “Wait until the ground stops moving.”

  “But the Great Spirit sees fit to break my wing,” Murgull muttered unkindly. “Wurlgunn? Oh, yes, he can fly, but keep old Murgull on the ground.” />
  “Hush,” Beth said without looking up.

  Wurlgunn struggled to get upright, took two rolling steps towards Olivia, and stopped again. He touched his head, his arm, Beth’s head, and then turned in a full circle. “There,” he said confidently. “Follow me.” He threw himself back into the air.

  Vorgullum marked the direction Wurlgunn took, then fixed Cheyenne with a considering stare. “Look at me,” he said quietly.

  She did, but half-flinching.

  “I am going to leave,” he said. “Do I have to kill you before I go?”

  Cheyenne’s chin quivered and she clenched her jaw. One tear slicked down over her cheek. She shook her head.

  “Doru, watch her. Kill her if she so much as stands.”

  The huge hunter at once stepped up and planted the butt of his spear in the ground before Cheyenne, glaring down at her with an expression that all but commanded her to stand up. Cheyenne covered her face with her hands and began to cry in hoarse, furious sobs.

  Vorgullum turned his back on her and reached out for Olivia. He looked wary, as if expecting her to back away. When she came to him, he closed his eyes as if in pain. “Kodjunn,” he said. “Come with me. The rest of you, stay here. Do not make a camp. If the Great Spirit wills it, we will have true rock around us tonight.” He lifted off, beating his wings hard against the frozen ground until he had enough lift to level out and soar away.

  It wasn’t long before Olivia recognized the place, just as it had appeared to her in the dream. The little valley between the divided mountain range, the waterfall and the lake, the miles and miles of forested foothills. Most importantly, there was not a sign of civilization to be found, not as far as the eye could see.

  “Where is the opening?” Vorgullum asked, circling over the highest peak.

  She took her arm off his neck to point at the place she remembered standing with Urga, and he dropped out of the sky, landing almost exactly where she had stood. And there it was, a rift in the rock several feet deep and wide, leading almost straight down.

  Vorgullum set her down and peered cautiously down. He sniffed the air, filtering the varied scents, and shook his head. “I smell no gullan.”

  “Then what are those?” Olivia asked. She indicated ancient holes gouged out of the rock, worn down by time and season, but recognizable as gullan clawholds.

  Beside them Wurlgunn had landed, painlessly this time. Kodjunn circled the aerie once more, then dropped and crashed experimentally into the high wall of the opening. He clung there expertly, looking down.

  “So,” Vorgullum said. “We should have a look, I suppose.”

  “A good thing one of us came prepared,” Kodjunn added, reaching into his belt pouch and coming up with a flashlight on a cord. He slung it over Olivia’s neck, and then turned it on. “Down you go,” he said. “If you get eaten by snow-snakes or something, remember to scream.”

  “I think I can manage that,” Olivia agreed, pulling out her climbing spikes.

  “You are not going down there alone,” Vorgullum growled, shooting daggers at Kodjunn with his eyes.

  “No, Kodjunn is going with me. If there are snow-snakes in there, better he gets eaten than you.”

  “Thank you, Olivia.”

  “That is not funny,” Vorgullum said quietly. “You are carrying my son.”

  Olivia sighed, turned to face him. “Correct me if I am mistaken, my mate, but I am the only one on this ledge we are absolutely sure the Great Spirit wants to keep alive.”

  “Someday, remind me to tell you what happens to those who challenge the spirits,” Vorgullum countered, but held his tongue while they advanced to the lip of the opening.

  “You go first,” she told Kodjunn. “I’ll use the holes you make.”

  Kodjunn flicked his eyes in mute apology at Vorgullum, who shrugged unhappily, then began to lower himself into the chasm. Olivia followed at a close distance, stopping every so often to shine her light into the shadows.

  It was a long way down. The rock blocked the wind out, and returned some feeling to Olivia’s hands after the first twenty feet, but then the temperature started dropping all on its own. Olivia had never climbed so far before, and after several minutes her arms began to make mutters of protest. She looked up and could no longer see light, although she knew the sun must be up. She looked down, aiming her light past Kodjunn’s body, and could just make out a flat place at the bottom, made rocky with debris and fallen chunks of stone. “That looks like the ground,” she said.

  He was twenty feet further down than she, and could jump. He landed hard, but picked himself up and peered around. “There are tunnels here,” he announced.

  She climbed as far down as his freshly-bored clawholds went, then dropped into his arms.

  He did not immediately release her, and for a moment, it seemed as though he might speak. At length, somewhat unwillingly, he put her down. “Shall we see if we can find the commons?”

