by R. Lee Smith
“No humans?” Vorgullum asked, brows climbing.
“None. I don’t know what we’ll do for rua,” Doru added heavily, fingering his spear with a brooding frown.
“Does that mean we can fly by day?” someone asked, and all the tribe looked at Vorgullum.
“I won’t answer until I better know this land,” he said at last. “For now, no.”
There were murmurs, but what little disappointment came with them seemed forced. Olivia supposed she could understand that. There had been enough sudden changes.
“We will sleep here tonight,” Vorgullum said, looking around. “Tomorrow is soon enough to claim our lairs. Is there a place to put the women?” Vorgullum asked next, directing his question to Olivia and not to Horumn, she noticed.
“We found the kitchen,” she answered uncertainly. She’d even lit the way there, thinking that it would make a good dumping ground for all their supplies until they’d managed to sort everything out. “I didn’t explore much further than that. I don’t know if there are any lairs around it—”
“It will do. Horumn, settle your charges and see that the safe females are made available. Have I any hunters able to fly?”
He had a few, all of them with human mates to feed, and Olivia doubted that was coincidence.
“And I want you to rest,” Vorgullum concluded, bumping his brow lightly against Olivia’s.
“I don’t think I can just sit around and do nothing yet. I’ll help the women settle in, okay?”
He frowned, but gave her a reluctant nod. “Don’t wander,” he told her. “I don’t know this mountain.”
“I promise.”
He nodded again with greater confidence, then found a spear and raised it to Doru and the others. “Our last hunt as the tribe of Hollow Mountain,” he called. “When we return, we feast as hunters of…Dark Mountain!”
There were some cheers, but they were lackluster at best. It had been a long journey and while sentiment might run high, they were all tired. If Vorgullum was disappointed in his tribe’s reactions, he did not show it, but only made a gesture to gather his hunters and led them out.
“God, I hope they find something,” Amy remarked, watching them go from the shelter of Kurlun’s arm. “It’ll be a hell of an omen if they don’t.”
“Hush, my mate. Bad luck can find its own way in. We don’t need to invite it.”
“Want to help out?” Olivia asked hopefully, offering Amy a flashlight.
Amy looked at it, then at her. “Honey, you know I would—”
“It’s okay.” Olivia lowered the light self-consciously, trying to smile. “It’s been tough.”
“And Junior here is really doing some gymnastics tonight. Maybe when he, she or it settles down.”
“Murgull?” Olivia found the old gulla sitting by herself, her eyes shut as she rubbed restlessly at her left shoulder. “Do you want to see where the women’s tunnels will be?”
“If I did, I would be there.” Murgull opened her eyes to glare at her, then slid them shut again. “I’ll see them soon enough, won’t I? Little pest. Leave old Murgull be.”
Olivia retreated, a little hurt, then went to Horumn, who certainly seemed to have her hands full trying to organize the many women, including weeping Bolga and half a dozen others much like her. “Can I help?” she ventured.
Horumn’s face screwed up, but she didn’t spit. Instead, she seized Victoria from the throng surrounding her and thrust her into Olivia’s arms. “Take this. No one walks alone, you maggots! Find a friend! If you have no friends, find an enemy! Take all you can carry! Go! Yawa, help me!”
Victoria blinked at her slowly, without recognition. Her eyes were glazed; her skin, death-cool and ghastly to touch. Olivia had to resist the urge to wipe her hand after letting go of her. Instead, she found a pack of supplies light enough for her to carry and headed out.
They were the first, and they were not immediately followed. Olivia walked and Victoria plodded complacently beside her, arms dangling, staring. It was awful.
“Where are we?” Victoria asked, after several minutes had passed in uncomfortable silence. Even her voice was dull and dim.
“We’re in the new mountain,” Olivia told her, stomach knotting.
They walked.
“What…What happened to the old one?”
“We had to leave.” Olivia looked at her despairingly. “We’ve been flying for days, don’t you remember?”
“I thought I was dreaming. I…dream. Sometimes.”
“Didn’t you even notice the cold?”
“It’s always cold inside me,” Victoria said, and it was the last thing she said during the rest of that walk.
When they reached the honeycombed caverns at the end of the tunnel, Victoria found a bench and sat, staring slackly into the palms of her hands while Olivia cleared rusted pots from the cooking hearth. She’d just gotten the first fire lit when Horumn arrived with Bolga firmly in her grip. “So,” the old gulla said, giving the cavern a dour looking-over. “Smaller than the last one.”
“This is just one of the cooking chambers,” Olivia pointed out. “There are three others adjoining it.”
“Bah. Leave that! You and all your hairless kind are useless with fires. If you want to help, stay out of my way. Yawa! Find a place for the safe ones to do their rutting! It’s a new home, new mountain, new world; there’s not a man out there who won’t want his prick gripped tonight. Crugunn, stop your chattering and get to work! Thurga, you and Rumm go back for the supplies and bring it all here. If we gave them a chance, those stag-heads would take it all and leave us with nothing.”
“Yes, Eldest.”
