The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (18)

Actually, a lot crazed. Less laughter than full-on lunatic gibbering. She wasn’t the only one who seemed to be concerned; she could hear Scott holding court close by in a tone of deep concern. He was using all his old familiar catch-phrases, too. Explore our options. Make decisions. Take command. The only thing he didn’t do was tell the people laughing at him to shut up and she kind of wished he would.

‘No one’s laughing, little girl,’ Bo Peep told her.

Beneath the heavy blanket and the heavier pain, Amber pulled the scattered pieces of her brain together and listened.

That sound…that high, chattering, lunatic sound.

Her eyes heaved themselves open. She tried to bolt upright and managed only a slightly deeper, choking breath. Her cry of, “Those are ghets!” came out as little more than a hoarse gasp and a rusty groan. The world went briefly grey on her and came very slowly back.

“She’s awake,” Crandall said in the distance.

A blurry shadow grew over her—Scott, looking down. “I don’t think so,” he said after a moment’s study.

Amber tried again to speak and again could only push air around. She was beginning to think she might be seriously hurt this time.

A second blur appeared, bringing with it a cool hand that wiped the sweaty hair out of Amber’s face. A woman’s hand, although not a soft one. Her mother’s hand, she thought, and it was her mother’s face leaning over her now, looking haggard and bitter and way too solid for a dead lady. “Amber?”

Nicci? Impossible. Nicci was half this woman’s age. But no, it was Nicci, and as soon as she realized it, much of the woman’s hard edges seemed to soften until she could see her baby sister above her instead of their mother’s ghost.

“You look like Mama,” Amber tried to say, but of course, all that made it into the world was a whispered, “…mama.”

“She’s delirious,” Scott declared, sounding annoyed and she couldn’t really blame him. He hated it when his speeches were interrupted.

“Guys?” That was Dag, looking back over his shoulder at the leather walls that surrounded the camp, beyond which the ghet-song had suddenly degenerated into snarling and screaming.

“They’ll be back,” Scott said grimly as the sounds receded. He folded his arms. One of them was distorted, stretched long and broken at odd angles; he had Meoraq’s kzung in one hand like a scepter. “And they’re coming right in here…unless we can give them a reason not to.”

All around the camp, Scott’s surviving Manifestors looked at Amber.

‘Oh please,’ she thought at them irritably. ‘What do you want me to do about it? I can’t even move!’

…oh.

Amber put all her strength into sitting up and managed to lift her head a few trembling centimeters before it dropped meatily back onto her mat. Had she ever thought waking up from her snake-bite or whatever that had been was the weakest a living person could feel? At least she’d been able to hold her head up! This…This was really bad.

And Meoraq wasn’t here this time.

“You can’t, man,” said Eric, coming out of the shadows to stand between her and Scott. “Whatever you’re thinking, you just can’t.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, Mr. Lassiter. Look at her! She’s dying! It’s a miracle she’s lasted this long, she can’t possibly live out the night! All she’s doing is stinking like blood and telling every predator in miles to come and get us! Now we can rally around her and get everyone killed or…”

“You’re not leaving her again!” Nicci leapt up to stand at Eric’s side, her hands balled into fists.

Scott stepped right up to meet her, putting his face too close to hers and cocking his head to one side. He’d picked up some dumaqi habits, it seemed, living in that cage. “I made a command decision,” he said tightly. “We couldn’t take her with us and we couldn’t wait around for her to get better or die, so yeah, I made that call. You want to stand here now and tell me I did the wrong thing, you go ahead because you are absolutely right. If I’d done what I should have done and she’d died like she should have done, we’d have had the lizard with us the whole time. How would that have changed things, huh?” Scott swung around, raising both arms over his head and shouting out to his Manifestors like they were a cheering throng that filled a stadium instead of a handful of men a few meters away. “He stayed with her when he should have been with us! Instead of blaming me for everything that went wrong, put the credit where it’s due! On Amber-fucking-Bierce!”

Murmurs.

Amber tried and again failed to make any kind of useful contribution to her own defense and the effort left her so wiped out that she had to close her eyes and rest.

“If we’d had a guide, we’d have reached the mountains long before the snow. We never would have gotten stuck up there for so long and we never would have come down so close to that city! We’d have had food the whole time! And water! And fire! No one would have gotten hurt, no one would have gotten killed, and you, Nicci, you wouldn’t have spent so many nights with a scaly cock shoved up your trap, now would you?”

“I wouldn’t have had yours either!” Nicci hissed. “And believe me, that’s the one I regret the most. This is not Amber’s fault! It never was and you know it, you and all your ignorant fucking sheep!”

Scott slapped her. His Manifestors murmured some more, angry now, but they were angry at Nicci. On the ground, her eyes still too heavy to open, Amber made a loose fist and grunted.

