by R. Lee Smith
“There must be.”
“He wanted Tina to stay in his lair when he hunted and she insisted on going out and letting herself be seen by other males. He wanted her to dress his kills when he brought them to her and she sent them off to be butchered by other women. He wanted her to take food from his hands when the feasts were held and she went off to be a healer and got her own share. He wanted her to praise him in the pit…I think we both know how vain a hope that was.”
“You know that no one told us any of these rules,” Olivia said. She meant for it to be an explanatory tone, maybe even one of apology, but it came out frustrated and a little resentful. “This is the first I’ve even heard of them.”
“Vorgullum didn’t want to chain you up with expectations. He knew you would be having a difficult enough time.” Kodjunn glanced at her, smiling. “And then there was you. And Vorgullum thought if everyone followed his example, all the humans might turn out like you.”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“Anyway, instead of being proud of a clever, strong-willed mate who can heal her tribemates and bring new life safely into the world, Gullnar has been very loud about how her behavior embarrasses him. Hearing that puts out a lot of the light of sympathy, especially when the others have no one at all to share their pit. Gullnar found himself frustrated by a lack of sympathy and a mate he considered unfeminine and wild. And then…” Kodjunn glanced at Olivia and away again. “Shortly after we arrived here, Gullnar found his mate in the commons dressing some of Wurlgunn’s latest hunting wounds with several other males close by. He ordered her back to his lair. She refused to go. He lost his temper and he hit her.”
“I never heard about this!” Olivia said, shocked by that fact much more than the story itself. After all, she’d been living in the women’s tunnels quite a bit, home of Crugunn, of whom it had often been said that she must have four ears and two tongues to keep up with all the gossiping she did.
Kodjunn shrugged his wings, the casual gesture belied by the pinched look of disgust that drifted across his face. “It’s not forbidden for a man to hit his mate. Even if she is a human half his size, apparently. Tobi wasn’t there, thank the spirits, or things would have been much worse, but in any case, Gullnar earned himself no pity by striking down a healer as she went about her work. But I do feel for Doru. He’s been trying so hard to make a friend of his Tobi.”
He tipped his head to one side, staring at the wall as if seeing Doru, or perhaps Gullnar, standing before him. “It’s good news for the humans, at least. One should always be free to choose a mate from love. These are terrible times, Olivia, but there should be some happiness.” He shook his horns out and forced a smile, lighting more candles. “And now to bite the bee with the honey,” he said. “Tell me of Cheyenne.”
“There is no change in her condition. I just thought you might want to know that she’s carrying two babies.”
“In what?” he inquired, fixing a candle onto a jut of stone.
“In her belly,” she said, beginning to laugh.
He looked just as surprised as Bodual had. “Is she? Are you sure?”
“Hey, do I come down here and ask if you’re sure about what these little smudges look like?”
He started to smile, paused, and said cautiously, “Do you think she’ll allow me to keep one of them?”
Olivia’s smile wavered. He saw it, and his excitement melted back into resignation. He shrugged his wings.
“So be it. My hopes were not high. Is she happy?”
“She seemed pretty pleased with herself when I left.” Unsettlingly, she heard an echo of Bodual’s words: Think of the sorts of things it must take to make that beast happy. When she looked up, Kodjunn was studying her face as if he could read her mind. “But,” she said slowly, “Vorgullum is right to have someone watching her.”
“Yes. It isn’t like her to be pleased, is it? I’m glad you came, Olivia,” Kodjunn said, changing the subject. “I’ve been working on your story, and I wanted you to see it.” He put out his hand.
Another ghost-voice, Cheyenne’s this time, but Olivia crushed it before she could listen to what it said. She took Kodjunn’s hand and let him lead her deeper into the archives.
He had put in a lot of work already, painstakingly restoring the old images with fresh paint, and she paused several times to look at scenes she had missed during her initial tour of the sigru. If he was impatient with these constant interruptions, he gave no sign. On the contrary, he seemed quite proud each time she pulled at his hand and peered closer at the wall.
