Olivia (48 page)

They could probably hear her all the way back in the commons.

Olivia shut herself up the only way she could, by seizing Vorgullum in both hands and biting down hard on his shoulder, just exactly where he liked to press his thrumming mouth during what he considered foreplay.

He howled, withdrew, slammed back as deep as he could go, and she felt his seed batter at the wall of her womb in a spastic fury.  Then he dropped, crushing the breath from her body with the full, sudden weight of him. 

They lay there, scraping one another’s ears with the sound of panting and the shocked sort of silence that always seems to follow the best and wildest bouts of sex.  She knew he had begun to come back to himself when he remembered to shift a little, let her breathe.

“So,” she said, before he could anything stupid, like ask if she were all right.  “It was a good start.  Are you ready for more?”

“Heartless woman,” he growled and, to her laughing surprise, fell over her again.

17

Much later, Vorgullum reached out one foot and prodded Olivia in the ribs.  “Tell me,” he said lazily.  “What is it about a good hunt that sends everyone tumbling backwards into bed?”

“You flatter yourself,” she told him.  “After five days of mourning for Lorchumn and Judith, we all needed some release.”

“Truth.”  He crunched up one wing painstakingly and rolled onto his side so he could scratch his stomach.  “I hoped he’d return with a new mate.”

“He knows, but he wasn’t ready.” 

“It is soon,” Vorgullum agreed.  “And his grief must still be strong, but I wasn’t thinking just about breeding.  It would have given him someone to hunt for, and a reason to keep coming home.” 

“Eventually, perhaps, but first it would have given him another frightened, hysterical woman he couldn’t communicate with.  That is not what he needs to help him heal.”

“Hm.”  He lay there quietly, thinking about that.  “Perhaps I should permit him to take a gullan mate.”

“When you forbid all the others?”

He grunted again, thought some more.  “I could order a woman to meet with him in secret.  One I can trust not to catch his spark.”

“If he was ready for that, he wouldn’t need you to make such arrangements,” Olivia pointed out.

Vorgullum dismissed that with a flap of his hand.  “Lorchumn doesn’t know what he needs.”

“And you can’t solve the entire tribe’s problems with sex.”

“Yes I can,” he said, and rubbed idly at her naked hip.  “What is the matter with Kodjunn?”

“With who?” she echoed sleepily.

“You must know him, the way you stare…His mate has red hair with a dark stripe down the center.”

“Kodjunn?” she repeated, becoming a little more alert.  “Is that his name?”

“I don’t know what to do about it,” he murmured.  “They don’t get along, that’s no secret, but this goes well beyond that.  He has to set a watch over her whenever he leaves his lair, and now I hear he is locking her in the women’s tunnels.  All the other humans have settled…to some degree.  All but that one.”

“He’s not a good mate to her,” Olivia began hesitantly.

He snorted.  “She’s not a good mate to him.  Great Spirit, but the things she has done to him!  Her very first night in this mountain, she threw a lit lamp at him, tried to suffocate him with bedding, and beat him with the fire poker.  She missed his eye by a hair’s breadth on that one, and he was unconscious nearly two days.  And that was just the first night!”

“Vorgullum…you have to understand how frightened and angry she was, how we all were.  I can’t blame her for fighting back.”

He shifted uncomfortably, then got up.  “I’m not
blaming
her, Olivia.  I know what we did to you.”  She heard him at the hearth, and then sparks struck and soon he was lighting candles.  “But Kodjunn is a good man.”

“He hits her.”

“She hits him.”  He snapped his folded wings in a tight, gullan shrug. “The wind blows both ways.”

And this was exactly the way she’d always believed this conversation would go, but her heart still sank.  She sat up in the pit, pulling her sleeping bag up over her breasts like a shield, wondering how much to tell him, how hard to try and make him understand, when all it could possibly bring her was that steely glint in his eyes and the ghost of those terrible words: Think of healthy young.

“He hurts her when they mate,” she said softly.

He frowned at her.  “What do you mean?”

“She says…”  His expression was so dark and serious that Olivia’s throat tightened.  It actually hurt to speak, but she swallowed past the constriction and said, “She says he hits her.  He hits her and that’s what makes him…ready.  He hits her where it can’t show, and then he…he mates with her so that it hurts as much as it can.”

