by R. Lee Smith
The feast was well underway already. Even before she could see the pale light spilling from the commons, she could hear gullan growls and manly laughter as hunters relived their prowess on this first hunt or, in the case of Wurlgunn, their equally entertaining failures. Someone called her name cheerfully enough when she entered—it might have been Bodual, but she never knew for sure because Vorgullum turned then, his greeting killed in an instant as he saw who stood beside her.
He leapt up, flinging the spit he had been preparing violently aside. It struck a wall and clattered to the floor, but no one looked at it.
The silence spread. Vorgullum stood, all his body taut and furious, his hands hooked into lethal claws and the hairs of his neck and shoulders spiking stiffly outward, quivering at each hard breath. At Olivia’s side, Logarr raised one hand in salute and turned away.
Olivia caught his arm.
Vorgullum sprang forward, just a blur of blackness and snarls. He grabbed her by the neck of her goat-skin and a few stray hairs, and threw her behind him as he had thrown the spit, except that he didn’t let her go. Her legs whooped out from under her with the momentum of his swing; she clutched at his arm, but it was iron under her frantic grip. She could feel a hot tickle creeping down her back as she flailed for balance at the end of his fist. He’d cut her. She was actually bleeding.
“I came only at invitation,” Logarr said quietly. “I will go.”
Vorgullum snarled again, a bestial sound like nothing she had ever heard out him, not even when she’d been in season. He did not move, did not open his hand or straighten from his feral crouch until Logarr was long gone. When he did release her at last, it was to shove her in front of him and fix her with his blazing eyes. “You will not speak to him again,” he said, very softly.
To say that she was stunned by this reaction could not begin to describe her feelings as she stared up at this furious stranger wearing Vorgullum’s face. “If you say so,” she said, choosing her words calmly and carefully, “then of course I will obey you. But you have not said so until now—”
He frowned and eased back a step.
“—and so you have no right to be angry with me,” she finished and wiped hard at her neck to show him her blood on her fingers.
He backed up again. This time, she advanced.
“And in the future, if you want me to move, you ask me. If you throw me like that again, by the Great Spirit, I’m coming up swinging!”
“Damn straight,” Tobi said from in the crowd, and Doru hushed her.
Vorgullum’s eyes flicked away and came back very faintly chagrined. He brushed his thumb across her throat—his only apology—and said, “I am not angry with you, my mate. I trust you to go where you will in this mountain and to keep whatever company you desire among my tribesmen, but that one is not tribe and you will not speak to him again.”
Because he refused to talk about his Journey. Burgelbun and two other hunters had given their kills to Mojo Woman, would have perhaps supported her inevitable plan to seize control of the tribe or whatever she (or the water-demon controlling her) had planned, but they were still tribe. Even Cheyenne, who he dismissed as a beast if he spoke of her at all, was tribe enough for Olivia to visit and speak with alone. But not Logarr.
“I’ll do as you say,” Olivia said again, “but I think what you’re doing is wrong.”
Someone, a gulla by the fur-thick sound of it, gave his forehead a smack. A few people muttered. Most only watched.
But Vorgullum smiled, crookedly but sincerely. “It’s your nature to show kindness and I would not change that,” he said, leading her to the hearth with his arm around her shoulders. “Sit at my side and share my kill. The Great Spirit has given us a good home. Come honor it with your true tribe.”
2
It took two months for the tribe to completely relocate, and in the meantime, Olivia was continually confronted with how many of the primitive amenities she’d taken for granted back in Hollow Mountain were in fact luxuries. There were no hot springs warming this mountain from within, and no open room with heaps of spare clothing, or even tanned hides ready to make new clothing from. There was no useable bedding in the pits, no cooking pots or spits that weren’t rusted through, no soap for the washroom, no oil to fill their lanterns and no flashlights at all.