“Yes, Eldest. Furluu, Golgun, this way. If you have that one, I have Chugg,” Yawa said, and took a flashlight to explore the nearest side-passages.
Olivia followed her with Victoria, trying not to stare too overtly. Even after all this time, Olivia hadn’t had the opportunity to really speak with Yawa. She rarely left the women’s tunnels, so their paths seldom had the chance to cross, but Olivia had often wanted to meet. Yawa had something of a notorious reputation, one that was perhaps even more formidable than Olivia’s own.
“It’s nice to finally meet you,” she ventured as Yawa shone her flashlight through first this doorway and then that.
“Is it?” the gulla said indifferently.
Furluu and Golgun, the two ‘safe ones’ who could take care of themselves, exchanged glances first and then giggles, although they quieted when Yawa glanced back at them.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“I’m sure you have,” said Yawa in a cold voice.
Olivia didn’t try again. She could remember well enough Bundel telling her they said Yawa was all ice and claws, but she was good, and maybe it was true, but she sure wasn’t going out of her way to prove it.
They looked at two more caverns and suddenly Yawa stopped and swung around. “All right,” she said tightly. “What have you heard?”
Caught out, Olivia could only stammer at her.
“I thought so.” Yawa started walking again, her jaw clenched with anger. “Who was talking about me?”
“Bundel.”
Yawa stopped walking, so suddenly that Furluu bumped into her. After a moment, she started again, now sending Olivia troubled, sidelong glances which continued off and on while they investigated several more caverns. “This should do,” she said at last.
“It’s a kitchen!” Golgun protested.
“That’s right, it’s a kitchen,” Yawa shot back testily. “You have running water to clean up in, a hearth of your own in a communal space, and six adjoining chambers—one for each of you and two to spare. In fact, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time convincing Horumn to let you keep it, so why not stop complaining and start settling in?”
Chagrined, Golgun and Furluu took possession of the other two women and Yawa turned away.
“Wait, shouldn’t we help?”
Yawa wasn’t
waiting for her, but just kept walking. “It’s their place now, let them do it.”
It was either follow or stay and stare down Victoria while the other safe ones unpacked whatever supplies they needed to make the Red Light district of their new mountain more comfortable.
Olivia followed, running a little to catch up.
The walk was long, dark, and silent.
“Bundel told you about me.”
“He said you were a good person.”
Yawa grunted. After a while, she glanced at her and said, “What else have you heard?”
“People don’t seem to like you much,” Olivia said. “But no one talks about why not, if that’s what you mean.”
“Hm.” Yawa walked on for a few more minutes in silence, and then abruptly said, “I had the red fever when I was in my first days. It makes a she-child barren, if she survives it.” She uttered a little grunting laugh. “The old leader actually told my mother to put me with the other female children so that they would catch it as well.”
“Jesus!” Olivia gasped. “And what if it killed them?”
“Dead or barren, still they make no new young.” Yawa turned to spit. “My mother cut her claws across his face for the asking and hid with me deep in the mountain until the fever was gone. But the damage was in me. I grew, knowing what must happen to me. I was full of rage in those days. I cursed the Great Spirit for making me this…this receptacle for the heat of an entire tribe. I could feel them watching me every day that brought me closer to my first season and to the right to mate with me. When it came on me, I asked old Murgull to help me. And she did.”
Yawa laughed a little, as if still surprised after all these years. “I was frightened of her my whole life. That terrible face! That terrible tongue! But I had no female family living by then…and I did not know who else to ask. I thought that she might kill me in a kind way, but instead she saw to it that the ritual of the Journey was performed before witnesses and got me out of the mountain unseen. Females don’t go on Journeys. It isn’t exactly forbidden, but it is unheard of all the same. If the leader could have stopped me, I know he would have. I was afraid that he would set his hunters after me, so I flew far to the south and lived alone beneath Urga’s moon.
“When I returned to Hollow Mountain, by the laws, I was a hunter, with the right to demand one gift of the old leader. I demanded the right to stay forever out of the Eldest’s care. That is why the males of the mountain do not like me,” she finished, tossing her short horns with a fierce smile. “Because I refused to open myself to every goat-head with a scrap of meat to feed me. The old leader gave me his fist and would have sent me to the Eldest anyway, but old Murgull put her hand on me and so he let me go.”
“That’s all she did? Put her hand on you?”
“She is Murgull,” Yawa said simply. “It was all she had to do. It made me no friends…as I’m sure you know, since you walk with her hand upon you all the time.”
Olivia nodded, thinking of Murgull and the cloud of superstitious fear that always seemed to surround her. Murgull, who healed and harmed. Murgull, who could make even Vorgullum back away and bend his neck. Murgull, who had the blood of hundreds of gullan on her gnarled hands.
“I tried to hunt once,” Yawa was saying. “Since I had survived my Journey and had the right. But the old leader swore to cut my wings and throw me to the care of the Eldest if I ever touched a spear again. He made me promise before the tribe that I would stay in the women’s tunnels and be a proper female.” She showed her fangs in a sneer, then shook her head. “And that is why the females of the mountain do not like me. Because being proper is a punishment for me. Ha. I don’t need to be liked.”
