by R. Lee Smith
“Now, goddammit, bring it now!” Tina shouted, and the world snapped back into focus.
Horumn ran to Tina’s side, holding a spool of fishing line and clutching a long bone needle in the other. “It is the best I could find, healer,” she was saying, and that was bad, because it was the first time old Horumn had ever acknowledged that Tina was the healer.
“Hold him down!” Tina reared back, saw Olivia and jerked her head crudely behind her. “Thugg!” she ordered. “Get Thugg!”
Olivia tore her eyes from Wurlgunn and saw, for the first time, the huddled form of another male, leaned against the wall with both hands clamped down over his thigh. Thick blood poured in spurts between Thugg’s fingers; the whole of his left leg seemed soaked with it.
Thugg looked up at her through agony-slit eyes. “What is tourniquet?” he rasped.
“I can’t leave!” Tina barked. “Get his leg!”
Olivia shoved herself out of the doorway and flew across the cave. She couldn’t have made it in one leap, but she didn’t feel her feet strike the ground. She fell beside Thugg, reaching for his belt only to realize that he was completely naked. “What—” It wasn’t important; he was bleeding to death. “Doru!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Give me your belt and come here!”
“Where in the hell are you?” she heard him roar, his voice black with frustration.
“Someone go and get him!” she commanded, slapping her hands down over Thugg’s. His blood battered at her with physical force.
She sensed Doru without seeing him, and shouted to command his attention before he could lunge at Cheyenne. “I need your belt! Get over here!”
At once, he was there, pressing his belt into her hands. “What do I do?” he asked.
Olivia wrapped the belt around Thugg’s thigh, snug against the join of the hip, stood up, planted her foot on his stomach and cinched it as tight as she could. Thugg grunted, but the flow of blood between his fingers slowed visibly. “Hold this,” she said. “As tight as you can.”
Doru obeyed, pressing one hand over the wound for leverage, the muscles of his arm bulging and locking as he drew another two inches of slack out of Olivia’s tourniquet. It stopped bleeding almost at once. “He’ll lose the leg if we keep it this way,” he said calmly.
“He’ll lose his life if we don’t,” she shot back.
“I need…my leg,” Thugg groaned.
“I need bandages!” Olivia called.
“I need them first!” Tina shouted. “And get that fucking knife away from her!”
Although conscious of Cheyenne’s screams, Olivia had not yet so much as looked for her. Now, exchanging a startled glance with Doru at the word knife, she turned around.
Cheyenne had shoved herself upright against the wall, her legs twisted out uselessly before, good only to prop her weight back. Her bare body gleamed with firelight, sweat and blood; her pregnant stomach heaved, casting shadows over the scarred and misshapen sticks of her legs. She was holding onto a hunting knife with white-knuckled force, and Olivia remembered again the terrible strength in those arms.
When Cheyenne saw Olivia’s eyes on her, her face split in a wide grin. She beckoned with the gore-striped blade of the knife. “Come and get it, bitch,” she panted.
“No!” she shouted, not in answer, but to keep Doru from lunging for the pit. She could feel his body tense beside her, but she dared not take her eyes from Cheyenne. “Stay with Thugg.” She stood up.
Doru’s wings struck out, an empty show of power. “Stay away from her!”
She walked carefully towards the pit, both hands held up and palms out.
“Get back, Olivia!” Doru roared. When she continued to approach the pit, he cast about for his spear, started to reach for it with his bloody hand.
She swept the weapon neatly aside with her foot. “Doru, the babies.”
“Fuck the babies!” Tina snarled, throwing her whole body against her struggling, howling patient. “Get that knife away from her!”
Cheyenne didn’t seem even to have heard Tina; her whole body had gone steel-rigid at Olivia’s calm voice. Now she unlocked her jaws and unleashed a blistering shriek of rage. “You stupid fur-fucking cunt! Don’t you dare try to save me!”
Doru’s voice shook the foundations of the mountain: “Leave her alone, Olivia! Someone give me my goddamn spear!”