Save for a handful of hunters, all strong fliers were kept busy transporting goods back and forth from their previous home to this one. While they were away, the women kept busy cleaning out the unused lairs and trying to find a place to put everything. Vorgullum and his hunters went out every night, working grimly to keep the tribe fed and covered when they had no idea where the game trails were, or what they might find on them. Each time the party Olivia had come to think of as the Movers returned, they brought harrowing tales of human encampments in the foothills of Hollow Mountain, coming closer and closer to the mouth of the gullan caverns. Finally, they found tracks on the mountain itself, and Vorgullum gave the order that there would be no more flights. For good or ill, they were moved.
And it wasn’t such a bad place, really. Cold and unfamiliar as they were, the new caverns were certainly easier to travel through. Tunnels sloped gradually instead of dropping off into unexpected chasms; apart from the short chimneys leading into private lairs, there was no need for the humans to climb anywhere. There were mirrored vents for light—the reflecting plates were beyond restoration, but Sudjummar assured her he had plenty of metals in the forge to make new ones—and a second entry shaft in what could be made into the women’s tunnels so that the caves could breathe properly.
“And I found the sigru,” Sudjummar announced at the end of his report. “Kodjunn is already there, of course, but if you would like to see them, he said he would allow it.”
She did, and so she took his arm and a fresh flashlight and let him lead her away.
It was a long walk, and not just because Olivia had to stop every ten minutes to take the weight off her swollen ankles. The archives were in the very deepest part of the mountain, to keep them away from idle eyes. The dreams of the sigruum were sacred, Sudjummar reminded her at her first and last complaint, and not for the whims of the curious.
The sigru had been sealed off with a stiff, tattered piece of animal hide. Red markings were visible in some places on the outer wall, but indecipherable, even to Sudjummar.
Inside, a wonder. It had begun as a very small natural cave, little more than an indentation in the wall. Gullan workers had lengthened it, and after unknown time and effort, they had carved out a narrow passage with very smooth, rounded sides that arced beautifully inward on itself. Lanterns hung from the ceiling at regular intervals, and Kodjunn stood below the first of them, peering closely at the images before him. It took Sudjummar’s hand on his shoulder to rouse him.
Olivia took her first look at the paintings of the gullan histories. They were done in simple pigments, mostly reds and blacks, brushed on in the primitive but graceful lines she had come to associate with gullan art. “It’s beautiful,” she said, since she knew the other two were watching her closely. “But you’ll have to explain it to me.”
“The first dream is always the story of creation,” Kodjunn said, and reached past her to indicate dark shapes in precise whorls and lines. “Here, the essence of Night is sleeping while Time flows over and through her, and here it conceives the Great Spirit. Here, the birth of Urga, and the first gullan. Here is Bahgree.” He walked her through the tunnel, which arced on and on in an ever-tightening spiral, taking her past several painted scenes as he rattled on in his distracted way of the legends of various great gullan leaders and their great adventures, great mates, and great disasters somehow averted by their prowess on the hunt or in the pit. Finally, Sudjummar reached out and gave his left horn a shake, saying, “I want to see what happened here at some point tonight, great sigruum. Do you think you could manage?”
With obvious reluctance, Kodjunn turned away from the paintings and the role of storyteller,
and helped Olivia deeper into the spiraling cave.
Olivia ran her eyes along the walls as she walked. She couldn’t translate much was what she was seeing, but she could guess at partial meanings. Here were pictures of different game animals (including, she saw with amusement, a herd of woolly mammoths) and methods of hunting them. As the spiral tightened, they came to a map of the mountain, one that showed where the water collected and how it flowed through the different caves, where the waste water deposited, and where any openings were. She wanted to stop, but Sudjummar coaxed her onward, saying, “After the mountain is marked, the stories of the tribe are told. Here, Olivia!”
And there, apparently. He and Kodjunn leaned in close to the wall, examining the paintings in silence.
Olivia wandered up ahead, shining her flashlight down the walls until there were no more images, only lengths of blank, smooth rock which terminated after thirty or fifty feet into a rounded point. “Do you see anything interesting?” she called absently.