Vorgullum stood there as the candle in his hand slowly tipped, spilling wax in unnoticed rivulets over his fingers and onto the floor.  “I do not believe this,” he said at last, as calmly and conversationally as if he were telling her the color of her eyes, or the condition of the weather.

“She told me she’s afraid he’ll kill her.”

He continued to stare at her for a long time, and then he looked away, towards the fire.  “Olivia,” he said, “don’t be angry with me, but I cannot believe that.  Not of Kodjunn.”  He looked back at her hopefully.  “Could she have meant that he coupled with her against her will?  None of you were very willing, in the beginning, but that’s not the same as violence.  And…And I have hurt you.”  It was not an easy admission for him, and he could not meet her eyes afterwards.  “Without wishing to, I have hurt you terribly.  Perhaps it was her season.  It’s not always possible for a male to be…careful.”

Olivia took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “She hasn’t been in season every night, Vorgullum.  But she tells me that every night he comes to her, he beats her.  If that isn’t enough to make him ready, he uses other things inside her.”

He flinched back as though slapped and gaped at her.  “I…I will order someone to listen outside his lair.  If I can confirm this, I will remove her from him and…and see him punished.”  He stood there, stunned and a little ill-looking, then turned away and put on his loincloth.  “Kodjunn. 
Kodjunn
!”

“Thank you,” Olivia said softly.

“I am glad you told me,” he answered, distracted.  “This never should have gone on so long.  Kodjunn.  Wait here.”  His claws tapped away and she heard the faint scuffling sounds as he climbed down the chimney and was away.

Olivia drowsed until he returned, and listened to him ready himself for bed again.  He slipped into the pit with her and lay his hand on her hip.

“All right?” she asked.

“Doru will keep an ear on him tonight.  However…”  He trailed off, then inched a little closer.  “Mudmar and Ellen have chambers just beside them.  I spoke to them both, in confidence.  Mudmar says he has heard her angry voice often, but no sounds of violence.  Ellen says she hasn’t seen marks or bruises on the woman’s body and they’ve bathed together several times.  Neither one came out and said, ‘She is lying’ but I think both believed so.”

Olivia considered this, her own head spinning, then rolled over and looked at him, troubled.  “Why would she lie about something like that?”

He shook his head, frustrated.  “She wants to see him punished, I suppose, but if that’s so, why go to you instead of me?”

“Well, if it is true, she’d be afraid to go to you, because you’re a male and she might think you’d only laugh at her.”

His expression darkened.  “If not throw her down and rut with her.  But why not go to Murgull?”  He considered his own words more closely.  “Murgull would have been able to provide potions to dull Kodjunn’s passion, or make him sleep all day.  If not kill him.  There is no surer means of killing a rutting man than with old Murgull’s wrath.”

“Again, if it is true, she may not see any gulla as her friend.  And Murgull is pretty scary.”  Her own words sounded feeble, though.  She tried to run her conversations with Cheyenne through her mind, but kept arriving at the same question:  Had Cheyenne come up with this story of violence just to convince Olivia to aid her in her escape?

She ran the episodes with Kodjunn back through her mind, but aside from that business on the chasm wall, there wasn’t much to go on.  Oh, he was sensitive enough about his love life, but as for this business with Bolga…well, had that been Bolga she saw that day?  She had been so certain of it once she’d seen Bolga standing in full light in the commons, but might it not have been Chugg?  It had been pretty dim, and hunchback and balding hair are easy to hide when one is flat on one’s back on a bench.

But barking isn’t, and if Doru could be believed, Chugg barked.  Bolga had been moaning pretty loudly, at least until her mouth had been covered, but not barking.  Anyway, Chugg was ‘safe’, wasn’t she?  Why would Kodjunn need to meet with a safe female in the middle of the night when he could walk down to the women’s tunnels in broad daylight (so to speak) and ask for her?

“I am so confused,” she said aloud.

He hugged her close, looked equally uncertain.  “I hope you’ve been misled, Olivia,” he said.  “I hope that with all my heart and soul.  But be assured that if you are correct in your suspicions, justice will be done.”