Cheyenne’s eyes blazed as Olivia gained another step, but with frightening speed the appearance of rage became a ghastly mockery of good humor. “We could have been friends, you know,” she said, giving her that furious, skull-faced grin. “We could have helped each other. We could have escaped. But no. You wanted to be the good slave. You wanted to throw in with the furries. Well, that’s just fine. Did you say you wanted the babies? Here you go, honey. Let me get ‘em for ya.”
Olivia sprang, but the knife was faster, twisting in the air and punching through the swollen bulge of Cheyenne’s belly. Cheyenne threw back her head, screaming with triumph and pain, her hand working like the treadle of a sewing machine, spurts of pale birthing waters washing the gore from her ruined flesh.
Olivia dove, her spirit flying before her from the force of shock alone, and once free of her puppet, saw the fire of Cheyenne’s soul still blazing even as it began to flicker and fail; she could see the twin-lights of unborn life, the spark of their life-force bleeding out through a dozen tiny wounds.
Dying.
4
Olivia put her puppet hands on the hard flesh of Cheyenne’s body, knocking them both to the softened floor of the pit. She could hear a distant and unimportant sound, like the snap of wet wood on the fire; she could feel a dim and insignificant itching in her puppet’s back. She flew further back, away from the range of physical sensation. She ignored the purpling bruise that spread over her own radiant shell below, and braided together great knots of healing power, pouring it directly into Cheyenne’s punctured womb.
She might as well have poured a cup of water onto a raging house fire. The light of life continued to fade. There was a sound of wailing, helpless death, like chimes all around her spirit ears; she could feel the souls of the unborn straining to be free of pain.
Olivia channeled more in desperate panic, digging at the reserves of her power until she could feel herself weakening. The light of bleeding life finally began to slow, but did not stop, and Olivia had given until she was pumping her own life force weakly into the ruined husk of Cheyenne’s womb.
She forced her puppet mouth to work, shaping words she could not hear: “Someone take my shoulders!”
Dim light brushed against her puppet far below. She shaped a net with her dying energies and slapped a great bolt of life free of her unseen partner. At once, color and sound exploded through her spirit senses. She threw out a patch of power, strengthening the unborn life, and shouted again, “Someone else! Quickly!”
Two flames came to her. She tapped them both, knocking them away, and finally stilled the slow bleed from the trembling light of the twins.
Olivia dropped like a stone, crashed into her puppet, and opened her eyes. Someone sprawled unconscious beside her; two gullan were staggering back from the pit. Cheyenne writhed slowly, her teeth bared and eyes staring, but all that Olivia could seem to see was the bloody chasm of her stomach. “She’s dying!” she cried. “They’ve got to come out!”
Tina’s voice was hoarse and brutal. “I! Can’t! Leave!”
Olivia squeezed her eyes shut and saw, not Cheyenne or the knife or even Wurlgunn with his throat gushing, but the anguished, baffled eyes of a dying goat. She opened them again, her heart no more than a scorched stone in her chest, and shouted, “I need a knife!”
She sensed more than saw the broad, black shape of Doru’s body as he leapt to the pit beside her. He seized Cheyenne’s limply flailing wrist, snapped it (Olivia would have given anything not to have heard Cheyenne’s scream when he did so, to have known that she was still alive and aware enough to feel), and pried the hunter’s knif
e from her twitching fingers. “Will this do?” he asked.
“It…It should be clean—” she began.
“What the fuck for?” Tina snarled, her voice cracking. “Just get the babies out! Yawa, get over here, goddammit, I’m losing him!”
Olivia unlocked one hand and took the knife as if it were something that could twist and bite on its own. Doru slapped Cheyenne’s tossing arm away, planted his knee on her chest, and pressed her flat in the pit. “Where do you want my hands?” he asked.
She could only look at him.
“Don’t try to cut,” Tina called. “Skin rips. Score the surface and have Doru pry her open. Be careful. Bring me the iron! You! The iron!”
