Olivia (17 page)

“And you?”

She made a smile for him.  He gazed at it gravely, then at their hands, joined together over her knee.

“I cannot give you the freedom I know you desire,” he said.  “The freedom I know you deserve.”

“Because I’m human,” Olivia said, and thought of Tina saying that they could do everything right, but they would never really be one of them, and when they got tired of waiting for the babies it was impossible to make with them…

Vorgullum got up and went to stand by the fire.  “I am leader before I am your mate,” he said.  “I must consider the possibility of escape and what it would mean to us.  Already, we have become a people of the under-earth, a people who do not dare to fly under the sun, a people who learned to fear humans when all they could hurl against us were stones!”

“You don’t trust me.”

“I cannot trust you!”  He swung with a curse, his claws striking chips from the wall in four deep gouges.  “I cannot trust anyone, Olivia!  I must be leader first!”

“Stop hiding behind that!” she shot back, knowing she needed to stop before the strained tether between them snapped entirely.  “That’s not an excuse!  You told me you wanted us to be your mates!  Why are you still treating us like enemies?”

He recoiled, but came back swiftly and with real anger.  “Why do you still sit and cry over your human book if you are so eager to be tribe?”

“What am I supposed to do with it?” Olivia asked, incredulous.  “Burn it, just to prove that I’m one of you?”

He glared at her, stiff-backed.  “When I see that you are ready to be tribe,” he began.

“Oh no, you don’t!”  She was on her feet in a heart-beat, standing toe to clawed toe with him, her hands in shaking fists.  “You don’t get to hold that over us!  You don’t get to force us to fit our whole world into bags we could carry and then tell us to throw it away if we ever want to see another human face!  You don’t tell us not to cry when we think about the families you stole from us!”

“Enough!”

“No, it isn’t enough, damn it!  We had lives and you took them and I don’t care why you did it, we have to stay here for the rest of our lives and we
get
to feel bad about that!  We get to
hate
that!”

“They do not ‘hate that’,” Vorgullum snarled.  “They hate us!”

“Oh, what could we possibly do to you?” she cried, throwing up her arms.  “The damned chute to this cave is more than I can climb, who do you think is going to climb all the way out of the mountain?”

Vorgullum’s stare hardened in that way she had come to know so well, the way she had come to dread.  “I can’t take that risk.”

“Then stop calling us your mates.  Stop calling us tribe.  Stop giving us hope if you’re just going to hide behind risk for the rest of our lives.  That’s what being a leader seems to mean to you.”

He looked at her, only looked at her, his entire body as hard as the shine in his eyes.   And still she couldn’t stop.

“We don’t have to be happy to get what you want from us,” she hissed.  “We don’t have to know how to speak your words.”  Her voice, pulled tighter and tighter, finally cracked.  “Tina was right.  We can do everything you tell us to, but we will never be one of you.  Get out.”

His nostrils flared.

“I have to stay, so you get out.  Get out, or I’ll leave just to make you drag me back.”  She advanced on him as he backed away, no longer just shouting but screaming at him. “I’ll make you see the monster you are!”

He went.

Olivia stood in the sleeping room’s doorway, her hands trembling where they gripped the rock, staring into the blackness where he’d vanished until it sank in that he wasn’t coming back.  Then she stumbled back to her alcove.  She sat.  Somewhere along the line, she began to cry again.  This time, she didn’t try to stop.

2

She was sitting in front of the fireplace when she heard the footsteps behind her.  She didn’t turn around.  Not until the gullan hand came flying around and slapped up hard against her ear.

Olivia’s first cry was little more than a yelp of surprise.  She scrambled back, grabbing at the side of her head as the hot, throbbing hurt spread out and finally registered as pain.  She looked up, but all her angry words died when she saw who it was.

Murgull’s extremely ugly half a face glowered down at her.  “Did I call you clever, eh?  May the foolish tongue rot in old Murgull’s mouth!”

Olivia rubbed her stinging ear and watched as the old gulla dragged herself to a bench and dropped atop it, unable to meet the disdainful glare of the other for more than a few seconds at a time.  In a shaky mumble, she heard herself trying to explain, but Murgull let her get as far as being alone all day before she pulled back her arm and gave Olivia one upside the other ear.