“This is new,” Olivia remarked, standing in front of the three broad black lines that separated one tribe’s history from the other. Kodjunn had put in a brief introduction to Hollow Mountain’s tribe, then introduced Vorgullum, who was depicted as a red gulla much taller than the rest of his tribe. His image alone poured a white liquid over a small building, while a small group of gullan clustered around it, waiting.
“Behold,” Kodjunn said dramatically, ushering Olivia down to the next sequence of images. “Here is your history!”
And there it was, all right. In the group of abductees, Olivia stood out. She was drawn much taller, for one thing, and her hair was streaked with vibrant red. Also, while the others were cringing and weeping, she was drawn standing erect and proud. Hers was the only image looking directly at the gullan.
In the next panel, Olivia and Vorgullum walked side by side to the overpass while the other unremarkable gullan carried their unremarkable women, all of whom had their faces turned away. Olivia put her arms around her captor, and they flew away, staring into each other’s eyes.
“That’s nice,” Olivia said, smiling. “But it’s not the way it happened.”
“Close enough,” Kodjunn said, shrugging his wings.
Still smiling, Olivia moved to the next wall to continue the story. And clapped a hand over her gasping mouth.
“What’s wrong?”
“That,” Olivia stammered. “That’s a little…graphic.”
Kodjunn studied the images, bewildered. On the wall, the captured Olivia and the gullan leader were having enthusiastic sex. A tiny yellow light was being kindled between them.
“Olivia,” he said, exasperated. “That’s where babies come from!”
“I know that, but you could still be a bit more discreet!”
“This is important,” he insisted.
Unconvinced, she moved on. Here was Olivia gathering in the other humans and trying to teach them gullan ways. Here was Olivia pouring liquid into bottles while surrounded by images of herbs. And here…
“For pity’s sake, Kodjunn, you did it again!” she exclaimed.
“Somurg of Three Fathers,” he reminded her. “It has to be shown.”
Another image of Olivia and a dark gulla, within whom was the red, wingless figure of the Great Spirit, lying together while the spark of life inside her grew and turned red. A trick of the flickering candlelight made the two figures seem to shudder and writhe.
“Besides,” Kodjunn said uncomfortably. “No one reading this will know who that was meant to be. They’ll assume it was the tovorak.”
Now here was the Great Spirit speaking through a gulla and showing favor in the form of gold light on Olivia’s body. Here was Olivia pulling a grey-painted demon out through a kneeling human’s mouth. And here was the dream that warned Olivia of danger. The tribe moved, and there were three thin lines reminding the reader to check the first tribe’s history before continuing with the birth of Somurg. The last image stopped, simply stopped, hanging in the center of the wall like an unfinished sentence.
“Is there more?” she asked, brushing one hand against the rock.
“Not yet, but there will be. I’ve dreamed some of it already.”
“Dreamed?” She tried to laugh, which was difficult to do when he simply looked at her. “It’s hard enough to live up to my reputation. I’d hate to have to live up to dreams as well.”
“Th
e dreams of the sigruum are different from the dreams of other men.”
There was no safe way to argue with that, especially with the memory of her last name in his mouth so sharp in her mind. And after Urga’s second visitation, she could have no doubt that the gods he claimed spoke to him were real. And if they were real for her…
“What do you dream?” she asked haltingly.
“I dream of you.”
Cheyenne’s voice dripped like poison in her ear: You make his furry cock hard every night. She tried to shake it off, but it wouldn’t shake far, not with Kodjunn’s calm eyes resting on her with such undisguised heat.
Her silence did not discourage him. He came a small step closer, reaching up to pass his hand once over her hair, never quite touching her. “You burn in me like fire,” he murmured. “You course through me like water. You blow through me like wind.”
How unfair, thought Olivia. She loved him no more than she did Vorgullum; the thought made her want to touch him, just to lay her hand along his arm, but it was all too easy to imagine where a sympathetic touch might lead when he looked at her like that. She kept her hands to herself and said simply, “Nothing can happen, Kodjunn.”
