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Rena had a large rain-soaked sack on her back. The promised food, but it could wait.
The next birthing pain took Rena before she was even settled. Glad for the firelight, Bab untied her friend’s skirt and spread it where it would catch the infant. Rena lifted her knees and let her legs drop apart.
Bab peered at the birth opening and saw the baby’s head. How had Rena walked through the storm with the child pushing out of her body? Bab glanced over her shoulder and saw the spirit man and the starved woman watching them. Now that she could see the skinny woman better, she could see how beautiful she was. And then Bab thought she understood. These wondrous beings had saved Rena. They had come to save them all and make sure Angel never lived the horrid life her mother had.
Bab’s fear left her. She knelt between Rena’s legs and caught the little boy as he slid into the world. His howl matched the storm outside.
Bab wrapped him in the thick, damp skirt and then handed him to his mother. The lightning and thunder no longer scared her. Not with the spirit man and his mate here beside her.
Angel was saved.
ONE GOOD WOMAN SUSAN KELLEY 68
Chapter Twelve
The warmth from the small fire felt good but it would take a long time for their clothing to dry out. Brady fed another thin branch into the fire.
Cara glanced at him, but his attention remained focused on the Savages crouched in the corner. Rena cuddled her newborn close and the other one, Bab, had retrieved her child from its bed of hides. The howl of the wind still defeated any attempts to speak and be heard though Cara thought it might have eased a little. They’d reached the cave some hours ago, and she guessed it was well into the night hours.
Brady touched her hand and startled her. She’d put her sword away a few hours ago but kept her hand on the hilt. Savages could move quickly though with each passing hour she doubted these females would attack them. Rena and Bab seldom looked their way, and when they did their dark eyes were wide with either fear or wonder.
Brady gestured toward their blankets. He’d hung them over the stack of firewood to dry.
He mouthed the word sleep to her and again gestured toward the blankets. How would she sleep while trapped in this small place with Savages? But neither of them had gotten much rest since Rena stumbled into their path. The thought of sleep broke the tight rein she’d had on her exhaustion. She pulled the knife from her belt and clenched it in her fist as she took Brady’s suggestion. The last thing she saw before her heavy eye lids defeated her bid to remain wakeful was his long fingers stroking the butt of his gun. That comforting gesture let her sleep.
* * * *
She woke to the dark but the wind had softened its attack. It took her mind a moment figure out what had woken her from a dreamless sleep. Food.
Brady sat with his back to her, facing the Savages. The battered and chipped cooking shell sat near the small fire. He reached across to it and stirred it with his small knife. The delicious scent drifted to her again. Oats.
Though he couldn’t possibly have heard her over the storm, he looked over his shoulder when she sat up. He smiled but immediately turned back to his guard duty.
Cara’s body ached from the hard floor and the last two days of nonstop travel. She joined Brady by the fire and looked at their enemy. Enemy? The two females slept curled together, each holding their babies. It was difficult to see them clearly in the gloomy cave, but they appeared more pathetic than dangerous. Again Brady’s wariness comforted her. He had too much experience fighting the beasts to lightly trust these two because of their gender.
Brady nudged the shell toward her. She sat close to him but took care not to impede his line of sight to the Savages. Even with nothing to flavor the bland oats, it was delicious. She ate half and then offered it to him. He devoured it with the same hunger as her and then set the shell aside to be cleaned later.
She tilted her head toward the blankets, and he nodded. He handed her his gun and then dropped into the blankets. He might have been asleep before his head touched the wool.
Cara stared at the cave opening. Was that a gray cast where there’d only been dark before? The rumbles of thunder were no longer directly overhead. The main storm seemed to ONE GOOD WOMAN SUSAN KELLEY 69
have moved north of their shelter. The wind still drove rain into the mouth of the cave but perhaps without so much force.
Sitting there while the rest of them slept gave her plenty of time to fret over what they should do next. The meager light from the fire fell on the nearest female Savage, Bab. Her face, though broader than most humans, was still very thin for a Savage. Her brow appeared nearly normal, and her features while not delicate, were also not coarse and thick like her kind tended to be. Even her hands clutching the baby were thin-fingered. Cleaned up and put in decent clothing, she could pass for human.
She thought back to the Savage settlement. Though only seen in short glimpses, a couple of the males hadn’t been as beastly appearing as most Savages. No where had she and Brady seen the vinefruit that induced the psychotic rage in the creatures. Was it possible that this isolated community of Savages had been deprived of the drugging berries and were evolving? In a few generations might they be human again? The weaning of the Savage population off the addicting vinefruit was a generations long effort by the Solonians. Once the ancestors of the Savages had been normal men, Solonian men, but when a wasting sickness manifested in the Solonian males, a hurried attempt to offset the illness with the use of the powerful drug derived from the vinefruit had changed those ancestors into the primitive Savages. And to everyone’s horror, the changes were passed from generation to generation. Looking now at Bab, Cara felt a stir of excitement. Might the weaning actually work?