“Come on, both of you.” And that was Eric, doing his let’s-be-reasonable thing. She couldn’t see him, but she could picture him clearly enough: both hands raised, eyes moving cautiously back and forth between the main opponents, and well out of range just in case the punches started flying. “Nicci, just give us some space for a sec. And let’s think about what you’re saying here, okay? She saved our lives.”

“I had everything under control until she charged that giant porcupine and got herself torn open. What she’s doing right now is endangering our lives, just like she did before. Don’t you see that? Don’t you realize? This is all about keeping us away from the skyport? If it hadn’t been for her, we’d be on the ship right now, all of us, and on our way home! The way I see it, Amber Bierce is directly responsible for the deaths of thirty-six people and that makes her an enemy of the state! Why are you defending her?”

That didn’t sound good. Amber pulled her eyelids up in time to see the blurry smudge that was Scott raise Meoraq’s kzung—not in a menacing way, but more like a young Arthur who had just pulled it from the stone as proof of his right to rule. “What do we do with enemies?” he called to his Manifestors. “What do we do with tumors? Do we give them a comfortable place to sit and grow, to infect the rest of the body? Or do we cut them out?”

“I’ll kill you if you try it!” Nicci shouted. “Do you hear me? I’ll kill—”

Scott pointed Meoraq’s sword at her, silencing her so suddenly that Amber thought he’d stabbed her until she backed up. “I’m going to put it to a vote,” he announced, turning back to his Manifestors. “All in favor, say aye.”

A solid wall of ayes went up.

“In favor of what?” Crandall asked coolly. “If you’re so damn sure it’s the right thing to do, why don’t you want to say out loud what it is?”

“And if you’re so opposed to it, why don’t you say nay, Mr. Crandall?” Scott countered. “Say it so we all know where you stand. Say it or shut the hell up.”

Amber sucked in a painfully deep breath and croaked, “…nay.”

One by one, they all looked at her.

Amber pressed her noodle-weak arms to the mat and forced herself up a mountainous few centimeters. A light, chill sweat broke out all over her body, washing her briefly back into winter. She glared as best as she was able while gasping and shaking. “Nay,” she panted and for good measure, added, “Mother…fucker.”

Scott cocked his head at her in that eerily lizardish way. “You don’t get a vote, Miss Bierce. You are not a member of this colony. Your rights as a colonist and a citizen are revoked.” He turned that same stare on Eric. “Get out of my way.”

Nicci clutched at Eric’s arm. “Don’t,” she begged.

Eric looked at her, then back at Dag and Crandall. Neither of them moved to join him. He looked at Scott again. The wind flapping lightly at the leather walls that surrounded the camp and the gentle crackling of the fire were the only sounds…until Meoraq’s, “What in Gann’s unholy name goes on here?”

People who had been sitting sprang up. People who had been standing jumped back. Scott dropped the sword and hid his empty hands behind him, trying to look in all directions at once.

Meoraq came out from the shadowed opening between two overlapping walls and stood over his kzung where it lay in the trampled grass. He looked at it without expression as his throat slowly lit up. He took six breaths in the absolute silence and then said, “You had my sword in your hand, S’kot. In your naked hand.”

Amber licked her lips several times, braced herself for another deep breath, and rasped, “Meoraq, don’t.”

He pointed at her to shut her up without taking his eyes off Scott. “Var’li S’kot,” he said, making each word distinct, “son of Var’li Reshar, you have broken the Third Law and taken up a bladed weapon. The law of my caste requires that I ask, but to say truth—” He bent down and plucked the kzung out of the grass, straightening up with a smile and a hiss. “—I don’t give a clay fuck if you pray or not.”

Amber gripped at the ground and tried to sit up further, but her arms collapsed. She hit the mat and an elephant stomped on her stomach and she let out a scratchy scream that, weak as it was, finally got Meoraq’s full attention. He crossed the camp in just three long strides, shoving Eric and Nicci out of his way before he dropped to his knees at Amber’s side. He stabbed the kzung into the ground and put his hand roughly on her forehead, pressing her flat; the other carefully peeled back the bandage on her belly.

His spines came slowly forward in a silent, oddly graceful flare above his otherwise expressionless face. “Oh my fearless Soft-Skin,” he said after a moment, without readable emotion. “I could just slap you.”

“It’s not what it looks like,” Scott said quickly.

“I do not hear you. Await the sword of Sheul’s judgment.”

“It’s not,” Amber said. “It was a kipwe.”

“I see that. I say stand where you are, S’kot,” Meoraq added, no louder and without seeming to have even noticed Scott’s silent attempt to disappear behind his Manifestors. He bent further over her, peering into her eyes and then prying her mouth open, of all things, before looking under the bandage again.