Olivia put the tip of her knife into one of the wounds that now gaped, sluggishly leaking bloody fluids. She drew the knife down a few inches, but there was no sense of resistance; the skin just seemed to fall open, exposing a pool of blood hemmed in by layers of yellow fat.
Cheyenne’s knee pressed up against Olivia’s hip, then shoved slowly forward. She uttered a low, belching groan and Olivia froze, staring at her over Doru’s huge thigh. She could feel her hands wanting to shake.
“Olivia.”
She looked at him, her mouth working.
“Open her, Olivia,” Doru said quietly. “I’ll do it if I have to, but I don’t know how.”
Olivia wrenched her eyes back to the hard-swollen stretch of torn skin that separated her from the weak life beneath. It heaved with Cheyenne’s fading breath. She stared until it lost its meaning, until it became an inanimate obstructive layer, like a leather blanket, something she could cut and part without fear. She drew in a deep breath, steadied her hand, and unzipped Cheyenne’s flesh in one smooth movement.
Doru’s hands flexed, opening the wound like an eye that wept bloody water. Olivia stabbed the knife into the bedding and reached inside, her fear-cold hands burning in the grateful heat of Cheyenne’s body. She found the sac of the uterus, probed until she found the ragged cuts of the knife, and slipped her hand inside, tearing the opening to admit her. She felt hot mats of fur and faint movement. She cupped a head, let her hand drift down over fragile bands of tiny wings, and drew the baby out in a wash of amniotic fluid.
“Take him,” she said, and someone snatched the baby from her and out of her sight. Olivia reached again, aiming for just a glimpse of dark fur in the bloody soup of Cheyenne’s womb. She found the baby, felt resistance as she pulled, and tracked the slow tail of the umbilical cord. She could feel it pulsing in her hand as she unwrapped it from the baby’s neck and arm.
She heard an infant cry, and for a confused moment, thought it came from the cavity of gore before her. She hesitated, felt the soft reality of a tiny body in her hands, and drew it carefully out. It was a girl, limp and lifeless, her dark down streaked with silvery scars where the knife had pierced her.
“Give her to me.” Doru put out his hands and Olivia laid in the infant in them, appalled by the difference in size between this child and her own newborn Somurg. One of Doru’s fingers was longer than the baby’s entire arm.
Doru put his mouth over the baby’s face and sucked in sharply. He turned, spat a wad of bloody mucus into the bedding, then put his mouth against her again and breathed—a faint puff of air—as his thumbs massaged the tiny body. Olivia could see the roll of her ribs beneath the thin pelt, the swell of her chest as Doru puffed his breath inside her.
The baby’s fist jerked. Doru lifted his head as the baby whimpered, kicked one foot, and put out a weak, unhappy cry.
Olivia felt herself sagging with relief. She looked down, saw the hilt of the hunter’s knife thrusting up from the bedding, and took it to punch off and cut the cords still tethering the twins to the lifeless body of their mother.
Doru stared into the baby’s tiny face as she cried. He stirred when Olivia started to stand, but only to release the infant into the waiting hands of a female. He stayed where he was, now gazing without expression down into Cheyenne’s open, staring eyes. He did not speak.
“Get him bandaged,” Olivia heard Tina say. “Keep the wound clean and dry, change the bandages every two hours. Get him some tea and lots of meat and get him a blanket. He doesn’t move from this spot until I say it’s okay. If his eyes are open, he drinks, understand?”
A small chorus of agreement.
Tina stood and faced off against Thugg, glaring. “What about you?”
Thugg groaned, with misery as much pain. “I’ll live,” he said. “For the moment. I might need you when Doru’s done with me.”
“The bleeding’s stopped. Yawa, stitch this up, and then we’ll get the belt off.” Footsteps. “Are you all right? Jesus, she really had a whack at you!”
“Huh?” Olivia started to turn, but felt Tina’s warm, wet hands on her back forcing her to face away. “What?”
“Your back,” Doru said, without looking around. “The beast cut hell out of you while you were…touching her.”
“I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but you should be dead.”
