Olivia (64 page)

She rolled over and shook Vorgullum awake.

He came alert quickly, confused and initially angry.  One look at her pale and frightened face changed his whole demeanor.  “What is it?”

Olivia took a breath, shook her head, and said, “Wake everyone up, now.  We have to go.”

14

“Take only what you can carry,” Vorgullum was saying, amplifying his voice by cupping his mouth.  “We can come back for the rest.  Wear as many clothes as you can.  Do not bring fuel, there will be something to burn at the new site.  Horumn is bringing burning coals to light all the new hearths.  Do not try to take fire of your own.”

“You’re crazy,” Karen cried out shrilly, waving an arm at Olivia.  “It’s the middle of winter, we just barely got a decent hunt in!  We can’t possibly survive a trip like this!”

“Who are you, my conscience?” Olivia shot back.  “Do you think I don’t know these things already?  Don’t you think I’m terrified, too?”

“There are seventy-one gullan capable of flight,” Kurlun reported grimly, coming up to Vorgullum with an equally grim-looking Amy at his side.  “Of that number, maybe forty could manage to carry the weight of another.  We will have to make several trips to move us all.”

“How far is this new mountain?” Vorgullum asked.

Olivia could only shake her head.  “In my dream, we went much faster than any gulla.  It could be days away.”

“Days?” Amy echoed.  “Camping above the snowline in the friggin’ Cascades?”

“The Great Spirit would not give us warning only to kill us with cold,” Kurlun said, but he sounded unsure.

Amy rolled her eyes.  “Yeah, if he means to kill us, he’ll do it with giant, mutant mammoths or something.”

Kurlun hooked those words out of the air and looked uneasily skyward.

“The strongest fliers can carry the humans and the crippled gullan in waves,” Vorgullum said edgily.  “The weaker ones can carry our supplies and make camp.  We can hunt as we go and come back for our stores once we have arrived at the new mountain.  Doru!”  He moved off to catch at his chief hunter’s arm and then two of them drew away to confer.

“This is a hell of a risk to take over a dream,” Tina said, joining them.  She frowned at Olivia, not with anger, but with uncertainty.  “The odds of a search team, even equipped with infrared devices, finding this place—”

“Don’t talk to me about odds,” Amy snapped.  “Just remember that people win the lottery all the time.  Whether or not they find us is almost completely irrelevant.  All they have to do is blunder around the mountain long enough to starve us safe in our damn lairs!”

Gullan and humans looked at each other uneasily.

“Do you really think someone’s going to get that close?” Tina asked, her brows knitting.

Amy snorted.  “Somehow, I doubt that Urga would have bothered taking Olivia for a magic carpet ride if no one was coming.  And before you ask, yes, I am completely convinced it was the real, live, honest-to-Christmas Urga.”

Tina looked at Olivia, then at Amy.  “Why?”

“I don’t know.”  Now Amy frowned, her hands rising to rest on the swell of her hard stomach.  “All I know is, I’ve been an atheist for ten years, and when I saw her face—”  Amy’s eyes met Olivia’s, dark and troubled.  “—I about pissed myself.  I don’t do that over bad dreams.”

Vorgullum returned, looking back over his shoulder.  “It is dark,” he said, “and the snows have eased.  It must be now.  To your mates, both of you.  Olivia, to me.”

She followed close at his side as he led his tribe out of the commons, to the bottom of the entry shaft and into the cold wind that blew down from the world above.  He shouldered the pack of his few possessions, pulled her up into his arms, and began to climb.

When he had brought her down this very wall, so many months before, it had seemed endless.  Now, it was no time at all before a tiny icy sting reintroduced her to snow, and then she was out, looking up into a night of whirling flakes and a few, dim stars behind sullen clouds.  She kept her head tipped back, her hands clasped behind Vorgullum’s head as he brought her easily up and out of the mountain, into a winter as sharp as a hunting knife.

Vorgullum set Olivia on a rough aerie of sorts and stepped out to stand beside her.  It was hard to look at him, hard to see the anguish in his eyes as he strained for the calm that a leader should always project.  “I did so much to stay here,” he said.

“I want you alive to miss it,” she replied, and he enfolded her in his arms again, staring out at the mountains over her head as behind them, other gullan similarly burdened heaved themselves out of the only home they had ever known: Kurlun and Amy, Doru and Tobi, Wurlgunn with Beth riding piggy-back so she wouldn’t have to trust his clumsy hands to hold her, and then Kodjunn, who heaved a massive bundle up on the aerie at their feet and climbed up after it.