“It didn’t look that bad to me,” said Crandall, watching him. “Once we got the bleeding stopped, I mean.”

Meoraq didn’t answer, which was about the worst response he could have given. At length, he replaced the bandage and covered her over with the blanket. He put his hands on his thighs. He bent his neck. He took six breaths. Then he brushed the backs of his knuckles across Amber’s brow and said, “I forgive you, Soft-Skin. Rest now. You are in our Father’s sight.”

The little comfort this gave her lasted just until Meoraq gripped the hilt of his kzung and stood up, ripping it from the wet ground and spattering Amber lightly with grass and mud. “I’ll try not to enjoy this,” he said, seizing Scott as he bolted for escape. “But you haven’t made that easy.”

“Meoraq, don’t!”

“I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand,” Meoraq replied, calmly towing Scott toward an opening in the walls. “Rest. This will not take long.”

“Let him go,” said Amber. The words were bitter as ash.

Meoraq stopped walking. He stood silent, staring straight ahead at the leather wall while Scott gasped for air at the end of his fist. The color striping his throat throbbed in time with his pulse. But for that and the heaving of his chest as he breathed, he did not move.

“Please let him go,” said Amber, hating herself for feeling the mean hope that he would ignore her and kill Scott anyway.

He turned and came back to her, dragging Scott with him, perhaps entirely forgotten. The color was bright enough almost to seem to be glowing in the firelight and his eyes were starting to glaze. “He broke his faith with God, if he ever had it, and as His Sword, I have no mercy to show him and would not even if I did! If I could not spare you, why in Gann’s name would I spare him?”

“Because we’re all that’s left. That…has to matter.”

“More than the Word?” Meoraq demanded. He struggled visibly with his temper, then lost it, roaring, “More than your life? What do you think he meant to do with my sword, fool woman? If I had slept tonight, if I had stopped even once to rest, you would be dead now! Dead and…and buried!”

She stretched out her hand toward his boot, palm up, trembling.

He looked down at that as everyone watched and Scott twisted and gasped in his unmoving fist. At last, Meoraq’s neck bent. His burning eyes shut and opened again, calm. He studied Scott for a while in silence, then released him and let him drop in the muddy grass. “I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand,” he said as Scott scrambled back, clutching at his neck. “I am a true son of Sheul, by whose laws you are judged unforgiveable. You are welcome no more among men. However, exile is permitted as a lawful alternative to execution and so I offer it. Shall you stand and submit to my sword, Var’li S’kot? It is a far easier death and, for my wife’s sake, I will even burn you when it is done. Gann will give you no such mercy.”

Scott retreated another step, still breathing hard, then suddenly snatched up a rolled tent and held it before him like a shield.

Meoraq spat contemptuously and picked up one of the travel-sized waterskins, shoving it hard against Scott’s chest. “Take it and go, then. You and all your cattle. Go and let the Dark Father who shat you out, take you in.”

“Come on, men,” Scott rasped, gathering up supplies with shaking hands. “I’ve spent…enough time…with lizards…and their…whores!”

Meoraq’s head cocked. He looked at Nicci. “What does that word mean?”

“It means he’s leaving,” Nicci said.

“And you’re not…coming with me!” Scott declared, pointing at her. He waited, perhaps expecting some tearful plea to reconsider, but when Nicci only sat there, he finally sneered and turned around. He left, staggering as he went, either from the lasting effects of his throttling or under the weight of the many waterskins he’d taken with him. After a long silence spent eyeing the supplies remaining to them, the last of the Manifestors scratched up some food, some blankets and another tent and hurried after him. The rest—Eric and Dag and Crandall, his one-time loyal lieutenants—stayed.

Meoraq looked at them. The stripes on his throat were still bright, bright yellow. “Get out.”

“For what it’s worth,” said Eric, “and I know it’s not worth much, we never should have left her.”

Dag grunted, a disturbingly lizardlike sound, and Crandall, looking back over his shoulder at Scott’s retreating colony, agreed, “He was a fucking loon. What do you say, Bierce? No hard feelings?”

Amber smiled weakly. “Yeah, okay. We’re good.”

Meoraq stepped up and shoved Crandall so hard and so unexpectedly that Crandall lost his feet and nearly fell in the fire. “This is not her camp!” he spat, this time shoving Dag, who only staggered. Eric stepped back on his own. “It is mine and I forgive you nothing! You, who acknowledge you should not have abandoned her to die in the open plains—not apologize, but acknowledge—have nothing to say about the fact that you stood and watched S’kot raise a blade over my wife?”

Eric kept his wary distance, but didn’t flinch. “I tried to stop him.”

“He did,” said Amber. “Please, Meoraq.”

