by R. Lee Smith
Thugg shrugged awkwardly, looked back over his shoulder at Wurlgunn. “I sat there for a while, but in the end, I decided it wasn’t worth waiting around for. I figured I could go out, maybe hunt a goat, come back and try again. I thought…” He shook his head, grunted something that might have been laughter. “I thought, ‘I bet it’s been a while since the Beast had any meat.’ Mothers need meat in their last moons even more than milk, they say.”
He lapsed into silence again, now staring bleakly at the pit where Doru’s broad body mostly blocked the sight of the corpse from view. “She was lying there. She wasn’t moving. Her eyes were open, but I could have sworn…I almost turned around and left. I don’t know why I didn’t. I felt…sorry for her. I asked Yawa if I could try and feed her. Yawa said I could.”
“I was grateful,” Yawa broke in. She was hovering at the doorway, looking almost as miserable as Thugg. “I hadn’t had any chance at all to feed myself since yesterday. I told him to beware her, but I didn’t think she’d even know he was there. She hasn’t said a word in days and days. I thought her mind was gone.” Yawa covered her face briefly, then put her hands out as though in supplication. “I left them alone.”
“She didn’t do anything at first,” Thugg continued. “I kept myself at arm’s length, chewed each bite for her. She ate after a while. Eventually, she looked at me.” He was shaking his head slowly, unaware of it, in mute denial of his own words. “She asked me who I was. I told her. She asked me what I was doing there. I told her…I don’t know why. She told me she’d…do something for me, if I wanted. I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
“She can be convincing,” Olivia found herself saying.
“I took off my belt and my coverings. I knew I had the knife. I put them beside the pit. I thought it was far enough out of her reach. But she managed to get closer without me noticing…that is, while we were shifting to…it doesn’t matter. I didn’t know what she meant to do. I pretty much did what she told me. She put me right where she wanted me. I…I actually closed my eyes.” Disbelief momentarily colored the emotionless recital. His hand moved to scratch restlessly at his thigh.
“I didn’t know she had the knife until she stabbed me with it. Even then, I couldn’t understand where she got it. I started shouting, I think. I have no idea where Wurlgunn came from. I don’t think he knew she had the knife, either. He jumped in the pit and fell back so suddenly, I thought…I don’t know, maybe he tripped or she pushed him, or something. He was choking, that’s what I thought. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. Then Tina and the others came in and Yawa ran off screaming. I am so sorry.”
Olivia put her red-stained cloth back in the basin and patted his shoulder. “You can go, if you want to. Find someone to stay with you, someone who can change your bandages and feed you tea. Water, too, but as much tea as you can get. Keep off your leg for at least ten days, or you’ll tear the stitches.”
Thugg sighed and clawed up the wall until he was standing, balanced on one leg. He looked around hopelessly, and one of the older females detached herself from the doorway and slipped beneath his arm. They hobbled out, and Olivia crept over to peer down at Wurlgunn.
“What does it look like?” Doru asked quietly. He was not watching her; his full attention appeared directed at the task of cleaning the body.
Olivia knelt and carefully peeled back one edge of the compress. The wound was a ghastly thing, but even she could see that it was not as bad as it might easily have been. It was only four inches long, but deep and ugly, and if it had been even an inch wider, it might have struck the jugular. Tina’s stitches were thick and uneven, but would hold for the moment.
“Olivia? Tell me.” Doru’s voice betrayed only a slight undercurrent of strain. She had no doubt that his hands on the corpse would be steady, even as the set of his body betrayed his fantastic tension.
“It could be worse.”
Wurlgunn’s eyes fluttered and opened. He brought her into focus with obvious effort, and then tried on a shaky smile. “Olivia,” he croaked. “Thank the Great Spirit. Now I will be well.”
“That’s very flattering,” she said gently. “But I’m not going to do anything.” She pressed the gauze back in place and took his hand, encouraged when he squeezed. “Do you know what happened?”
