Olivia (35 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, while his hunters shifted on their feet and looked awkwardly at their spears.  “I am.”

“Your words are always wise,” he murmured, combing his claws through her hair.  He gave her another brow-bump, right there in front of everyone, then gently disengaged and resumed climbing up toward daylight and all its dangers.

6

It was far too early to go back to bed just because she’d managed to screw things up so spectacularly.  Olivia trudged off down the mainway, knowing she had nowhere to go but back to an empty lair and nothing to do once she got there.  The common cave was still empty.  She didn’t think she wanted the company of anyone who’d overheard the fireworks anyway.

But another human face might be nice.  Amy’s, maybe.  Amy would probably point out that telling your man you shit on him in front of his whole hunting party was not the best way of engendering a lasting friendship between their two peoples, but that was all right.  If she could apologize to Vorgullum, she could hang her head a while in front of Amy.  She had to do something, anyway.  She just didn’t want to be alone.

So she walked herself down the winding mainway to the women’s tunnels, savoring the self-pity while she had it, knowing Amy would probably knock it out of her soon enough.  The darkness was good for depression.  The lanterns were lit, widely spaced, just enough to keep her oriented along the many crossways and side-passages, but they didn’t last forever and eventually she was obliged to bring out her flashlight.

Someday, this would all be familiar enough that she could walk it in the dark, like Murgull.  Someday, it would even feel like home.

She heard the noise before she saw the light spilling through the iron door that separated the women’s tunnels from the rest of the mountain.  She’d probably been hearing it for some time without noticing, too lost in her own depression, but a final metallic banging ended all her thoughts of Bundel and his mad mate.  The caverns and tunnels of Hollow Mountain had been carved wide and made smooth, but still, sound did not carry easily along its uneven surfaces.  Nevertheless, the sound of a giant iron pot falling empty to the stone floor could not be ignored, not even out here, not even by her.  Immediately following came a long, loud groan and then Horumn’s furious shout: “Don’t just stand there, pick it up!  Up!  Up!  Over the fire! 
Not in the coals, you stupid girl
, use the damned hooks!”

Hesitating now, Olivia made her feet carry her the last little distance, and each step forward brought her closer to the sounds of voices—gullan and human both—crushed together in the wordless rooba-rooba of crowd-speak, sometimes rising into a discernable, “Over here,” “Show me again,” “Now what?” or “Ouch!”  Beneath that were pounding sounds, rapid and arrhythmic, scraping sounds, blades chopping, metal clattering, and the omnipresent rush of running feet.

She reached the door.  It was unlocked and slightly ajar.  She opened it up and stared into chaos. 

Olivia had never been back here without Murgull, and even though she’d strongly suspected the old gulla had ordered it emptied for their meetings before, to see it now in the full riot of its use astonished her.  She’d been told there were only forty gullan females; it didn’t sound like much, even with the human captives thrown into the mix, until she saw so many of them here and hard at work.  The closest thing she could think to compare it to was the kitchen of a high-scale hotel, except that all the work stations were on the floor:  One woman swept roasted nuts off the hearth stones for the woman who shelled them, who then dumped the meats into the bowl to be carried to the woman who ground them into a mealy flour.  At another station, another woman swiftly deconstructed cattails one at a time from a huge stack so that the leaves, tips, roots and stalks could all go to different hands.  All around her, things were roasted, chopped, plucked, boned and peeled, and as busy as it all was, Olivia knew they weren’t all here because there was a constant stream of gullan rushing in and out from the many back passageways.

Olivia hovered in the doorway, still holding onto the bars, overwhelmed by it all.  Through the press and flow of bodies, she could see people she knew—Amy, pounding away at some roots; Anita, mending nets at the far end of the room under a critical gullan eye; Liz, running full bowls of raw food to the cookpots and filling up the empties—but she couldn’t see how to get to them without putting herself in the way.

“Get in or get away!”  Horumn limped up to her, scowling, and smacked her hand so that she let go of the door.  “What do you want?”

“I was just looking for something to do.”

“Bah!  Croaking frog!  You are Murgull’s headache and you won’t find her here!”  Horumn glowered back over one hunched shoulder as a large pot slipped Beth’s hands and banged to the floor amid cries of annoyance and dismay.  “You would know better where to find her than I.”