“No! I give you your blood-kin. The rest of them can go to Gann. Out!”

“Hey, he had a sword!” Crandall shrugged off Dag’s helping hands and bounded to his feet. “What was I supposed to do, take it away from him? Huh? So you could come back and find me holding it? Who the hell do you think carried her back here and bandaged her up? Isn’t that worth anything?”

“We made a mistake,” Eric added. “We made a lot of them, okay? We just want the chance to make it right.”

“It’s okay,” Amber tried to say and this time, Meoraq rounded on her.

“Stop telling them that!” he hissed. “You have no power to forgive them!”

“You do.”

He recoiled, spines flaring and flattening with a brittle snap. “But I won’t!”

“Please.”

“No!”

“I’m begging.”

“I don’t care!”

“Meoraq—”

“They don’t like you!” he bellowed, pointing at Crandall and the others with the sword. “This isn’t liking you, damn it! This is groveling for their worthless lives! Nothing has changed!”

“I don’t care if they like me,” she said, just like she’d used to say it to herself so long ago. Somewhere along the way, it had turned into the truth, but it didn’t make her feel tough or hard or strong, only tired. “But if I let them walk out there and die just because I don’t like them, then something’s changed, all right. Please.”

They all looked at Meoraq.

He did not say anything for a long, long time.

At last, he sheathed his sword and turned his head just enough to look at Eric and the others. “I am Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul,” he said tonelessly, “who was son of Ta’sed, who was son of Kuuri, who was the forty-third son of the line descended of the Prophet’s Uyane Xaima. I am a Sword and a true son of Sheul…and I forgive you all your pasts. But I do not take you in,” he added in a hiss. “You are not Uyane under me. You are not welcome in my House. We are not good.”

Crandall started to speak, but Eric stopped him with a warning glance.  No one said anything.

Meoraq turned his back on them and knelt again next to Amber. “For you,” he said simply. “Hold on to me now. This will hurt.”

He lifted her. He did it slowly and even gently in spite of the color that was still so strong at his throat, but it did hurt and in spite of her determination to suck it up, she had to cry a little. But she got an arm around his neck and kept it there, anchoring herself to him while the rest of the world lurched and spun.

“I’m sorry,” she said as he took her into his tent. “This is a hell of a thing to come back to.”

He coughed up a humorless laugh and lay her down on his mat. “I asked God to bring me back to you. I left the details entirely to His whim. There is a lesson in that. Now rest. Tomorrow will be a difficult day.”

“You’ll have to remind me…when were the easy ones?”

It was a rhetorical question. Meoraq had never been good at recognizing those. “All things are relative,” he told her. “There are no easy days in the wildlands, but tomorrow…tomorrow will be difficult.”

 

5

 

Meoraq had run all night on nothing but a few bites of cuuvash, praying at every step that Sheul would keep his camp shrouded from the eyes of his enemies and tormented by visions of what he would find if He did not. He would have thought he had imagined every possible scenario. A kipwe attack—which he could not help but think of as roughly on a level with a mimut or a saoq attack—had never crossed his mind. It was the sort of thing he would have found laughable had he seen it in a play or a book—a tragedy on the indistinct edge of comedy—until it was his Amber lying there, as pale as a yearling…and as weak.

But she would not rest. Meoraq understood that she had not seen him in many days and that she wanted to know that Xzem and the infant had reached Chalh in good health. He understood also that the mood within his small camp was a dark one following Scott’s exile and she wanted to lighten it. And he understood best of all that she was hurt and hurts have a way of growing when there is nothing else to do except think about them. A Sheulek leaned early to embrace pain, to own it and sleep in spite of it, but Amber was not Sheulek.

In the end, Meoraq brewed her a strong cup of tea with a few leaves of healershand, chewed some more leaves and packed her wound with the pulp, then set the humans on watch—ha—and went out with his lamp to pray. Sheul brought him to a hive of soldier beetles; Meoraq caught twenty and wrapped them awkwardly in a fold of his tunic.

He returned to find Amber, as he’d hoped, deeply asleep. So was Nicci and the other humans, who had, he saw, helped themselves to the rest of the tea. Just as well. He moved Nicci to the humans’ tent (as he knelt to set her on her mat, she mumbled and caught at his harness as if to pull him down with her. It took some effort to get away with waking her and even more effort to do it without hissing), left the rest of them where they lay and directed himself to Amber without distraction.

The medicine had done its work well by that time and the wound was bloodless when he pulled the bandage away. He washed the wound to clear it of clinging pulp. Amber murmured, but that was all, even when he pressed the severed edges of her flesh closed and hunted out the first beetle, holding it carefully by its shiny shell. Already deeply aggravated, it needed no encouragement to bite. Its massive mandibles punctured both sides of her torn muscle, squeezing them tight together, and at once, Meoraq pinched off its head. Its insect will was greater than death; it would hold its grip until its shell crumbled away.