“He is leader!” the old gulla spat as she howled.  “You think he could not have you all in chains if he wished to keep slaves?  You think no one here has told him this?  You think it would not be easier than to coddle and care for you maggots?”

“He won’t even let us see each other!” Olivia cried out.

Murgull rocked forward with startling speed, putting her hideous face right up against Olivia’s to sneer.  “Whining whelp!  Milk-mouthed bawler!  Here does old Murgull sit with withered wings and thorns in her bones and one eye full of fog so that you can snivel that you are lonely, oh so lonely!”

“Leave me alone!”

“Oh no, maggot, I am not your mate to fold my wings and slink away when you wet your eyes and wail at me.  Clever Olivia,” she said scornfully, leaning away as though she were looking at a smear of something foul on the sole of her foot.  “Look what you have done with your clever mouth now.”

“What was I supposed to do, thank him?  He wouldn’t even tell me if the others were alive or dead until the day he needed me to threaten them!  I got one night to see them, just one, and I guess that was supposed to be good enough for me!”

“And this is how you ask for more?”

“Why should I have to ask?” she demanded, flushing.  “How many times have you ever had to ask for permission to see your own people?  He won’t let us speak our own language, and now he wants to burn my book!  Why should I pretend to believe him when he calls me his mate?  Why should I make it easier for him to keep us as slaves?”

Murgull’s mouth twisted, but she only grunted.  Some of the scornful fire went out of her stare, but only some of it.  She watched Olivia seethe herself back under control, then gave her neck folds a rub and said, “Easy to see you as slaves when you lie quiet in your mate’s lair, you say.  Old Murgull says, easier when you defy him.”

“Since we’re slaves either way, why shouldn’t we fight?”

“Fight?”  Murgull’s good eye narrowed.  “So now you croak the words of other frogs, eh?  Wise Olivia.  Clever Olivia.  Could you win such a fight, you and all your humans together?”

“Tina says—”

“Bah!  This one says and that one says!  When you had no humans to listen to, you knew better!  When it was only Olivia and Olivia’s thoughts, did you think you were his slave, eh?”

“I…”  Her voice faltered; she shored it up quickly.  “I thought I could make the best of things.  But apparently, this is the best of things, and it’s really not that damn great.”

“Could be worse,” Murgull grunted.  “Could be better.  You have the power to convince your mate one way or the other.  Which way did you turn him tonight, eh?”

Olivia couldn’t answer that.

“He is leader,” Murgull said.  “He must show no doubt, no hesitation, when he stands before his tribe.  Yours are the only words he will ever bend his neck to hear, and you do your humans no good work to fill his ears with poison.”

“They are not my humans!”

“Oh, but they are, my little wingless sister.  As much as we are his, so they are yours.  The leader’s mate stands tall beside him.  The leader’s slave does not.  Which would you rather be now, eh?  Eh?”

Olivia dropped her eyes and stared fixedly into the firelight, her cheeks actually throbbing with the violence of her blush.

“You think I do not know what your sisters are saying, just because I do not know your words?  Ha!  You can think of nothing that old Murgull has not already thought.”  Murgull gave her neck-skin a particularly vicious twist and gazed deep into the embers.  “You think he does not want you to see your humans so that you will not know when one dies, is that it?  Ha!  Did he fear to show you one gone mad?  You whine because he has made you carry his words to your people.  Are you not his mate?  You are his mouth, yes!  His ears and his eyes also, and his hands, when his own carry too much.  This, he does not demand of a slave.  This, he trusts only to a mate.”

Olivia wiped at her eyes, her lips pressed tightly together. 

Murgull studied her and then the flickering coals.  At last, she grumbled under her breath and said, “This maggot who says you will never be tribe…does she say also you will be killed if your human bellies can’t bear our young?”

“I don’t believe that,” Olivia said curtly.