“A bad fire here,” Kodjunn replied. “They lost the game and all the plants and had to get creative about what they were eating. This could be good to know.”
“And there are humans around here somewhere,” Sudjummar added. “Because one of their leaders made a point of forbidding his hunters to take their cattle or, oh this is interesting, or their women.” He lit the next lantern and walked on, giving the walls cursory glances as he went, and stopped just before the paints did. “Sigruum!” he called. “Here we have it!”
Kodjunn and Olivia joined him and studied the walls. Kodjunn’s brows rose slightly as he read what was shown.
“So,” Sudjummar said finally. “At least it wasn’t disease.”
“What happened?” Olivia asked, looking in frustration from one to the other of them. All she saw were shapes, worn by time to mere abstractions.
“It seems,” Sudjummar explained when Kodjunn remained quiet, “that one of the hunters chose to defy the old law about not killing human cattle.”
“Oh?”
“Or taking human women.”
Olivia blinked. “Oh.”
“When he was discovered, he challenged his tovorak for leadership of the tribe and won. Soon, there were many humans mates among them. And many young born to them.” He glanced at her, troubled. “And they were well…at first.”
A faint chill touched her. She told herself it was the air. “But?”
“Some…illness took them,” Kodjunn said. On the section of wall before him, a wingless woman raised her hands—and the death-grey lump between them—to the featureless sky. Her mouth yawned open much wider than any human mouth could, reminding her unpleasantly of Mojo Woman, there at the end. The flickering lamplight made her seem to sway and jabber, but the grey thing in her hands remained motionless. Kodjunn started to touch the wall, covering the flaking image, then lowered his arm again. “The children died.”
“All of them?” That chill grew stronger, creeping along her spine like claws, but she managed to suppress the shiver they wanted to tickle out of her. “But what could—Were they poisoned?”
“Who would poison a child?” Kodjunn asked, recoiling.
“Someone who did not want to see humans bearing them, I suppose,” Sudjummar answered, but he was frowning. “In any event, the tribe decided it was a curse and that their new leader had brought it upon them. They cut his wings and threw him from the highest peak, but the children kept dying. They…You really don’t need to hear this, Olivia,” he finished, and caught a firm hold on her arm.
She dug in her heels and peered at the wall. “Is that a pit full of bodies?”
He and Kodjunn exchanged glances. “Yes.”
“Human bodies?”
Sudjummar bent his head, then looked at her. “Desperate people do terrible things.”
“What happened to the rest of the tribe?” she asked.
“Would you live in the place where so many angry spirits walked?”
“You lived over the depths back in Hollow Mountain,” she pointed out.
“That doom came about because of our compassion,” Sudjummar countered. “This one, from their cruelty. In any event, they left. And the Great Spirit would not lead us to a haunted place to build a new home. Even if there are spirits—” His gaze dropped to rest upon her rounded belly. “—surely they will be freed when they see the good that has come of our joining.”
Olivia’s eyes had a way of straying back to that painted pit, filled with human figures drawn in death-grey hues. “Surely.”
“Come out of here, Olivia.” Sudjummar took her arm again, and this time, she let him. “The sigruum will have much work to do restoring the archives before your story can be told.”
“Mine?” She looked back at Kodjunn, startled, but he was lost in the wall once more.
“You are a part of our history now,” Sudjummar told her, leading her back out of the spiraling sigru. “And when your Somurg is born and all who gather here see him strong and whole, you will be a greater part still.”
“I’m not certain I want to be great.”
He shrugged. “That’s why they call it notoriety—”
“And not popularity,” they finished together.
He let go of her arm and put it around her shoulder instead, laughing.
She let him do that, too.