“Vaguely.” He closed his eyes to collect his thoughts, as though the sense of sight were too great a distraction for recall. “Anita,” he said at last. “She makes pictures with string. She’s good at it. I thought if I had some string, it would make her happy. I was talking to…Crugunn, I think. I heard shouting, came running. Thugg was on the ground. I didn’t see the blood.”
“You didn’t see the knife?”
He laughed, a dry rustle like autumn leaves, his eyes still shut. “Yes, oddly enough. I did see the knife. It just…didn’t stop me. How stupid is that?” He worked his eyes open and smiled at her. “Any other day, I would have tripped over my damn feet and fallen over until my brain caught up, but no. I jumped right in the pit. I remember thinking, ‘Wait, knives can cut’, and then there was heat. No pain, just heat. I couldn’t breathe. I fell backwards. I remember wondering if I was going to break my wings and what would happen to my Beth if I couldn’t hunt for her.” His voice cracked to dust on the last word and he closed his eyes again.
Olivia watched him rest for a little while, then backed away and let one of the hovering gullan take her place and try to feed him sips of tea. That proved too painful to watch; she returned to Doru.
He had moved the soaked bedding to a pile beside the pit and arranged Cheyenne on the leather cover. She looked very little and white, the scars and calluses built by the mountain standing out in stark relief against her sun-starved body. Doru had combed through her hair with his claws and arranged it in a braid over her shoulder, just as she’d done once for Judith. Her legs were together, her arms folded in a posture of sleep above the ruined recess of her lower body, which he had tried to stitch together. Her face, white with death, was still twisted with fury and pain and the eyes would not remain closed.
“Is it all right?” he asked.
She nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Her heart was a sick well of sorrow and shame and evil relief that the worst had happened and now things could get better.
“I need something to wrap her in, when I’ve painted her.” Doru put his hands on his thighs and gazed at the body meditatively. “I mean to stay with her. Is there anyone else who will make the grave?”
“I’ll find someone,” she promised. She laid her hand on his shoulder and he reached up absently to cover her hand with his own.
“We even called her a beast,” he muttered and shook his horns. “Is this what you felt when you…slipped on your spikes?”
“Something very similar, I think.”
He released her and crouched lower. “You had the power somehow to heal the babies.”
She waited.
He turned and looked back at her from the very corner of one eye. “Did you have the power to kill her?”
“Probably.”
He studied her in silence for a long time, and then looked back into Cheyenne’s still furious face. “If you had been stronger, if you’d had more people here to draw from…I think you would have tried to heal her.”
She said nothing.
“You don’t understand how incomprehensible this is to us…to all of us. This thing you call compassion.” He frowned down at the corpse, running his claws over the leather pit cover as though wishing to cut it, cut anything. “We’ve indulged it, because you are Vorgullum’s mate. We believed it made you weak. I believed that.”
She wanted to touch him again, but something in the tight posture of his body warned her from the attempt. She could only stand and be silent as he searched the mirror of Cheyenne’s staring eyes.
At last his head bent. “Go on, Olivia. Bring me paint for her funereal markings and bindings to cover her with. And then leave us alone. If th
ere is such a thing as a soul, hers may still be close. I have much to apologize for.”
5
Olivia did not exactly ask anyone to prepare a grave for Cheyenne, but she stopped the first male she saw hovering without the women’s tunnels and told him she wanted two gullan to start digging. He obeyed without hesitation, and Olivia went back to find something she could use as a shroud.
Olivia came only as far as the doorway of the death room. She passed the paints and a sleeping bag in to Rumm and withdrew to the women’s commons. She had not been seated long when she realized that Yawa was crouching submissively a short distance away and that Tina was standing beside her. She lifted her head, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for one or the other to speak.
“Do you want to be alone?” Tina asked.
Olivia thought about it. She shivered. “No.”
Tina and Yawa exchanged a glance. Tina came and sat beside Olivia on the bench. Yawa came forward on all fours, and crouched low again when she reached Olivia’s knee.
