by R. Lee Smith
“Doru is a noble male,” Yawa added in low, musing tones. “The old leader would have made him tall if he weren’t so overwhelmed by authority.” They sat in companionable silence for a while and then Yawa prodded Olivia in the ribs and asked, “How is he?”
Olivia began to reply, thinking Yawa must be referring to Doru’s present depression. Then her mouth snapped shut as she realized Yawa intended a far more intimate inquiry. “How am I supposed to answer that?” she sputtered, completely off-balance.
Yawa blinked at her.
“I thought you didn’t care about that!” Olivia stammered, still trying to recover her equilibrium in the face of Yawa’s casual inquiry.
Yawa snorted and fanned out her wings. “I did not care to be worked by every male who brought me meat just because I can’t breed. This doesn’t mean that I have never desired a male. Or taken one. And Doru,” she finished with a sigh, “is a fine male.”
“He is, ain’t he?” Tina agreed, throwing Olivia half a distracted smile. “If I went for that sort of thing, I’d be on him in an instant.”
“You’ve had plenty of time to seduce him by now,” Olivia argued, sticking squarely to what she thought of as the point in an effort to keep from answering the initial question.
“When I first nerved myself to do so, he was meeting with a female already. In secret, you understand. Those were terrible days. But she died, and his grief was such that…that I just couldn’t. And since then, he has been like a child that puts his hand in dark places and encounters a snake.”
“Bit,” Olivia said.
“Bit,” agreed Yawa, nodding. “And bit. And bit. And bit.” She glanced at Tina with faint apology. “I tell you, when your Tobi put him aside to mate with you, I went away to the tunnels and cried for him. I thought he would never take another mate in all his life. I thought that would surely be the snake that killed his heart.”
“Fortunately for all of us, Olivia Issagul had her wicked way with him,” Tina replied, and Yawa returned her full attention to Olivia expectantly. “So?”
“I’m not going to answer that!” Olivia exploded. “I wouldn’t even begin to know how!”
“He must have coupled with you by now.” Yawa broke off as a new thought occurred to her and looked absolutely appalled. “You mean to say that he…that Doru can’t…” She began to gesture awkwardly, not even bothering to hide her disappointment.
Tina was snickering and trying to cover it by pretending to be coughing.
“Yes, he has coupled with me,” Olivia said, having determined that the only way out of this conversation was just to bull through it. “Several times a night, in fact. Very thoroughly. Doru is just fine.”
Yawa looked first relieved and then envious.
Olivia continued. “Doru is, perhaps, the best damn coupler in the whole freakin’ mountain. Doru has a spear that could pierce a bear from three forests away. He rolls like the mountain. He is enduring as the great oak—”
Tina burst out in one of her rare laughs.
Yawa began to smile faintly.
“Doru is fast as thunder and slow as snowfall. Doru moves like leaves in the wind in the fall. Doru,” she concluded magnificently, “is the great god under the mountain and when Doru is done, there’s always Bodual.”
Tina threw her head back and just laughed.
Yawa shook her head, patting Tina’s arm. “I think if you gave yourself and Amy both to one male, that male would burst into flames.”
Tina smiled broadly back at Olivia. “I’ll tell you something, and you might not think it’s funny, but Tobi told me once that sex with Doru was intense. Tobi used to go base-jumping, for God’s sake.”
Olivia suddenly thought of the freefall experience only, unbelievably, two hours past. “You can tell Tobi that Doru says sex with me is intense.”
“Oh, that is scary.” Tina’s smile faded. “Poor Doru. I like the big guy, and he’s in there beating himself up even harder than you are.”
Yawa stood and hopped down from the bench. “You are worried for him, for Doru?”
“A little,” Olivia confessed. “I feel like I’ve hurt him, by causing him to question himself.”
Yawa nodded. “You have hurt us all. To see you flying forward, dropping to heal her even as she stabbed at you…you make me ashamed. You make me wish…that my ways are the same as yours.”
Tina snorted. “You’d want to get stabbed in the back?”