He only shook his head, smiling ruefully at the tips of his talons. “So I have tried to tell myself, but my dreams say differently. I see you in the sand before that great, dark water with the river that runs beside it. I see you bending over me and I hold that image close to my heart. But I think…I think you have been wise to teach your healing ways to Tina as you have done. As I ought to teach what I know of our histories,” he added, looking back at the wall with longing. “Because I think that we are leaving and I think it will be soon.”
“But, my son—” she protested, her voice no more than a whisper.
“Has his own destiny. Who knows? Perhaps you will come back to him.” He glanced aside to run his eyes over the painted rock, still smiling. “Anything is possible, Olivia. Anything at all.”
“Isn’t there any chance that your dreams are just, you know, dreams?” she asked, but without much hope.
His smile widened. “No. Ha. Not much. Fate is like a storm. You can let it bend you, or you can make it break you. One way or the other, the storm always has its way. Now our storm is beginning, Olivia.” He took his hand off the wall and faced her again, fanning out his wings to fill the narrow tunnel. “What will you do?”
CHAPTER TWO
BEGINNINGS
1
She did nothing. Don’t dwell on it, she’d told Liz, and it was good advice whether you were talking about delivering a baby or going on a journey for a god. There were plenty of other things to do in Dark Mountain, not the least of which being all the things that came with having a newborn baby bat, and so she worked on them instead.
And it was while she was working on them—nursing Somurg in the commons while humans and gullan women scraped and softened the latest batch of cured hides—that Thurga tapped Olivia on the shoulder and said, “Amy is asking for you.”
Olivia sprang up, jarring Somurg out of his comfortable sucking sleep and into furious screams while everyone stared at them. “Is she in labor?” she demanded, hurriedly burping him.
Flustered, Thurga backed away. “She didn’t say so. She is only asking for you.”
Olivia gave her the baby and set off at a run down the hall to the lair Amy had been sharing with Crugunn, Rumm, and several other gullan women, since she refused to move into the actual birthing room until, as she put it, there was a damned good reason. Personally, Olivia felt that having to share one pit with five gullan was a good enough reason, but it had been difficult enough just to convince her friend to come to the women’s tunnels, so she didn’t push it.
Rumm jumped up when she charged inside, revealing a perfectly contented-looking Amy quietly sewing herself a shirt. “You got here fast,” she observed.
“How far apart are the contractions?”
Amy rolled her eyes. “I am not having contractions,” she said. “I told that twit there was no trouble here.”
“Then why did you call me?” Olivia asked, now that the pleasantries were out of the way. “Are you experiencing any discomfort?”
“You’ve been nine-plus months pregnant, you know damn well how comfortable I’m not,” Amy retorted. “I just wanted to get my daily check-up out of the way early so I can take a nap. You know how it is: Ask for Olivia and you get a massage, ask for Tina and you get a physical.”
Olivia laughed and gave the gullan women a wave to clear them from the room for a little privacy.
“And I’ve been having contractions,” Amy said when the last of them was well and gone.
Olivia stared at her, then jumped up and raced to the door.
“Oh, don’t have a fit,” Amy said crossly. “I think I’ve had two real pains in the last hour. I’ve got scads of time.”
“Well, then, what—?” Olivia didn’t even bother to finish the question. She just sat there and silently demanded an answer.
“I figure just because I’m having contractions doesn’t necessarily mean I’m in actual labor,” Amy explained. “But I’m not sure, so I thought it would be best to have you around, as opposed to the whole circus.”
“Oh.”
“But I would like my legs rubbed,” Amy said wistfully. “And my back, if you could. My, you look trim. How’d you lose the weight so fast?”
Olivia smiled as she knelt in the pit and started massaging Amy’s legs. “All the running around I do and you have to ask?”
“You could take it easy for a while.”