3
That night, as Olivia heaved herself up the chimney into her new lair, she found herself thinking over the idea of herself immortalized in gullan legend. The idea was a little discomfiting, but not as disturbing as she supposed it should be if she were truly a modest woman. She wondered how she would be drawn, and in what color. As near as she could tell from the archives, black was used to indicate ordinary people and things; red was for importance, such as leaders and spirits; while death came in shades of grey.
“Perhaps a nice yellow,” she said to herself.
“What was that?” Vorgullum looked up from the fire.
“Kodjunn and Sudjummar took me to the archives.”
His brows rose. “They did?”
A curious reaction. She hesitated in the act of loosening her robe’s ties. “Wasn’t that all right?”
He had to think about it. “I have no objection,” he said at last, slowly. “You are my Olivia and you may go where you will in my mountain. But I’ve never heard of a woman in the sigru.”
“Oh.” Uncomfortable now, she fussed with her robe.
“What happened here, did you see?”
She told him briefly and without speculating on exactly what had happened to the human-born children. He absorbed it all and at last nodded.
“Of course, we have no way of knowing what happened to them after that,” she finished.
“They flew south,” he replied without hesitation. “And joined with those in Frozen Mountain, from which tribe our own divided in the long ago days. And so we have earned the doom that came upon us.” He sat and brooded over the fire, then surprised her with a short laugh. “That is oddly comforting.”
“What makes you think—”
He shrugged, first with his wings, then with his shoulders. “I heard the other half of that tale from the old leader, as no doubt he heard it from the leader before him. I’m a little surprised Kodjunn said nothing, but knowing him as I do, I suspect he was only half in his own head, if it was the first time he had seen the sigruu. He’ll dream it tonight, most likely.” He glanced around at her and his head tipped. “You look tired.”
“Not tired, only pregnant,” she assured him, and peeled off her robe, noting as she did so that in another month or so, she would have to find one in a larger size. And not just around the middle, where Somurg slept, but around her swelling breasts as well. Belly, breasts, ankles…God! Everything was growing but her bladder. Heaving a long-suffering sigh, she lowered herself into the pit and just lay there for a while. Baby Somurg flipped himself over inside her and began to gear himself up for a long night of keeping Mom awake.
“
See how healthy he is,” Vorgullum remarked, smiling with pride. He came into the pit and placed a hand over her belly, testing Somurg’s punches. “He is so…alive! How much longer before I can hold him?”
“Soon enough,” she replied, watching him with a smile. “Just think, by this time next year, there will seven babies crying up the caves.”
“What a pleasant thought,” he said, and spooned up against her, leaving his hand where it could be punched at. “Our Somurg will scream the loudest.”
“Of all the things to pick to be proud of,” she groaned, and he nipped at her shoulder.
“Amy will birth just behind you,” he continued. “Sarabee after her. Liz, Anita, and Ellen after that. Cheyenne last of all. That leaves Wurlgunn’s Beth, Doru’s Tobi, Gullnar’s Tina and who else?”
“Carla,” Olivia offered. “And Karen and Sarah J.”
“Mmm. Seven babies, even without them. Seven in a single year. Never in all my memory has there been so much new life among us.” He nuzzled her neck, but it seemed a mechanical gesture. When she rolled towards him she saw him staring meditatively towards the hearth. “Seven,” he mused.
“And you could be happy with only six if you had to.”
He jerked his hand off her as if she’d caught fire, but his expression was not one of shock, but of shame.
She sat up, nodding. “Tell me you didn’t drag Cheyenne all the way here just to decide to fling her off a new aerie.”
His chin lifted. That old, familiar glint came coldly into his eye. “I don’t trust her.”
“That’s not a good enough reason to kill someone.”
“I envy you at times, that you have such luxury to think so.”
“Vorgullum, please…” God, she could not believe she was saying this. “Think of healthy young.”
He nodded, gingerly eased his arm around her again. “For the child, I can wait. But you must have some chat with that beast. Tell her there is a number on the moon-spans of life she has remaining if she does not earn my trust, and that number is seven.” Then he set his jaw and said nothing more.