Yawa shook her head. “But if I were the b—if I were she, I would want someone to go beneath my knife to try and save me. I would want to belong to a tribe that had such courage. I would want someone to cry for me.”
Tina nodded and sat there for a while, her smile now entirely usurped by her far more familiar expression of matter-of-fact candor. “I wouldn’t. Olivia, I love you and I appreciate what you tried to do, but you’re an idiot.”
Yawa recoiled, staring.
Tina waved one hand as if Yawa’s horror were a gnat, and not a particularly troublesome one. “You want to feel bad about someone, feel bad about Wurlgunn. He’s going to lose Beth over this.”
Yawa and Olivia both flinched now.
“There’s been a lot of dissension in the ranks since Wurlgunn came back,” Tina told them. “No one’s been bickering over Beth, because she’s so creepily young, and maybe also because everyone knows the poor bastard would end up punching himself in the nose in a challenge…” Tina trailed off, shaking her head. “Everyone was talking about Anita moving in with them, but do you honestly think Wurlgunn could manage two women at once?”
The question called up a variety of intriguing images, but they all seemed to fade into the way she’d last seen him, lying limp beside Cheyenne’s body with blood matting his chest and arm.
“No, she’s probably got her own room, with a big pile of personal bedding and a curtain between them. She and Beth keep each other company by day, and Wurlgunn feels noble and important by feeding her at night.” Tina ran her fingers through her limp hair. “Wurlgunn the mighty hunter. Good grief. And now he’s going to spend the next month easy lying flat on his back, and I bet he’s not even moved into the clinic before we get a couple of dickheads locking horns over Beth and Anita.”
Yawa’s brows drew together. “This will not be,” she said.
“Sure it will.”
“You mistake me, healer. I will not allow it. It was my evil that caused Wurlgunn’s wound; I will provide for his mates.” She stood up slowly, her shoulders squaring and wings fanning out. “I will hunt for him.”
They looked at her. Olivia could feel herself frowning. “Doru said none of you women could fly very well.”
“I am not like the rest of them, digging in the earth for roots and grubs and afraid to let some male spy them in the air and find them ugly for it,” said Yawa, tossing her short horns. “But I swore to the old leader I would not hunt. When Doru came to us with spears, my vow kept me silent. No more. The old leader is dead. His ways were not just. I will break my vow to him and if it means I am forced into the care of the Eldest…” Her voice wavered. She shook her head furiously. “So be it. But I will hunt.”
“No one’s going to force you into the care of the Eldest while I’m around,” Olivia told her. “I’ll talk to Doru.”
Yawa nodded and started walking again, staring into space, her expression drawn and grim. They followed her.
Something that had been tickling Olivia’s mind for some time now presented an opportunity to be voiced. “While we are still on the subject of providers,” she announced. “Who’s providing for you right now, Tina?”
Tina snorted. “Tobi does a pretty good job all by herself, for which I could cheerfully throttle her. And Doru shares all his kills with her. Gullnar is supposed to do the same for me, at least until I’ve given him a baby, but to be blunt, I don’t think he’d do it even if he were here. He may not actually hate me, but he’s damned close.”
Olivia murmured some sympathetic words whi
ch Tina accepted with a shrug and a nod. For a while, she was quiet. Then, with that same lopsided little smile, Tina said, “You know, when I was taking care of Vorgullum at Hollow Mountain, he tried to patch things up.”
“Gullnar?”
“His version of patching things up, anyway. I wasn’t exactly as receptive as I could have been, partly because I was looking at a shot gulla and partly, I admit it, because he’s an ass and I don’t like him. Then, one night, honest to God, he sneaks up into Vorgullum’s lair—with the man himself lying right there in a fever-sweat—and tried to score.”
Yawa nodded absently. “This is Gullnar.”
“He is such a dick. I had an opportunity to go my entire life without kicking a man in the balls and he ruined it for me. So no, I don’t think he’s going to go out of his way to see that I’m fed. Fortunately, I’m the chief healer, so Tobi and I are doing just fine.”