Beetle by beetle, he closed her wounds and sealed it with a paste of healershand and honey. He examined every part of her for kipwe quills the humans had missed and licked every scratch. He changed out her bandages for clean cloth taken from his provisions seized in Chalh. After that, there was nothing he could do except sit and brood over the many wounds he’d seen sour in spite of the best surgeons and those that had healed cleanly with no care at all.

“She rests in Your sight, O my Father,” he muttered, rubbing at last at his brow ridges, and this was true, but she also rested in the wildlands. Between the threat of revenging raiders and hungry beasts (he counted Scott somewhere along this line) were too many dangers to defend against. The nearest city—well, the next nearest, as Praxas would be no shelter to him—was Chalh again, four running days at best, and in light of Lord Uyane’s last words to him, he was hesitant to take her there. If she was to have any chance at all of recovery, it would have to be somewhere else.

They must be ready to move on at first light.

So decided, Meoraq again took his lamp and went out into the darkness, this time to build a sled. He was so tired by now that he watched his hands cut and trim poles as if they were the hands of another man, feeling nothing of what he did. He didn’t know how he was going to walk all day, let alone carry Amber. The humans would be no help to him in that regard; their treatment in Praxas had not left them able to bear weight for great distances even if they could be made willing.

Anger rose in him, bitter as bile. He swallowed it, but the taste remained.

When he returned to camp, the fire had burned itself down to lightless red glints. He built it up again and when he could make out one human from another, he woke Eric (with a none too gentle nudge of his boot). “Take the watch,” he said, noting even as he gave the order the groggy glaze of healershand tea in the human’s eyes.

But Eric nodded and sat himself up, rubbing at his flat, ugly face.

“Wake me at first light or if Scott should return. Do not—” He pointed the whole of his hand into Eric’s face and immediately won the man’s full, frowning attention. “—speak with him. He has gone to Gann and so too have those who treat with him. How do you mark me?”

Eric yawned and showed his fist, saying, “He won’t be back. He knows you’ll kill him. Hey. Is she going to be okay?”

Meoraq glanced behind him, but of course saw only his tent. “I cannot answer, but that isn’t what you truly want to ask, is it?”

“I don’t know what you—”

“If she dies, I will turn you out.” Meoraq glanced around and caught a shadow of dark thought in Eric’s eye before his human face closed. “There was a time I thought almost well of you,” Meoraq said with a thin smile. “But you have grown to like the taste of the poison S’kot fed you. Now you talk out of two mouths, the same as he. I have no use for you. If my wife insists on it, there will be a place for you in Xeqor. If she doesn’t—” His spines flicked. “—there won’t.”

“You have no idea what we’ve been through.” Eric’s jaw clenched, but his voice did not rise and he bent his neck before he spoke. If his time in Praxas had taught him nothing else, it had taught him manners. “I don’t even think you can understand it. I don’t think there’s one thing in your privileged life that allows you to know what it’s been like for us since we crashed on this planet. Even Amber knows we did the best we could.”

Tired as he was, Meoraq smiled an honest smile. “She said that, didn’t she? I can almost hear her say it. And if I had been there to see it, I would have seen no lie in her eyes and do you know why? Because she wants so much to believe it. Like S’kot and his fever-dream ship. She believes it because she has done the best she could every step of this road. Yes. Now. Look into my eyes, human, and tell me you have done the same.”

“Why should I? I already know you think it’s a lie.”

“I do know it’s a lie,” Meoraq agreed. “I want to know if you do. So speak, human. We’ll judge your words together.”

“I think I’ll wait,” said Eric after a moment, “until you’ve slept.”

“Is my sense of judgment in doubt?” Meoraq asked, blackly amused. “Is that what you’re telling me? Is that what you’re saying to the Sword and the Striding Foot of God?”

“I’m saying when I’m tired, I’m not always as objective as I could be.”

“Spoken like a priest. It’s easy to tell who had the keeping of you.” And that really was spiteful. Meoraq made himself stop talking, even if he couldn’t quite make himself apologize. A Sheulek was not required to be civil so long as he was honest.

Eric made no reply, but his eyes in the firelight burned.

“At first light,” Meoraq said again and was answered with a silent salute. He went into his tent where the scent of human blood was strong and lay down as far from his wife as he could. Her breaths in the dark were loud and not even; her face, if he could see it, would be strained. He listened, thinking he should pray for her once more so that those were the last words Sheul heard from his heart tonight and not the ones he’d given Eric, and so thinking, he closed his eyes and was deeply asleep at once.