Olivia tried to remember if she had used her power against herself at any point. “Am I okay?” She tried to reach around, but Tina forestalled her.
“No, but you’re not bleeding, either. We’ll get you some antibiotics and you should be okay in a week or two. Obviously, she didn’t hit your spine.” She stepped away. “I need to see the babies and…Jesus, someone better tell Beth.”
“Go to work,” Olivia answered. She gazed at Doru’s back, then reached out and brushed at the base of his wing.
He looked up at her, glanced back at Cheyenne, then stood up and faced her. “I would have killed her,” he said. “I have questioned your wisdom in allowing her to live almost continuously since the day you…slipped on your spikes. I came here to kill her at the first sight of her.” He dropped his eyes to his hands, turning them in meditative silence.
“Doru—”
“As if two innocent lives were a fair price to be free of the Beast,” he went on bitterly. “What did it matter when we had four already, four more strongly kindled. What did it matter, two new young, when weighed against the poison of the Beast?” He dropped his hands, stared at Olivia almost curiously. “How am I supposed to live alongside that child, knowing that I meant to trade her for the sake of convenience and quiet? How can I meet her eyes?”
“You saved her,” Olivia said. “I couldn’t have done that. I couldn’t have even guessed how.”
He dismissed that with a cut of one hand, turning back to look on Cheyenne. “There have been no good births for twenty-eight years,” he said. “This cruel life has lent us strange talents.”
Olivia slipped around his wing and pressed up against his side. He put his arm around her mechanically. She did not look at the body, but she let him brood on it in silence.
Finally, “Olivia, I feel…awful.”
She waited.
“I believed I could sacrifice two lives just to be rid of one more. That was wrong and I always knew it was wrong, deep down. But…I think maybe I was wrong to want to kill this woman in the first place. I have forgotten…even she has been precious to someone. Olivia, what have we done? What are we still doing? How many more will we bring back and ruin?” He started to speak again, then slowly folded up, ground his fists against his face and began to sob.
Olivia ran her hands over his head, rubbed the base of his horns where the skin was thinnest, stroked the thick pelt of his shoulders. Soft as otter, she thought again, as she did her best to comfort him.
His arms came up and wrapped like iron around her waist. He pressed his face into her hip, his tears bleeding slow heat over her clothing. “I want to ready her for burial,” he said. “Teach me what to do.”
“Will it make you feel any better?”
He shuddered. “Something has to.”
Olivia used charcoal from the hearth to draw examples of the mystic-seeming spirals and symbols she had used once when painting Judith. She did not
try to invent meanings for them and Doru did not ask. He studied them in silence, asking only where they should go upon Cheyenne’s body, and then began the terrible task of washing away the blood. Olivia hovered near him for a moment, but he was deep in his own world, and so she crossed the room and knelt beside Thugg as Yawa finished stitching the deep gash in his thigh. When Yawa retreated, Olivia was there to bandage him. Thugg closed his eyes and looked supremely unhappy.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked finally.
Thugg sighed and looked over at Wurlgunn where he lay panting on the floor by the fire. “I want to die,” he said. “I can’t believe I was so stupid. I killed the Beast. I may still have killed Wurlgunn. I nearly killed you. Those babies are drawn moons too early and it is all…my fault.”
Olivia waited, fitting the final bandage tight and pinning it in place. She slackened Doru’s belt and threaded it back through the buckle. Thugg was silent as she poured out a basin of water and returned to him, beginning to wash the blood from the fur of his thigh.
“I came to see—” he began, and trailed off. He was quiet for several minutes. The only sounds were that of water pattering over Cheyenne’s flesh, of the coarse cloth grooming through Thugg’s pelt, of Wurlgunn’s thick breaths. “I came to see…a female. Didn’t matter who, as long as it wasn’t Chugg. Horumn met me at the tunnels, told me Furluu and Golgun were off fawning over the new babies and Victoria and Carla were occupied. They don’t have a good waiting place here, so she told me I could wait in the women’s commons.”