“What happens if someone challenges one of you?” Olivia asked, and blushed when Tina focused on her. “I mean, is it legal to fight a woman for another woman?”
“I don’t know,” Tina admitted. “Tobi and I have discussed it, but we haven’t agreed on a plan. Your brilliant performance aside, there’s no way in hell that either of us could take on a horny gulla, and I know it, even if Tobi doesn’t. I guess we’ll just have to deal with it when it happens, if it ever does.”
“It’s all so stupid,” Olivia said, and shook her head. “This is what happens when you put men in charge. Women would settle things a lot more democratically.”
“Maybe.” Tina did not sound convinced. “But trust me on this, Olivia. When democracy breaks down, a woman is a lot more likely to do some serious physical damage than any man. I mean, sure, a guy will be the quickest to mess you up, but speaking both as a doctor and a lesbian, when a woman does fight, she’s a lot more likely to go for the kill. Especially when the motive is sex.”
Olivia thought at once of Bahgree.
And, with a shiver, of Urga.
6
One week later, Olivia arrived in the common cave in time to see Doru heave a younger male into the wall and roar in his face. The younger male was bleeding from several claw marks in his chest and arms, but still he bared his teeth in defiance.
“Jesus wept,” Olivia said in disgust.
The nearest human ears belonged to Liz, who glanced her way as she nursed Levonal. “It’s not what you think,” she said.
“It’s not?” Olivia halted and stared at the beating taking place in the center of the room. “What else could it possibly be?”
“You almost sound disappointed.”
“Not disappointed, just….” She didn’t really want to explore her feelings. “What’s going on?”
“Nummak there was supposed to be guarding the door and somehow he stepped away from his post long enough for Tobi to sneak out again.”
Olivia blew her hair out of her face and looked around in vain for Tobi. “Well, I hope he goes after her next,” she said waspishly.
“He’ll have to wait a few months,” Liz replied. “Tobi slipped off the aerie and took one hell of a tumble down the mountainside.”
Olivia felt her blood freeze over. She turned and stared wide-eyed at Liz’s level eyes. “Is she all right? Did she lose the baby?”
“No, and no. She broke both arms and cut holy hell out of her back, but she is otherwise just fine and will recover completely in a few months. Tina will almost certainly do the beating that Doru doesn’t dare do, and in the meantime, Nummak made the supremely stupid mistake of lipping off when he should have quietly hunkered down and apologized for letting Tobi get by him.”
Olivia watched Nummak take a blow to the head and finally drop to the ground. Nummak rolled onto his hip, snarled half-heartedly, and lowered his brow to rest on the stone. “Stupid human,” he muttered.
Doru, his fists like rock, his huge chest heaving, threw back his horns on hearing this and swung his entire upper body into a pile-driving punch to his fallen opponent’s ribs. At the last, the very last, possible instant, he aborted the path of his attack and smashed his fist explosively into the stone beside Nummak, who flinched hard, one hand coming convulsively to his side, as though he couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t been struck.
“Get out,” Doru growled.
Nummak eased back onto his hands and knees and peered up at Doru.
“I gave you an order. I commanded you to protect a bringer of damned precious life, and you failed in that, which I could forgive in time.” Doru turned his eyes, snapping with rage, to pin Nummak in place. “But you sit there and curse the life that the Great Spirit in his mercy has spared, you curse the mother that bears my child as she lies fighting to keep the spark in her womb.”
One of Nummak’s ears twitched and he slid back some short inches and watched Doru warily.
“Get out of my mountain,” Doru snarled. “If I see your face before ten nights have passed, I will rip it off your head.”
The other gulla didn’t argue. He got to his feet and ran.
Gullan were silently slipping out of the commons, fading into shadows and taking their humans with them as they went. Doru continued to stand, his head turned and eyes burning on the spot Nummak had just vacated. His hands clenched and flexed rhythmically; his claws nicked small drops of blood from his palms to spatter over the stone. He made no sound at all.