The naked bitterness in those words made it a struggle not to squirm.  “Can I help out here?” Olivia asked weakly.

“Ha!  Help enough I have from your useless kind.”  But Horumn gestured for her to wait and then stumped over to snatch up a shallow tin bowl filled with cooking scraps: boiled bones, stale crusts, overripe fruits and wilted leaves.  She thrust this dubious fare into Olivia’s hands and said, “As you go, set this in the waiting place.”

“What place?”

Horumn gave Olivia a swift slap to the ear, then spun her roughly around and shoved her out through the open door.  “The place,” she snarled, “where people wait
who are not welcome here
!  Go!”

“What is it?”

“For Logarr.”  Distracted by a second crash, Horumn zeroed unerringly on poor Beth and yet another pot, this one now spilling stew merrily across three work stations, and shouted, “Curse your hands and your eyes and your hairless hide!  Out!  Get out!  Thurga, take this grease-fingered fool out to rake dung!  At least that she cannot break!”

Olivia retreated as well (not fast enough to miss Horumn’s incredulous, “Are you
crying
?  Sweet Mother of the Moon, someone get this mewling whelp a milking teat and get her out of my sight!”).  She made her way back up the dark mainway, swinging her flashlight from side to side until she saw a small alcove.  It wasn’t much, just a wide place cut into one wall, shored with rough timber and furnished with a simple stone bench.  She set the bowl down, took a few steps away, and then turned to go and shone her flashlight directly into a gulla’s face.

It was a male, not one she knew.  He didn’t flinch, didn’t raise a hand to shield his eyes, didn’t really seem to care.  He waited.

Slowly, Olivia lowered her flashlight.  “Are you Logarr?”

“Yes.”  He showed no surprise at the question, gave her no cue for how to proceed.

“Do I know you?” she asked, because he looked, to her eyes, remarkably fit.  His pelt was very dark and shone with good health.  His horns told her he was relatively young.  He was not as tall or as powerfully built as Vorgullum, but he was considerably fitter than either Beth’s mate or Amy’s.  If Vorgullum had paired the humans with the healthiest males, he certainly ought to have one of them.

“No,” he said after a moment, and that was all he said.

“Well…I think this is for you.”  Olivia gathered up the bowl of garbage and held it out to him.

He stood quite a long while before taking the two steps necessary to reach out and take it.  Seeing him up close gave her something of a start; his eyes were pale, neither blue nor grey nor green, but some pale and watery color for all that, when every other gulla she’d seen had black eyes.  It would have made her wonder if he was blind, except for the intensity in his quiet stare which told her indisputably that she was being seen.  Seen and measured.

But he did take the bowl, and as soon as he had it, he turned around and took it away with him back down the mainway.  He did not say any kind of goodbye or give her one of those open-handed salutes.  He just left, and let the darkness swallow him.

Creepy.  She wasn’t even sure just why it had affected her so deeply, but in the aftermath of this brief encounter, she was oddly loathe to continue on to Murgull’s secret room.  She sat down in the little alcove instead, the waiting place, shining her flashlight now and then in the direction of Logarr’s departure, although of course she saw nothing.  So great was her concentration, or her lingering unease, that she did not hear Murgull’s approach until the old gulla dropped onto the bench beside her, cackling at the shrieky little gasp this startled out of her.

“Lurking in dark places, eh?”  Murgull prodded at her ribs with a singularly sly smile.  “Sign of devious intent, that.  You must be a wicked woman.  Ha!  Old Murgull knew there was a reason she liked you!”

“I was just looking for you,” Olivia said lamely, rubbing her side.

“Lies,” came the comfortable reply.  “You are sitting on your slimy frog’s rump.  Ha!  But busy minds need rest.”  Murgull’s good eye narrowed in a conspiratorial leer.  “What goes on in your busy mind?”

‘Nothing’ seemed like the wrong answer.  She said instead, “Horumn is teaching all the other humans how to work.”

Murgull drew back, her hideous face contorting in an expression that was two parts contempt to one part doubt.  “And you hide here?”

This slur on her honor—as if she were a spoiled child dodging chores—stung deep and Olivia’s temper flared.  “I’m not hiding, she threw me out!”

Murgull grunted and settled back, now casting her scornful glare down the passage that led to the women’s tunnels.  “Miserable old bat.  So she sends you to me for work, does she?  Then work we shall do.  Come, little sister.”