 

* * *

 

His dreams were tangled things, impossible to put in meaningful order. It seemed to him it began in Tothax, because his cousin Nkosa was there and the two of them spent some measureless time together on the rooftop before the edges blurred away and he was walking with Amber across the plains of Yroq. She was limping, falling behind, and when he finally turned around in a senseless kind of dreaming rage to yell at her, it was not Amber any longer but Nicci instead. Her shoulder was bleeding, fresh blood in the shape of toothmarks, and he knew with all the certainty of dreams that her father had bitten her, to force Meoraq to take her in. She held out her arms to him, her face cold, mewling at him after the manner of a dumaqi woman and hating him with her eyes. Then he was somewhere deep in ruins, slaughtering raiders as they came for him, slaughtering their slave-women as they cowered and ran, slaughtering their screaming children. He thought he must be looking for Amber, to save her, but when she came out of the darkness, his sword went before him and the roar that tore from him as she fell was not grief, but rage. He turned around, surrounded on every side by blood and death, and found himself trapped behind a wall of glass and there were Ancients on the other side, standing over their unknowable machines, watching him. One of them came down from the dais and reached out to him, reached right through the glass that Meoraq beat his fists raw against, and put his hand on Meoraq’s shoulder.

Meoraq awoke with a violent start, seeing first the figure from his dream looming over him and then Scott and finally, truthfully, Eric.

“You said dawn,” the human reminded him, withdrawing. “I made some tea.”

“Stay out of my tea box,” Meoraq muttered uncharitably and rolled over to have a look at Amber’s wound in the dim morning light.

She came awake with a high cry as he lifted her blanket, then slumped back and stared at him blearily from deep in her sunken sockets. “What is it about the second day that makes everything hurt worse?”

“Swelling,” he replied, peeling away her poultice. The flesh beneath was deep red and swollen, but not so badly as he feared. Blood stained her bandages, but not pus. Not yet. He grunted, then carefully pressed it down again. “How do you feel?”

“Like I have a fever.”

He moved closer and lay his chin briefly over her brow. “You don’t,” he said, relieved. “But you have lost a great deal of blood. It must be—”

Her arms slipped around his neck and weakly held him. He shut his eyes, feeling only her trembling embrace, and wished with all his bitter heart that they had never come to Gedai.

“I want you to drink a little tea,” he murmured at last, gently pulling away. “And then we have to go.”

“Oh, Meoraq, I don’t think I can.”

“I’ve made a sled to carry you.”

Her face twisted, dismayed, even as she tried to laugh. “It’s one slice of shit-cake after another with me, isn’t it? Why did you marry me?”

“God gave you to me.”

“Did you keep the receipt?”

He didn’t know what that meant, although he knew it wasn’t worth a response. He lifted her, ignoring her sounds of pain and the obvious strain of not giving them full voice. Shouldering his way out of the tent, he found Nicci and the other humans by the fire, warming up cold meat for the morning meal. “Leave that,” he ordered. “You can eat as we walk. N’ki, fill the flask and pack the food. The rest of you, take down the tents and the walls.”

“Please,” called Amber, white-faced with pain.

“You don’t say please to servants,” he said crossly, setting her on the sled.

“Yeah, I know what you people do with servants. Leave them alone.” Her brows furrowed in an expression something like embarrassment. “Feels like I’m bleeding again.”

He checked. She was. He didn’t have much healershand left—it was surprising enough that the provisioner in Chalh had thought to give him any—but he chewed half of what he had and painted it onto her wound, careful not to crush the beetle heads.

“You want to hear something funny?” Amber asked in a muffled voice. She’d shut her eyes as soon as he’d lifted her bandages and now had her hands firmly pressed over her face, as if to stop herself peeking.

“Not really, but go on.”

“This would be no big deal where I’m from. I could just go to the clinic on the corner and get patched up. They’d give me back all the blood I lost, slap on some syntheskin and send me home with some pain pills and if it had happened on a Friday, I’d be back to work on Monday. Do you believe that?”

He grunted, re-affixing her compress. “I believe you are not lying. I have no idea what you’re saying. You can look now.”

She lowered her hands—they trembled—and opened her eyes—they were glassy. “When are you going to tell me that this is what I deserve for doing such a stupid thing in the first place?”

“I’m not,” he said, bringing out the first of the binding straps and passing it beneath her legs. “I know you acted only to save the lives of your…” He paused to let a few unspoken adjectives blow away in the wind, then finished, “people.”

“Yeah, but not getting yelled at is making me think I’m a whole lot more hurt than I thought I was. Level with me, lizardman.” She grabbed at his arm, missed, and finally caught him. “How bad is this?”

“Lesser wounds have killed,” he said. “Greater wounds have healed.”