“What…What do you think about the babies?” Olivia asked.
Tina hesitated. “They’re breathing, for now. Honey, I’m not going to lie. Even in a hospital, this would be bad. The boy’s chances are better. The girl is smaller…more severely scarred…it doesn’t look good for either one of them, but for right now, they’re holding their own. Can I ask you something?”
Olivia nodded, studying the shadows cast by her feet on the floor.
“How long have you been able to do this stuff?”
“A while.”
When no greater answer was forthcoming, Tina frowned. “How are you able to do it at all? I mean, have you always been able to do this?”
Olivia contemplated her toes in silence. After several long seconds had passed, she turned her head and looked Tina wearily in the eye. “Seriously, you want to know?”
Tina’s brows furrowed slightly. She nodded, visibly steeling herself.
“I’m fucking the Great Spirit.”
Yawa drew back.
“Is that all?” Tina hadn’t so much as batted an eye.
“That’s the gist of it.”
“Oh.” Tina rubbed at the back of her neck.
“Why?”
“I was kinda hoping this was something I could learn. I don’t suppose…?”
“No. The Spirit is willing, as they say, but your flesh is weak.” Olivia thought about it. “And Urga would kill you.”
Yawa made a grumble of agreement, still staring at her.
They sat together in silence. The fire hummed and ate the coals.
Tina said, “Are you going to be okay?”
“I couldn’t do more. I gave everything I had. That’s all there was. I probably could have killed every person in that whole cave, but I couldn’t fix them any better than I did, and it took three other—” Olivia sat up straight. “Did I hurt someone? I did, didn’t I?”
“Bodual passed out, but he’s okay now. I didn’t see who the other two were, but they walked out by themselves, so I guess they’re all right. A little shaky, but all right.” Tina put her hand on Olivia’s knee and squeezed. “And the babies are alive now. Every hour, their chances get better. We’ll be taking it day by day for a long time, but if we can get them to eat and keep them warm, they might have a chance.”
“Where are they now?” Olivia asked. Her breasts ached, as if with grief; she had no more milk to give.
“Liz has the girl for now, but I don’t know that she can handle her along with Sunuu and Levonal. Amy took the boy, but it’s the same story, you know. She’s still got Smugg and Somurg. Anita might start producing pretty soon, and until then, some of the older babies are just going to have to eat pulp. I know you didn’t want them weaning, but…”
She wanted to protest, wanted to jump up shouting, ‘No! If you wean them, they’ll die!’ But what was the alternative? Give up on Cheyenne’s twins now, before they could steal milk from the mouths of the others? Hopelessness welled up as tears; Olivia covered her face and wept.
The other two exchanged glances.
Yawa scowled, patted her clumsily on the back. “You waste your pity on that animal.”
“I agree.” Tina leaned back and folded her arms. “For God’s sake, she nearly killed Wurlgunn. She nearly killed you! Twice! At what point do you look up and say, ‘You know what? She wasn’t very nice!’”
“She wasn’t very nice,” Olivia agreed, knuckling her eyes dry. “And she died in pain in a room filled with people who hated her.”
Yawa grunted, but looked less sure of herself.
Tina continued to frown at her. “Horumn’s right. You do feel too much.” She switched to English. “If I had a mirror, I’d show you the scars on your back where she stabbed you. They ought to name that little girl after you, and maybe every time you heard her called, you’d remember that you had to save her life from her fucking evil mother.”
“They should name them both for you,” Yawa added blackly, also in English. “And every time they speak those names, perhaps it will remind them of the shameful way they robbed you of your mate, pestered you with challenge, and then needed you to save two lives.”
Tina recoiled sharply, blinking, and then burst out laughing. “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “You speak human really well, Yawa.”
“You learned our speech in just a few moons,” Yawa said with a shrug. “Did you think none of us could learn yours in a year? Ha!” She switched back to gullan. “But this way is easier for me. You may continue in your birth tongue if you like. I can follow.”