That vise-like grip came down over her arm even before old Murgull had gained her feet, pinching off all protest—had Olivia been foolhardy enough to mount one—and they were off at once, moving at Murgull’s lurching run despite the selfsame’s immediate litany of physical complaints.  They did not go deeper into the dark either, not to Murgull’s secret room, but right back the way she’d come, to the women’s tunnels and through the unlocked door into Horumn’s riotous domain. 

Some of the humans paused to watch them pass, but the gullan uniformly made themselves scarce if they could and small if they couldn’t.  Murgull cackled as she dragged Olivia across the cavern, leering at all of them and none of them, alive with that merry malice that so often defined her when things were going well.  “Work, you frogs!” she cried, simultaneously flapping one hand to dismiss the quality of that work.  “Hop for Horumn!”

And oh God, but there was Maria, rising out of a trio of gullan with all her mojo-markings smeared by sweat and resentment blazing in her eyes.  She threw down the rough stone she had been using to grind meal, threw it hard enough to send chips bouncing back behind it as it rolled away, and shouted, “Don’t you call me a frog, you ugly old
bruja
!”

Murgull stopped.  She eyed Maria with a crooked, close-mouthed smile, letting everyone see her inspecting the spirals and stars painted in lipstick and ashes over Maria’s bare arms and legs.  Then she released Olivia and gave her a dismissive shove away from her, clearing the battlefield.  “Is it not a frog that I hear croaking?” she asked, so mildly that at least a dozen gullan backed uneasily away.  “Use your tongue to catch flies, before it gets you into trouble.”

“You only think you know what trouble is,” Maria sneered, and raised her hand in that forked fist.  “But you are about to find out.”

There was no silence in the wake of this challenge.  There was instead a great many-voiced caw, not unlike a flock of crows (a murder of crows, Olivia’s brain commented, and yes, thank you, murder was just the right word) startled into flight.  Tools were dropped, labors abandoned, and gullan fled seemingly at random through every and any available egress.  In moments, there were only three left (Horumn, of course, and two others as ancient and unimpressed as she) and the humans, and Olivia didn’t know whether to be amused or dismayed by the apprehension she saw on too many of their faces.  It was not like a group of women about to see a good old-fashioned catfight erupt, but a group of schoolyard girls filled with the superstitious terror that comes from seeing one of their own step boldly on that mother-crippling crack, or begin the chanting summons for Bloody Mary.  Carla, Karen, Liz, even
Beth
—all shrinking back as from the shadow of the Devil Herself, and not from Murgull, who was at least sincerely horrible, but from
Maria
, from that big, fat, phony Mojo Woman.

But Murgull didn’t flinch.  Murgull didn’t move at all.  As humans and gullan alike scattered around her, Murgull regarded Maria with a tender smile beneath a cold and burning stare and only after it was quiet again (and here was the silence she had first expected, a whole cavern’s worth of held breath) did she speak.  “Do that, little frog,” she said.  “You do that.  We will see which of us has stronger magic.  There are so many things a little bald frog can eat, and drink…and breathe… and brush her little bald flippers against in Murgull’s dark mountain.  So put out your hand to me, eh?  Go on.  Speak my name.  Spit your curse at me, human, and let us begin.”

Maria lowered her arm, but not before Olivia—and hopefully everyone else—saw her hand tremble.  “I wouldn’t waste my time,” she mumbled, but she said it in English.  She edged back, found her grinding stone, and got back down on the floor, flushed and tight-lipped.

“And you, you lazy maggot,” Murgull continued, crooking her claws at Olivia.  “Did I tell you to rest?  You come with old Murgull now.  Time to see things, know things.  Make things, maybe, for little frogs to drink.”  She threw back her ruined head and groaned laughter, not even glancing at the other humans, then limped from the cave.

Olivia ran after her.  The last thing she heard as she followed Murgull’s rapidly receding form into the tunnel was Amy’s wry, “Here’s a little free advice for you, Mojo.  Never piss off a
real
witch.”

Murgull caught Olivia’s arm just outside and leaned on her a little as she trotted along.  She was still chuckling off and on, just this side of under her breath.  “Mojo old Murgull,” she kept saying, her tone one of faint wonder.