The day was definitely upon them when the Savages stirred. They cast wary glances toward Cara, but went about feeding their children and digging in Rena’s pack for food. The way they cracked open walnuts with their bare hands reminded her how powerful the females were no matter how much Bab might look human. Bab was very thin, nearly starved looking, but her child moved with lusty health. The wind was calm enough that that she could hear the mewing of the babies as they fussed with wakefulness.
Brady stirred and sat up. His hair looked more out of control than usual and stuck up in artful tufts. He stretched, his long arms reaching over his head. His grin flashed at her, and she resisted smiling back though his expression lightened her heart.
He stood up, and she rose to join him. Rena and Bab watched Brady with their wide eyes. Did they think he would beat them up because he was a male?
“I think the worst of the storm is by us.” He took his gun and slid it back into its holder.
He frowned at the female Savages. “What are we going to do with them?”
“We can’t trust them no matter what we do.”
“We can’t make them prisoners, and we’re not going to kill them.” One of the female’s whimpered at Brady’s words. “If we leave them here, we’ll have to worry about them at our backs or that they’ll tell their tribe where we are.”
“Don’t hurt us,” Bab said in a voice as feminine as any human. “We just want to raise our babies without them getting hurt.”
Brady walked closer to the Savages. Cara stayed at his side and kept her hand on her sword. His voice was hard. “You intend to live here alone? Won’t the males come after you?”
Rena and Bab huddled closer together. Were they frightened of Brady or did the mere mention of their tribe’s males set them to trembling? Again Bab spoke for them.
“We can do it.”
“You’ll starve,” Brady said.
“Or they’ll find you and take you back,” Cara added.
ONE GOOD WOMAN SUSAN KELLEY 70
Bab shook her head. Her matted, dirty hair moved in thick lumps. “They think I’m dead, and they’ll never track Rena through the storm.”
“They don’t have to track her. How many different places can she go?” Brady’s voi
ce softened. “How do you expect to protect your little ones from the cold or even another storm? If it weren’t for us, Rena would never have made it here. What if we were less friendly? We might have killed you.”
Cara fought a hysterical laugh. Brady was trying to have a reasonable, intelligent conversation with a Savage. Could things get any more bizarre?
“Kill us?” Bab asked in a trembling voice. “Didn’t you come to save us? You and the beautiful woman?”
“Save you?” Cara asked, but the females didn’t look away from Brady.
Brady gave Cara a questioning look but she could only shrug her answer. He sighed and spoke again in a gentle tone. “We don’t want to hurt you, but why do you need saved?”
“Because of Angel.” Bab smiled down at her infant. The glow of love and pride created something of beauty in her broad features. “So she can grow up right. So she can be somebody.”
“Angel.” Brady leaned forward and looked at the baby swathed in a piece of hide. He gasped and gestured for Cara to join him.
She kept a wary hand on the hilt of her sword. The beasts were incredibly quick, and Brady was way too close to them.
Brady’s mouth hung open as he stared at Angel. Cara braced herself, thinking to see a horrible deformity. She didn’t want to react and anger Bab.
“Hell!” she sputtered. Like Brady, she edged even closer. It was impossible, but Angel looked like a perfect, beautiful, human child.
“I don’t understand,” Brady said. “One of the … men in your village is the father?”
Bab nodded, her wide smile of pride growing even larger. “She’s so perfect. That’s how we knew you really existed and were not just in the magic drawing.”
“Magic
drawing?”
Cara was glad Brady had the wherewithal to ask questions, because she couldn’t quite form words.
Rena pulled something from the untidy stack of hides where they’d slept. It was a thin, battered book. The writing on the black cover was gone except for a few gold specks that might have once been the title. She handed it to Brady with the reverence of sharing a cherished possession.
Brady took it and opened it carefully. The pages fell apart to a page near the back. He stared at it for a moment and then held it for Cara to see. It was a picture of a man, dark-haired, older than Brady and not nearly as handsome. It was certainly an image that would have been strange to the Savages. Even her people, the Solonians hadn’t known of the existence of dark-haired and light-eyed people until the founders of the Realm colony crashed upon their shores.
“They must think you’re some kind of god,” Cara whispered.
Brady frowned at her and handed the book back to Rena. She clutched it to her chest and looked at Brady with a disturbing look of worshipfulness.
“I still don’t understand why you ran from your village and risked starvation for you and your children,” Brady said.