“That’s comforting,” she replied, but it wasn’t.  One way or another, it was all about to become a moot point because Cheyenne intended to escape.

With Olivia’s help.

Just what I need.  More angst-ridden indecision
.  Olivia squeezed her eyes shut, counted one hundred breaths, and tried to let it all go.  Even so, it was a long time before she found her way into a thin, troubled sleep and the last thing she heard before it happened was Cheyenne’s voice saying, ‘One way or the other, that’ll be the end of it.’

18

She spent the day with Murgull, but her efforts at potion-making were disastrous.  No matter how she tried to concentrate, thoughts of Cheyenne kept stealing in.  After dark, she’d said, and every minute took her that much closer to the escape which Olivia had promised to be part of.  She burned herbs, spilled tinctures, dropped jars, and finally was thrown bodily out through Murgull’s hidden door with both ears ringing to find her way back to her lair alone.

Vorgullum was there when she arrived, but he was only dropping off her dinner.

“Won’t you stay?” she asked, knowing already that he wouldn’t.

“I have a tribe of nearly two hundred to provide for,” he replied, yawning.  “Two elk are not enough, and it is already getting hard to find apples.  Our stores should be half-filled with nut-mash and instead, they are all but empty.  There will be hunts every night until the snows come, I think.”

“Is it night already?” she asked, apprehensive.

He nodded, rubbing at his eyes.  “I’ll try not to wake you when I come home.”  He came to kiss her, then took up his spear again.  “I brought you a book to read while I’m away,” he said in parting, pulling open his belt pouch and tossing a newspaper into the pit beside her.

She thanked him, reaching for it, and by the time the shock of the headline had fully sunk in, he was gone.

CULT BLAMED FOR MYSTERIOUS MASS DISAPPEARANCES

Two men were held for questioning Friday afternoon in relation to the mass disappearance of seventeen women from High Hill Apartments in Canby.  Larry Kruegun, 41, and William Sanderson, 18, claim to be disciples of an unnamed cult leader whom they refer to as “the Messiah”.  The two men turned themselves in to police after receiving instructions to do so “in code, over an antennae implanted in our molars.”  In an earlier interview with this paper, the suspects have claimed that the women are alive and being held on Jupiter’s fourth moon as the Messiah’s wives.

The Canby Sheriff’s Department has released a statement pertaining to the arrests, stating that while all leads are being investigated, there is no evidence connecting the men to the missing women.  “At this point, neither of (the suspects) were able to pick out any of the ladies from a photo line-up, and they were trying.  There are a number of discrepancies in their story, and there is the issue of credibility,” said Deputy Thomas Hatcher.

The women vanished from High Hill Apartment on July 13, between the hours of midnight…

The article continued on another page, but Olivia was laughing too hard to bother looking for it.  She folded the paper and set it down on the bench before going into the washroom to clean herself up for the evening.  After spending most of the day worrying about Cheyenne, Kodjunn, and where Olivia fit between them, the ridiculous news item was just what she needed to get herself geared up to face the night.

She dressed, ran a comb through her hair, and found herself a working flashlight in the candle-bin.  She wasn’t certain how long this thing with Cheyenne and Kodjunn was supposed to last, but she made sure the fire would still be burning for at least four hours.

This completed, she took a final look around the pit, steeling herself for what was certain to be unpleasant one way or another, and left for the hot springs.  It was late, and the mainway was as busy as it could get with such a small tribe inhabiting it.  The gullan she passed raised their hands to her, either on their way to their lairs for sleep or on their way out to join the night-hunt, but as soon as she turned off the wide tunnel into the winding passage that led to the depths, she was alone.

Just as well, really.  She would have welcomed a ride down to the bottom of the Deep Drop, but didn’t want company once she was there.  She only wanted to get this meeting with Cheyenne over and done with.

She could feel her arms aching by the time she’d climbed only halfway down, however, and it worried her.  How was she going to get back up with the whole mountain asleep or off chasing deer through the forest?  She supposed she could make that part of the distraction, but she really did not want to be trapped in his arms again.  Sure, she’d been in season the last time and maybe he couldn’t help himself…but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen again.