“I don’t have anything to say,” Olivia said.
Tina scowled at her. “You are just determined to blame yourself, aren’t you? It wasn’t your fault, dammit!”
“No,” said Yawa quietly. “It was mine.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
Yawa met Tina’s frustrated eyes coolly. “I should not have left her,” she said. “But I did, and I confess that I did so not because I did not think her capable of any action, but because I did not care what happened to her. I thought the Beast might easily have some demon left in her. In the deep places in my mind, I even suspected she might allow that demon to come out if she were alone with a male, and I may have left them precisely to let that game play out, to provoke the killing hand.”
“Wrong hand,” Tina muttered, and Yawa nodded, dropping her eyes.
“I…It was a foolish thing to do, and an evil whim that urged it on. If there was a demon in that cave, it fed on me, not the human. If her young ones die, it is I who must dig.” She lapsed into unhappy silence.
“And you,” Tina added, looking crossly at Olivia. “You’re sitting there thinking about Cheyenne. After all this, you are still feeling sorry for her.”
“Someone has to.”
Tina muttered something uncouth under her breath, but Yawa only looked more thoughtful.
Olivia brushed back her bangs and said, “Tina, if this were a movie, who would you feel sorriest for?”
Tina opened her mouth to snap something, then frowned and knit her brows. “Come to think of it…Okay, I’m beginning to see your point.” Her voice softened. “But look, hon, this isn’t Hollywood, this is the real world. Sometimes surviving means you have to be the bad guy, and you don’t have to spend the rest of your life beating yourself up about it. Cheyenne did what she did to herself, and in my opinion, she’d have done it anyway. If none of this had happened tonight, we’d have gone in her room ten weeks from now to find her standing over their little broken bodies and laughing at the looks on our faces.”
Olivia closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Tina said after a short pause. “I shouldn’t have said that, but I don’t think I’m wrong.”
“No,” murmured Yawa. “I think not.”
“I wish this were the big screen,” Tina said with a sigh. “The bad guys wear black and the good guys ride off into the sunset, and everyone g
ets what they deserve.”
Olivia found herself trying to think of all the movies she had ever seen. It was a pitifully small list. The faces of actors swam in her mind, but like her parents, they were blurry and vague. Snatches of dialogue rang in her ears, but the voices that uttered the words could have belonged to anyone. The only thing that she could visualize with clarity was a series of explosions, Hollywood-style, as the hero invariably escaped the clutches of whatever surreally impossible situation he’d gotten trapped in. Oil tanker in the middle of the ocean? No problem. Lost island in the middle of nowhere? No sweat. Dead starship in the middle of space? Big deal. Top-secret military installation guarded by hordes of bloodthirsty guerillas? Give me a break.
Undiscovered tribe of batmen in a hollow mountain with primitive weapons, virtually no security, and very reasonable rules of conduct? Hm, settle down, have babies, learn to live with it.
“If this were a movie,” Tina mused. “I’d never have to shave my legs.”
Yawa, who had understood maybe one word in three throughout the second part of this conversation, looked down at Tina’s leg, puzzled. “Never have to do what?”
“Remove the hairs,” Tina explained. “Look at Olivia’s legs. See how smooth and bald they are?”
Olivia extended her leg and held still while Yawa inspected her.
“Now look at mine,” Tina invited, pulling up the leg of her rough breeches.
Yawa eyed them curiously, and then showed all her teeth in a smile. “Look at mine!” she invited, stretching out one foot.
Tina glanced at the thick, black pelt that covered her body and uttered a barking laugh. “Yes, all right, you win,” she said.
“Ha! And you are only balding, you know. Not bald. How awful it must be to have such clammy skin,” Yawa mused, eyeing Olivia’s bare leg.
“Well, it’s cold, but I wouldn’t say it’s awful. At least, I haven’t heard any complaints.”
Tina snorted. “Yeah, well, I can’t speak for the rest of them, but you ought to know that Doru just isn’t the complaining kind.”