  They walked down passages and through caverns made dusty with disuse. Finally, they found a junction with a private passage leading to old gullan lairs. They were virtually the same as the ones Olivia was accustomed to, attainable only through a narrow, vertical chute and opening on fairly small, sparsely furnished chambers.

  “How long do you think it’s been empty?” Olivia asked.

  He knelt by the pit and picked at the shreds of time-stiffened hide that padded it. The old leathers flaked apart in his hands like pie crust. “Long enough. But they left, they didn’t die out. They took plenty of things with them.”

  “Why would they leave?”

  He shook his head. “They might have been threatened by humans, or by famine or disease. The game might have left them. The water gone bad. It might have been a thousand things, Olivia. If we can find the sigru, perhaps we will find the story.”

  They climbed out of the deserted lair and continued their search. Olivia’s watch registered twenty minutes before they found the commons, not adjoined to a nice, wide mainway, but at the center of a series of winding passages like the spokes of a melted wheel.

  “We are deep, deep in this mountain,” Kodjunn said admiringly. “And look at this, Olivia.” He indicated what appeared to be furrows crawling along the walls and parts of the high ceiling. “This cavern was not always here.”

  “They left wood in the fuel bin,” Olivia observed, aiming her flashlight at a deep trench that ran the length of the back wall. “Wow, there’s even candles in the lamps!”

  “We should start lighting them then, and send Wurlgunn and Vorgullum back to the others.” Kodjunn walked with her for a few steps, then took her arm and stopped.

  She watched him, shining her light at the ground between them.

  He seemed to be searching for the right words to say. At length, lacking them, he shook his head in frustration and started walking again.

  So she said it for him.

  “You still desire me.”

  He stopped again, but wouldn’t face her.

  “You know why that’s impossible.”

  “You have no idea,” he breathed. “You can’t know what it’s like to be near someone, to want someone so desperately that you can’t even hear your own name when it’s called. I dream of you…in ways that I should only dream of the spirits I serve. I breathe you, Olivia. I can still put out my hand and feel just how your body filled it.”

  “You have a mate, and so do I.”

  “All those weeks I waited for Cheyenne,” he mused. “Never knowing if she was ever going to let me touch her. All that time, I thought of you, dreamed of you, ached for you. When she let me lie with her, I thought it might be the same. It wasn’t.” Now he faced her. “Will you meet with me in secret?”

  Just like that, Olivia thought. Just as though he were asking her to tea. She honestly did not know how to answer.

  The silence dragged on, and he dropped his gaze and shrugged. “You have a mate I could never compete with, and would not, even if I could. I have Cheyenne.�
�� He winced. “But I will learn to be content with this.” He started to move away from her and she followed, shining the light on his heels.

  “Why?” she asked finally. “Why me? Amy is smarter. Ellen is prettier. Hell, lots of them are prettier, so why me?”

  “Why?” He kept walking and did not look at her. “Because even in the worst of your pain, you took me in your arms and filled my empty heart. It was the first time I ever felt as though, in loving a woman, I was loved.”

  Now she felt guilty.

  Sensing it, he added, “I never meant to have these feelings. I tried to deny them, but they are always with me. Sometimes, when I look at you, I see you through other eyes, in another place. I see sand all around us, and at your back is the water—more water than I have ever seen in my life. There are waves, much larger than the waves in a lake. And you are kneeling there beside me, so beautiful. You bend over me and you are smiling.”

  He reached the wall and reached back for her. She twined herself around him and he began to climb to daylight. “Strange,” he murmured. “But when I have this vision, I am more patient. Almost as if I think that I will actually have that time with you someday.”

  “Anything is possible,” Olivia conceded. “But don’t expect it in the very near future.”

  “No,” he agreed, working his way steadily upward. “Too much has happened unexpectedly already.” He climbed in silence for several seconds, and then added, “Still, there is a mystery that surrounds you, Olivia. And I have been a part of that mystery. I will be a part of it again. I am certain of it.”

  The trouble was, so was she.

  BOOK II

  THE GREAT SPIRIT

  CHAPTER ONE

  DARK MOUNTAIN

  1

  All morning, gullan came in from the cold to the slightly less-cold hub which would be the new commons. The strong fliers were kept busy ferrying their flightless kin and other supplies as the day dragged on, while the rest of them slept. Olivia and Kodjunn together collected ancient candles wherever they found them in the abandoned lairs and began to light the tunnels from the entry shaft to the commons, from the commons to the waterway, and anywhere else that Olivia thought might be useful. At her direction, some of the other women—gullan and human together—began to clean up a little, lighting the many hearths in the commons, preparing hot broth for their exhausted people, and arranging what furs they had into sleeping spaces. By nightfall, it had begun to feel at least a little like home. She knew it was nightfall only because Doru came in with the last of them, saying, “You should see it out there, Vorgullum. There’s not a spark to be seen but the stars in the sky.”