“Well, I’m not very proper either,” Olivia said after a moment. “Maybe we can like each other.”
“Maybe,” Yawa murmured, and then said it again, as if the idea came with a taste she wasn’t sure she liked. As they came into the new women’s commons, she shook herself out of it and gave Olivia a lopsided smile. “It’s strange to see you in person. I thought you’d be taller.”
Olivia snorted and would have answered except that a gullan hand closed on the scruff of her neck at that moment and yanked her roughly around.
“Are you still here?” Horumn demanded, giving her a hard shake. “Unpack something! That, even your clumsy frog hands can manage!”
Olivia hurried to the heap of backpacks and leather satchels growing beside the tunnel’s mouth and started unpacking flashlights, knives, pop bottles filled with assorted medicines and potions, dried strips of meat, batteries, lamp oil, bundled furs and fleeces and all the other essentials the tribe had thought to bring. She didn’t try to put anything away, just organized it into stacks and let the women come for what they needed as soon as they found a place for it.
It shouldn’t have been as much work as it was, except that Thurga and Rumm kept coming with more, and more, until Olivia was compelled to start unloading things in one of the adjoining rooms. And as willing as she’d been to help the overworked women settle into their new home, she was relieved when Gullnar, one of the hunters who had left with Vorgullum, came to interrupt them.
There was no iron door to hold him out of these caverns, and so he came all the way inside and stood, leaning against the wall beside a bloody bundle of deerskin to idly ogle the forbidden females resting here. “The first hunt of our new home has returned,” he said formally, giving a nod to Horumn even as his eyes dipped and crawled over the giggling gullan behind her. “Vorgullum gives these to his tribeswomen, but there are two bucks roasting in the commons for the hunters…” His gaze shifted to Olivia. “And their mates.”
Horumn turned a baleful eye on Olivia, then gave Gullnar a glare. “Heard,” she said. “Now clear this tunnel. Your business is done.”
He lingered another moment (more to show Horumn he would not be ordered around than for any other reason, she thought) and then took himself away. Horumn spat at his retreating feet, then barked back over her shoulder for Crugunn and Rumm, smiling grimly when their exclamations of delight for fresh meat died on seeing a heap of internal organs, bloody bones, and hides that needed fleshing. “Go on, then. Light the fires and fetch a pot, eh? Stewed guts are good enough for the likes of us. And you,” she finished, glaring at Olivia. “Your man will want his mate beside him and all the tribe to see her fed well at this first feast. All the tribe who matter.”
Rumm and Crugunn fussed with the mess until the Eldest had limped away, then gave Olivia twin looks of sympathy.
“It’s not only you,” Rumm whispered. “Horumn never had a mate to take care of her, only men who made her promises and gave her bad babies to raise under the old leader’s furious eye. She would be just as bitter even if you were gullan.”
That was actually reassuring.
“Her anger is foolishness,” Crugunn added. “For all the years of her life, no man has been free to take a mate, save at the leader’s command. And it certainly isn’t as though you had any choice in the matter.”
Rumm gave her a swift smack to the arm with the back of her hand. Crugunn flinched with what sounded like a protest, then flinched again and stared wide-eyed at Olivia.
She smiled, a wan effort perhaps, but the thought of her abduction held very little sting for her these days.
From further in the cavern, Horumn bellowed and the two gullan guiltily took up her burden and carried it away between them. Alone, Olivia headed back through the gently sloping passage towards the hub of tunnels that made the new commons. She wasn’t really very hungry, but the old witch was right: Vorgullum would want her there, being the first to be fed while his tribe looked on. It had been many days of hardship and uncertainty, only to come home to a strange new place. This feast would be a promise of comforts to come, a promise that had surely come from the Great Spirit himself.
Olivia’s flashlight, bouncing unsteadily across the tunnel floor ahead of her, suddenly illuminated a dark pair of gullan feet. The feet stopp
ed walking and stepped aside as Olivia followed the legs up to an impassive face. Recognition was not immediate; she saw it was Logarr only after she saw the cracked clay bowl in his hand.
Olivia illuminated her own face for him to see and heard a short, dry puff of laughter.
“I know who you are,” he said.
She lowered the light. “Are you coming to the feast?” she asked.
He laughed again, shorter and drier. “You don’t know who I am, it seems.”
“You’re Logarr,” she said, and that silenced him. She smiled, just in case he could see it. “The feast is for all hunters, isn’t it?”
“I am not welcome.”
“That can change,” she told him. “It should change.”
He said nothing.
“If humans can be tribe, so can you, surely. It’s a new mountain, a new beginning. Come with me, Logarr.” She held out her hand. “Haven’t you been alone long enough?”
She wished she could see his face. The perfect stillness of his body and the half-glimpsed glitter of his watchful eyes gave her no indication of his thoughts. She had decided she’d embarrassed him and was about to move on when his hand brushed at hers, his fingers tracing lightly across her palm before taking it in his grip. He squeezed once, carefully, then released her. When she started walking again, he followed.