“Yeah, but I don’t really want to. Once you’ve been safely delivered, I’m going to take Somurg and present him to Murgull.”
“How long will that take, do you think?”
“Just the one night. I told Vorgullum I wanted to make the trip by myself, you know, on foot.”
Amy nodded, rolling onto her side. “He said no?”
“He said quite a few things, actually, but no was the gist of it. The only reason he’s letting me do it at all is because I promised Murgull I would. They’re big on promises here. So he caved, but I only get the one day and he might just decide to stick around when I do it. You know, protect me from afar.”
“Heap Big Husband,” Amy agreed, and looked suddenly depressed. “Have you seen Kurlun?”
“He’s out there in the front of the women’s tunnels, where he’s been pretty much since you got here unless Vorgullum drags him off to hunt. The only thing he needs is a carton of cigarettes to be chain smoking while he paces up and down.” Olivia worked her way down to Amy’s ankles. “He’s probably going to stay there until you deliver.”
“That’s a comfort,” Amy said drowsily. “I miss him more than I ever believed possible. You know, he gave me a baby shower? He gave me a baby basin, sort of, and some blankets and some toys and another electric can opener.”
“Now you have a matched set.”
“Same model, different color. I use them as bookends. Now I just need some books.” Amy rolled onto her back, then pulled a blanket over her sizable bulk. “I can’t wait until this kid arrives so I can jump on my man.”
“So you say now,” Olivia teased.
“I don’t care how much it hurts,” Amy insisted. “I’m needing a lot of loving. I’m going to—” She broke off with a yawn, then mumbled the rest of what she’d been saying, and fell asleep.
Olivia sat with her until Thurga returned nearly three hours later with a meal for Amy in one hand and Somurg against her shoulder. Thurga handed the baby over, looking deeply ashamed of herself. “I did not realize I had been away so long,” she confessed, and shot Amy a worried glance. “She really must eat.”
But Thurga would never wake her, and she’d be mortified if Olivia did. The world of dreams was both real and treacherous; to pull one from sleep too early could lose a person’s soul forever. Olivia gave her friend a solemn nod, surreptitiously tickling her son’s back right between his webb
ed baby-wings. Somurg, predictably, responded with a sleepy howl of protest, which yanked Amy safely out of sleep. A baby’s cry, Olivia had learned, like any other call of warning heard in nature, was exempt from taboo.
“Ah, you waken!” Thurga, relieved, brought Amy her bread and a bladder of goat’s milk.
“Of course I waken! Turn off the siren, why don’t you?”
But Somurg had already decided that having his wing-skin tickled wasn’t quite the violation it had first seemed and was settling down on his own. He grumbled some, socked Olivia in the breast, and went back to sleep, snoring just like his father. Olivia sat down, watching Amy drink her milk through grimaces as she rubbed her stomach. She looked so tired and sore…and lonely.
“Thurga,” Olivia said suddenly. “It’s time to move Amy to the birthing room. Make sure the bench is cleaned and get some fresh towels in there. I’ll sit up with Amy until morning if you can take care of Somurg tonight.”
“You honor me,” Thurga stammered. She looked in disbelief from one to the other of them, then uttered a little bay of joy and ran from the room.
“God, they’re easy to please,” Amy remarked, looking after her.
“Are you still having contractions?”
Amy’s eyebrows rose. “Off and on. Why?”
Olivia stood up, leaning Somurg against her shoulder and running her hand down his soft pelt. “When Somurg comes here, the gullan are going to follow. We’ll be alone in the birthing room when you go into serious labor.” She glanced over her shoulder at the empty doorway, and then offered Amy a small smile. “Whereupon, I intend to sneak Kurlun in to see his baby born.”
Amy’s eyes went wide and then she let out a little squeal and clamped both hands over her mouth.
2
Amy cleared her throat. Olivia looked up from where she was sitting and nursing Somurg, an act that was entertaining not only her sleepy son, but the three gullan women who were supposed to be seeing to Amy’s needs.