“No?  Then come, little sister.  I will take you back to the tunnels and show you desperation floating in a newborn’s death-box.”  Murgull bared her remaining teeth in a cheerless smile and leaned back.  “You will always be strange, you humans.  It will always be easy to see you as something different and dangerous.  Each time that your blood comes, the hearth of our hope grows colder.  I will not promise you a hundred years of peace while my people die.  No, I will not promise you ten!  There is only one in this mountain who can make such promises, and what did you say to him, eh?  What did you do?  Now perhaps he thinks that if you would fight him, even
you
, why must he insist on this dream of mates and tribe?  Why, when chains are so simple and so sure?”

“This isn’t fair!” Olivia burst out, once more on the knife’s edge of tears.

Murgull pulled back her arm to strike, but then slowly lowered it again.  “No, little sister, it is not.  But here we are, all the same.”

“I want to go home!” she wailed, and started crying hard.

“I want my eye back,” the old gulla replied, with just a hint of acid in her implacable tone.  She let Olivia sob out a few shuddering breaths while she watched the embers, but only a few.  “Useless,” she muttered, scowling.  “There never was a hurt healed by tears, or a fever broken, or a belly filled.  Stop it.”

And Olivia, somewhat to her surprise, did.  She sat wiping at her hot cheeks, and finally whispered.  “What am I supposed to do?”

“Think.  Your own thoughts, eh?  Not thoughts of angry humans.”  Murgull grunted and heaved herself up again.  “And not thoughts of old, dried-up Murgull and her rotting teeth.  You think, little sister, and I go.  When your mates comes, best he find a clever mate who does not need old Murgull chewing her ears before she knows she must beg his forgiveness for her foolishness.”

“Beg,” Olivia echoed, too worn to protest more than that.

“And remember when you do, that what he sees in you, ha, he believes of all the others.  So you will beg, won’t you?”

Olivia shut her eyes against the light of the fire.  “Yes.”

“And he will forgive.”  That gnarled and time-softened hand came down briefly to grip her shoulder—a hard comfort, but perhaps the best that she knew how to give.  This was not a world where comfort came easily to anyone.  Then the footsteps retreated the way they had come, and Olivia was alone again.

3

By the time Vorgullum returned, Olivia’s resentment and depression had mostly run its course.  Of course, she still wished for things to be different, and most of all she wished for the chance to see the other women and talk with them, because her instincts told her this was a life that could still be lived well, and she had never been the sort of person who trusted her instincts.  Tina’s matter-of-fact attitude wasn’t exactly heartening, but it did have a way of anchoring one to reality instead of drifting uncertainty.  Even Cheyenne, who’d had no real advice, had burned with the sort of fiery courage that had at least made her feel as though there was something they could do about the whole situation.  Maybe not escape, which was surely what Cheyenne thought, but something.  Murgull seemed to think Olivia’s ‘make the best of it’ approach was best, but best for who, really?

And that wasn’t fair, because, as her sociology professor had been apt to remark, when he wasn’t going on about
Gilligan’s Island
, “We are all the center of our own universe.”  Having the human baby-makers docile in their captivity definitely was best for the gullan who hoped to breed by them, but (and these were the untrustworthy instincts Olivia really wished she had a second opinion on) it also seemed best for the captives themselves.  If escape ever did become an option, it would only be possible if the would-be escapees had the trust of their guards and the liberty to move about and make plans.  And if not, well, at least they could live out their new lives with a modicum of freedom and purpose—if not the child-bearing purpose the gullan intended, at least as productive members of the tribe. 

She didn’t want to apologize.  She didn’t think the responsibility for that was entirely hers, but with weary reluctance she had to accept that if she didn’t make the first move, the space between them would become insurmountable.  This was her world now, and it would be what she made it.

It was to this Olivia that Vorgullum returned at the end of his day.  He seemed wary as he entered the sleeping room, wary but encouraged, especially when she did not immediately leap up and renew the quarrel.  He folded his wings close, a guarded gesture softened somewhat by his deep nod, which she was coming to recognize as an invitation for that forehead-bump the gullan favored since they didn’t kiss.  She offered him half a smile from where she sat in her alcove, and he came a little closer and brought out some strips of meat from his belt-pouch.

“I did not know if I would be welcome at  mid-day,” he said, offering one.  “So I thought it best to stay away.  You must be very hungry.”

“I am, but I think it was good for me.  It reminded me that you have never let me go hungry before.  With the whole tribe to oversee, you have never neglected me.”