He could tell that wasn’t much comfort to her. Truth, it wasn’t much comfort to him either.

He fetched what tea was left in his stewing pouch after the humans had been at it and poured it into his new metal flask, then brought it back for her to drink. She managed only a few sips, grimacing at the taste, which was a perfectly good winterleaf blend. “For now, know that you are in His sight.”

“Like I was when He let me get on the ship?”

“The ship that brought you to me, yes.” He grazed the backs of his knuckles gently across her brow. “He set you on this path, Soft-Skin. Have faith that He will see you reach this journey’s end.”

She looked up at him with her weary, pain-dull eyes and said, matter-of-factly, “He doesn’t love me like He loves you, Meoraq.”

It hurt his heart.

“Even if that were true, and I say it is not…” He knelt down beside the sled and lay his hand over hers. The only warmth in it came from the flask she held. “If He loves me, He will never let you die.”

“And nobody believed me when I said they were doing it,” Crandall remarked, helping Dag roll up one of the walls. “That shit’s just embarrassing.”

Meoraq grunted, still looking only at Amber, who offered him a crooked sort of smile. “You’re not going to let me hit him, are you?”

“You really shouldn’t.”

“Opinions differ.” He tapped the flask in her hands meaningfully and left her to help his humans finish breaking camp. As he passed Crandall, he glanced back and, seeing Amber’s eyes shut tight against the taste of the tea, delivered a swift slap to the back of the human’s hairy head.

 

* * *

 

They made terrible distance that day, but Meoraq comforted himself with the knowledge that every span gained was another he put between them and Praxas and that, at least, was something. And it wasn’t as bad as it could have been because in spite of his sour prediction, the humans did volunteer themselves to carry the back end of Amber’s sled when the terrain made pulling impossible, which was often. There was far less complaining than there had been herding them across Yroq (he could not remember much of their nature in the few days he’d had them after Praxas. Truth, all his memories from the moment Sheul had taken him in the raider’s nest until his arrival at Chalh were stained dark and remained largely beyond recall) and they kept quietly to themselves whenever he stopped them for rest. It could never be a good day, given the circumstances, but it was tolerable.

Yet as the hours wore on, Amber visibly weakened. She remained cool to his questing touch and her wound did not worsen, but the unavoidable rocking of the sled caused her such pain that she could not bear to travel more than a quarter-span at a stretch. He urged tea on her until the single waterskin S’kot had left to them was dry, trusting to Sheul to fill them, but the only water they met with on their travels was the rain, which was just heavy enough to soften the ground, not enough to fill their flasks.

The sun had scarcely begun its descent when Meoraq ordered the walls up and while his humans made his camp for him, he ran on ahead to scout this inhospitable land. He found no free water, but in a murky fen half a span away, he did find an abundance of wild healershand just out of the bud, as well as some iseqash herb, which would help her to sleep. Meoraq knelt in the mud and gave thanks, took what Sheul had given him, and ran with it back to his camp, arriving just after nightfall to find Amber and Nicci asleep in his tent, the rest of them asleep in the other tent, and a small pack of ghets making an easy meal of their provisions.

Meoraq’s roars brought the humans out of their tents (except for Amber, although by the sound of it, she tried) and chased off the scavenging beasts, but the damage was done. The mouths of ghets were the mouths of Gann himself; every scrap of meat they’d touched must be presumed to be poison now.

Meoraq sat up through the late hours to burn it, counting six breaths whenever he felt the color coming to his throat and giving God thanks at each one that the ghets had fed out of his packs and not the tent where Amber lay helpless. He had most of a brick of cuuvash left from that given him in Chalh and it would have to last.

It was the first of seven days’ travel, but each was essentially the same, trapping him in one endless hour for as long as the sun shone behind the clouds. He led them well around Chalh—not without misgivings—and picked up the thin trail of the Crossways in the east, following it through the hilly forests of Gedai and along the crumbling streambanks where they drew their bitter water. He did not seek for Scott and his cattle in their shadow. He tended only Amber, spoke to no one but God.

On the seventh day, as his cuuvash was down to its final bites and Amber’s swollen wound had begun to show the yellow crust of infection at last, the road brought them to the open mouth of an underlodge—old, but not too long empty or at least not overgrown. Uyane’s steward in Chalh had mentioned there were many of these along the way to Xi’Matezh. Heartened, Meoraq called a halt and pried open the door to investigate.

The short stair opened on a large round room, equipped with a fair-sized hearth and separate smoke-room, various pots and basins, a table and chairs, even a proper cupboard to sleep in. It would hold all his humans comfortably and provide them sturdy shelter against both the beasts of Gedai and the weather while Amber recovered.

When he went back to the surface and told the humans of his decision, they all looked at Amber and then gave Meoraq the same unquiet glance.