“Leave it,” Vorgullum said without looking.

“It’s Cheyenne,” Kodjunn explained.  As if to demonstrate, the bundle made a muffled yowl of rage and writhed on the aerie, prompting Kodjunn to set his foot in the middle of the mass and press it flat.

Vorgullum eyed the bag of human.  “Throw her off,” he said shortly and looked back out at the horizon.

Olivia stepped back from him, stunned.

“No,” said Kodjunn.

Vorgullum sighed, scritched his claws over his furrowed brow, then turned and seized the bound human with grim resolve.

“No!” Olivia cried, but it was Kodjunn’s hand that caught Vorgullum’s wrist.

“She’s pregnant,” said the
sigruum
wearily.

Vorgullum did not initially move.  He looked at Kodjunn, then down at the writhing canvas bag.  “Are you certain?”

“Murgull is certain.”

Vorgullum’s eyes narrowed.  He looked out at the world, thinking, his claws still sunk into the bag, and presumably, into Cheyenne.  At last, he locked eyes with Kodjunn and waited for the other to reluctantly remove his hand.

Olivia took a half-step forward and Kodjunn caught her by the shoulder.

“No,” he said.

“But—”

“He is
tovorak
.  No.”

Vorgullum stood the bag on its feet, thrust down brutally with his claws to open the canvas and drew Cheyenne out by her hair.  She started to scream and he locked his hand around her throat and swung her out over the aerie.

“Look at me,” he said.

Cheyenne’s eyes squeezed open.  Both her hands clutched at his; her legs cycled futilely in empty space over the whistling black of the drop-off.

“I am going to carry you,” Vorgullum said.  His voice was calm.  His eyes were pitiless, impassive.  “I will carry you only so long as you lie still in my arms.  Only so long.  No longer.  Do you understand me?”

Cheyenne’s hands clawed at him spastically.

“Do you understand me?”  Cool.  Relentless.

“…essss….”

He brought her back over the aerie and set her down.  Deliberately, he removed his hand from her and turned his back on her.  Cheyenne clutched her throat and swallowed air, eyes shut and leaking tears.  Vorgullum said, “I trust you to bear my mate and child on this journey,
sigruum
.”

Kodjunn nodded once, wrapping one wing around her.

Vorgullum looked at Olivia with eyes that still held little of mercy or emotion and which silently said he would have given much to keep her from having seen it.  “Which way?” Vorgullum softly asked her.

She could only point.

He looked out in the direction she indicated, frowning.  “North,” he said.  “I’ve never heard of any of our kind who dwelled there.  I had always believed this tribe to be the northernmost.”

“So did I,” Kodjunn agreed, plainly troubled.

“The aerie is full,” a gulla called.  “Someone has to jump off before we can keep coming.”

“To the north, then,” Vorgullum commanded, his voice booming out into the still night.  “North, to the home the Great Spirit provides us!”  He took impersonal hold of Cheyenne and leapt into the air without another word.

An instant later, Kodjunn followed.  Olivia wrapped her limbs helplessly around him, hating the feeling that came with suddenly losing kinship with the ground.  The wind of their passage chilled her to the bone, and soon her teeth were chattering uncontrollably, despite her many layers of heavy clothing.

She considered, not for the first time, that she could easily be sending the entire tribe to their deaths.  Either the cold would kill them, or they’d die of hunger when they couldn’t manage to chase up enough game as they traveled.  But the thing that worried her the most was the thought that they would never find the mountains seen in her dream, because they didn’t exist.

Olivia buried her head in Kodjunn’s chest, hiding her face from the freezing sky.  Once again, there was nothing to do but let herself be carried.

15

There were seven stops in that twelve-hour night, but no complaints, not even from those strong flyers who had to make several treks back and forth from the stopping points while everyone else rested.  Vorgullum refused to leave what he perceived as the safety of the higher altitudes and so they flew along the mountains, in the bitter cold and blowing snow, ever watchful for a good place to camp out the daylit hours, but it wasn’t until just before dawn that Wurlgunn stumbled on the perfect place.