Bab lifted Angel forward so they could see the child even better. “I can’t let Jak or the others touch my little Angel. They would destroy her.”
ONE GOOD WOMAN SUSAN KELLEY 71
Cara glanced at the badly beaten Rena. Female Savages were tough. They had to be to survive the attention of their males, though this Jak seemed a particular brutish sort. Little Angel had the delicate bone structure of a Solonian. How long could she survive?
At some point the wind had ceased its howling and now spoke with an irregular sighing as if fatigued by the destruction it had wrought. The rain still fell with a light soothing hum and the air seemed less chill.
Brady turned from the Savages and walked to the cave entrance. Cara looked at the child one more time and then joined him.
They stood side by side and stared out into the gentle downpour. Leaves, branches and even a few trees lay in a broken, tangled mess, victims of the typhoon.
“What are we going to do?” He didn’t look at her. “That baby is as human as you or I.
We can’t leave her behind. We can’t let those bastards get at her.”
A shudder went through Cara. Savages mated very early. How would a delicate thing like Angel survive that at age eleven or twelve? The thought was obscene.
Cara’s stomach rolled and pitched. She knew exactly would happen to Angel. “I’ll kill every male Savage in that village before I let them have her.”
* * * *
Brady couldn’t believe the change in the shoreline. The tide pools where he’d hunted for crabs were gone and new ones formed. The sea was wild, the waves monstrous still though the sun shone brightly as it touched down in the west. The storm had lasted little more than a day yet wrought massive destruction.
Piles of seaweed and driftwood littered the beach and raised a stench of dead things under the warmth of the sun. Here and there were the bodies of odd fish or sea creatures and even a few smooth planks that might have come from some long lost ship.
“Look!” Cara called. She was somewhat south of him, searching the debris field. She held up a large, dark shell, bigger than the one they now used for cooking.
“Good find.” He pulled free a plank that was half-buried in the sand. It was nearly as long as he was tall. A few more of these and he could build a nice raft to cross the river and then hopefully find their way home. And leave the Savages behind? What were they going to do?
They slowly walked along the messy beach, taking in the sights despite the odor of dead fish. Some of the creatures thrown up on the beach by the storm surge were interesting enough to distract him. Some resembled miniature monsters with large claws, and others had translucent bodies and long tangled tentacles. Even if they weren’t already rotting, they didn’t look edible.
Cara fell in beside him and proudly handed him the shell.
“We’ll need this,” he said. “I guess we have to think about feeding four.”
“Six,” she corrected him.
“Hell.” He’d not been overly worried about the two of them. He still believed they could find their way home and manage not to starve. But now they were somehow responsible for Rena, Bab and the two babies. “We have to talk about this, Cara.”
The smile slipped from her face. He couldn’t imagine the conflict this caused for her.
“The only thing I can think of is to take them with us.”
“It might be tricky getting us across the river. How are we going to take the two of them and the babies across? And what will their lives be like if we make it back home?”
Cara stared out to sea, her face grim. The steady breeze off the waters lifted a few strands of her hair and played it across her face. “They’ll be shunned by many but not all and they won’t be abused anymore. Angel can live and grow up to be a true Solonian.”
ONE GOOD WOMAN SUSAN KELLEY 72
“Will anyone every trust them completely? Even Angel will always carry suspicion.
You and I aren’t going to turn our backs on either of them.”
Cara looked back at him with fierce desperation in her eyes. “We can’t leave Angel here.”
“I don’t know what we can do.” Any thought of making it through the winter was out of the question now. They could never store enough food to see them all through.
They continued slowly down the shoreline. He looked back at the tracks they’d made in the sand, but it made little difference now. If the Savages hunted for their females this far south they would find sign or smell the smoke.
“I guess tomorrow we should travel to the river and see if we have a chance. It’s less than a half a day away.”
“You go. I’ll stay here with them.”
“You will not.” He took Cara’s arm and spun her to face him. “You’re not staying here alone. Their males could come looking for them.”
“And I’ll need to be here to protect them.”
“The hell you will. You’re not standing between them and their mates.”
She knocked his hand away. “You don’t tell me what to do, Brady Gellot.”
<
br /> “That’s not what I’m trying to do.” He took a deep calming breath. “I’m not leaving you here alone with them. If you don’t go with me, I’m not going.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you trying to get me alone, Captain Gellot?”
He relaxed. “The thought crossed my mind. Listen, Cara, they’ll be all right for a few days. If the males were following Rena, they would have had to retreat to their village during the storm. Even starting out today, it will take them at least two days to get this far. And they’ll have to search for her along the way to make sure she didn’t hole up somewhere. If we’re lucky, they might even think she drowned and turn back.”
She moved closer to him. “You can do better than that in convincing me I should go with you.”