Olivia took a step towards him and three hands reached out at once to restrain her. She thought a moment, but then gently and firmly moved away from them and went to Doru’s side.
“She’s all right,” she said softly.
“She is not,” he answered, his words a hum of rage pushing through his clenched teeth. “She will be one day, but for now, she is not all right. My child is not all right. And that—” He turned and spat on the stone where Nummak had crouched. “That animal would show me his teeth and curse her!”
Olivia put her hand hesitantly on his arm; it was hard as rock, unyielding to her.
He said, “It could have happened in the shaft, for the spirits’ sake! I suppose I should be thankful she fell from the aerie, where at least she had a slope of stone to break her fall, but what in Urga’s name possessed her to leave the mountain in the first place? She swore me an oath that she would stay until the child was born!”
They did not speak for a long time.
“He’s not whole,” Doru said finally, grudgingly. “Nummak. He doesn’t look it, but he’s one of the Wasted. He doesn’t think right. He has foaming fits sometimes. Damn it, I should have set someone else to guard, but he was the first person I saw and I was biting at the chance to get out. I’ve spent too many days training Yawa. We needed a real hunt!”
Olivia said nothing.
Doru growled and shook his head, the gesture only a thin thread from an open display of horns and aggression. “We found summer elk, a fine fat herd. I was coming back with the first load when I saw her…broken there at the bottom of the upper aerie, where the goat trail winds around to the pen. I knew instantly, instantly, who it was. I don’t even remember dropping the meat. I was terrified to move her. I started baying and Bodual came and threw off his meat and we wrapped her in a deer litter.”
The big gulla shuddered, a hard slow roll of horror. “My father,” he said slowly. “He got tagged by a rogue elk in season, shredded his left wing, and tried to fly back to the mountain on it. I was close enough to see him when he dropped. We tried to put him on a litter. I still remember the sounds his back made when we moved him. He was dead before we were in the air again. I had to put my hands on Tobi. I had to put my hands on her and move her.”
His right hand curled into a fist with the sound of brittle snapping. He was beginning to growl again, and his hackles were slowly spiking out across his back and shoulders. “And that ass I sent to guard the entry was in the commons, drinking thumperjuice. When I sent Bodual and Yawa to carry my Tobi to the healer and went to him, he showed his teeth to me!”
“Is he going to survive being banished for ten nights? Is he smart enough to go to ground during the day?”
Doru did not look at her, but he straightened, tossing his horns and shrugging back his fanned wings. His hackles were still spiked high and his body was still rigid with tension, but his voice was even as he shouted for Mudmar and ordered the hunter to find Nummak and stay with him until dawn before bringing him back into the mountain. He glanced at Olivia, still scowling, and then turned away from her.
She pursued him quietly, took his hand and turned it to examine his knuckles. “Are you hurt?” she asked.
“Damned idiot,” he spat, and tossed a dark look at her. “Not you,” he added in a muttering undertone.
“No, that one had Tobi all over it,” she agreed. “Did you break your hand?”
“No.” He took it back from her, rubbed restlessly at his arm. “But I gave an old wound a fresh reminder. That’s good. Give me something to think about while I wait to hear whether or not my child will leave this world before it ever draws a breath.”
She slipped her hand around his and gave a gentle tug.
He glared at her again. “What?”
“Let’s go see her,” she said.
He didn’t immediately move, but when he did, it was with swift authority towards the women’s tunnels. Olivia kept her hand in his and jogged beside him through the dark passages, neither of them speaking. They came to the hide flap that separated the sexes within the mountain, and there Doru stopped and glared at it as if it were an enemy he wished to strike out and kill. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to go any further, Olivia moved past him and held the flap open.
He did not move.
“Come on,” she said.
“I shouldn’t.”
“I’ll never tell. Come on.”
He ducked below the leather door and eased into the tunnel beyond. She led him past the women’s commons, and he hesitated as he heard female voices hiss to a stop and strike up again in scandalized whispers. “No,” he said, digging in his talons. “I shouldn’t be here.”