That is, he tried to bank too hard and fell out of the sky at full speed, slamming through a snow pack and into a small collection of sheltered, cozy caves.  Of course, no one saw this immediately, and so everyone was landing and running towards the place they’d seen him vanish, calling out his name.

“We’re all right!” Beth called from within.  “His head broke his fall.  Come and see!”

The snow pack was probably twenty feet thick at its thickest point, and Wurlgunn had only broken through at all because of his momentum, weight, and the dumb luck to hit at a high angle where the ice was light and the snow only four feet deep.  The cave it concealed was a massive one, easily containing the entire tribe, and with the bundles of their supplies blocking the entry hole, their combined body heat was enough to keep them from being too miserable.  Once Horumn got a fire going out of the few coals she’d carried with her in a cow’s horn, it was even fairly comfortable.

For several hours, everyone pretended to sleep.

And then Bolga began to cry.

Horumn tried to hush her, but the harder she tried, the harder Bolga cried, and soon Murgull rose from her place near the back and stumbled over various gullan to reach them.

“Too soon for her to be so active,” Horumn whispered loudly.  “She is in a great deal of pain.”

“Make her drink this,” Murgull said.  “It will soothe the cramping and help her sleep.”

Bolga’s sobbed swung briefly into a child’s temper tantrum.  “No!” she screamed.  “Nasty drink!  Bolga won’t!”

Horumn spoke to her in a stern, low voice, and Bolga’s cries tapered off into sniffles.  There were messy gulps, then more sniffles, and finally quiet.

Olivia waited for it, counting slowly backwards from ten.  She had reached the number three when Horumn finally asked, “Why are we doing this?”

From the low groans and muffled sighs that swept the cavern, Olivia had not been alone in anticipating the question.

“Bolga is hurt inside,” Horumn added, switching tactics.  “She cannot keep this pace again tomorrow.  She could die if she does!  And it takes two of us to carry Murgull!”

“Then leave Murgull!” Murgull snapped.  “Let Olivia be the tribe’s new nuisance.  She knows all now that I knew then, anyway.”

“Olivia?” Horumn repeated, stunned.  “It is Olivia’s nonsense we’ve chased out into this damned cold!  If anyone should be left behind—”

“No one will be left behind,” Vorgullum growled warningly.

“—it should
be
Olivia!” Horumn finished, glaring at him.

Vorgullum started to get up, but Olivia pulled him back down.  She stood up instead.  “Are you cold, Horumn?”

Horumn glared at her, then dropped her eyes.  “No colder now than tunnels back home.”  She looked back up fiercely.  “But the wind in the air is biting me!”

“Speaking of biting,” Tina said in low English.  “Have you thought about frostbite, Olivia?  Fingers falling off?  Hypothermia, for God’s sake?”

“Look,” Olivia said bluntly, turning back to Horumn, “I am just as miserable as you are.  Humans are bald and fragile.”

Horumn muttered under her breath and dropped her eyes again.

“But to stay in that mountain and risk discovery is more than we can leave to chance.  If you’re cold, you can get warm.  If you’re tired, you can rest.  What can you do if you’re pinned in by a band of hunting humans?  What can you do if you’re found by them and killed?”

“Even if all they do is hover around the mountain and never actually find us at all,” Amy put in.  “Humans are notoriously slow when it comes to giving up.  They’re not going to be looking for days, they’ll be looking for moon-spans.  And if they were to find something, they could still be picking over the mountain for a year!”

“It was a dream!” Horumn exploded.  Then, rapidly, as though to excuse her outburst, “Sometimes a dream is just a dream!  You’re all losing your mind over this because the Great Spirit touched her once before.”

Kodjunn cleared his throat and sat up.  “You’re right, Horumn.  How many stories are told of the Great Spirit or Urga appearing once and never again?  And how much folly has come from a gulla chasing such visions? 
Tovorak
Woonag saw the Great Spirit as a child and spent the rest of his life trying to make himself worthy enough for a visitation which never came.”

“Yes!” Horumn agreed, pouncing on the example.  “And he led his tribe to one disaster after another!”

“So let us have a test,” Kodjunn suggested.  “We will stand you and Olivia outside and ask the Great Spirit to strike dead the one who is wrong.”

Silence.

Horumn and Olivia both stared at him, conscious of every eye in the room open and upon them.

“Horumn?” Kodjunn prompted.

As one, the gulla and the human looked towards each other.  Their gaze met and held as the entire tribe watched.