“What?” he snapped, glaring at Eric, who seemed to have made himself their leader in Scott’s absence.

“Nothing.”

“Then take the gear and get below.”

They took him at his word, each man carrying the sheets and poles of the wind-break into the store-house and then going down into the underlodge, where they stayed. Only Nicci lingered beside the sled, although that was most likely to avoid having to carry provisions, since she made no move to help Amber up. Meoraq unloaded alone, dropping blankets, packs and bundled tents down the opening (and perhaps on some lazy human’s head, he thought peevishly), before unfastening Amber from the sled and gathering her into his arms. She slung her arm around his neck to help support her weight, but she did not open her eyes. Seven days of rest in a moving sled in the wildlands was no rest at all; she looked even paler and more strained now than when he’d first seen her and her only response to his nuzzling was a weary pucker of pain.

“Is she going to be all right?” Nicci asked.

He didn’t know and his uncertainty sparked at once to anger. “Why are you asking me?” he snapped at her. “I am not Sheul, to close wounds and purify flesh! I end life, I don’t make it.”

In his arms, Amber frowned. “Should I be worried that you seem to think making life is going to be necessary?”

“Hush,” he told her.

They went down into the darkness, which was not as dark as it could have been, since Eric had done him the astounding service of rifling through his pack to light his lamp. Dag had brought out what remained of Meoraq’s wrapped cuuvash and the little pot of honey he’d been using to sweeten Amber’s tea, and Crandall was even now pouring himself a drink from Meoraq’s flask into Amber’s cup.

“What—” Meoraq began, almost conversationally, then changed his mind. “Get back, you parasites!” he roared, and they all scattered to the walls.

“Six breaths,” Amber murmured in his arms.

“I’m calm. A Sheulek is always calm.” He sat her carefully at the table and gave her her cup. Grumbling, he hauled his mat to the simple cupboard and opened it violently enough to pull its neglected door off its runner. It took some time to shove it back into place, but soon enough he had it on and the interior slapped clean of beetle-husks and grit. “Great Father, give me healing for my woman’s wound,” he hissed, as he unrolled his mat and made up his bed within. “And if You cannot give me that, give me the strength not to kill the rest of her people in front of her.”

“You’re in such a cheerful mood,” Amber remarked.

“Lies.”

“All right, you’re being a bitch.”

“I told you to hush.”

He put her in the cupboard and set a blanket over her. The humans watched him warily as he unpacked the rest of his gear and put the lodge in order. It didn’t take long; he didn’t have many things. “We stay here until I give the order to move on,” he announced, snatching up the empty waterskin to sling around his shoulder. “My kills are not yours. Hunt for yourselves or go hungry. My woman is resting. Do not disturb her.”

He ascended and passed out of the overhanging hut, but stopped there to take a deep breath of Sheul’s air and let the wind cool his temper. He could hear their voices muttering, and although he knew he should rejoice in the sound and celebrate the miracle of their survival, he could not help cursing Praxas in his heart, not for the terrible crimes they had committed against these humans, but for harboring them at all.

“What the fuck was that?” Crandall demanded below. “Now I’ve got to ask the lizard’s permission every time I use a fucking cup? What am I supposed to do, drink off the fucking floor?”

Eric answered, too low to be heard, followed by Nicci: “I told you he’d get mad.”

“Shut the fuck up, lizard-bait.”

“Leave her alone.” Amber.

“You can shut up too, woman. Lie there and bleed or something. The big boys are talking.”

Meoraq breathed. One for the Prophet…

“Come on, man,” Eric said. “Lay off her. She’s hurt.”

“Oh yeah, she’s hurt. I’d completely forgotten, seeing as she’s spent the whole damn day bitching and moaning about it.” Crandall’s voice skewed up into a shrill mewling, grotesque to hear. “‘Please, Meoraq, put me down! Oh, please stop, I can’t stand it!’ Like you had such a hard day when we were the ones hauling your fat ass around.”

“It’s not fat,” said Amber, her irritation clear even though the cupboard door.

“Whatever, woman, I saw you naked. You’re putting the belly back on you.”

Saw her naked? Meoraq put a hand on the hilt of his kzung and closed his eyes, trying to come up with just one reason not to go right back down those stairs, haul Crandall out into the rain and cut his ugly head off. Amber had reasons, or thought she did, but Amber’s reasons were not, in this moment, good enough.

“Stop trying to shut me up!” Crandall shouted suddenly, breaking Eric’s low murmurs. “I’m not his fucking dog and I’m sure as hell not yours! Hey, woman!” A rapping of a human hand on wood. “Am I disturbing you? Why don’t you cry some more? You’ve gotten awfully good at that, Miss I-Don’t-Need-My-Hand-Held, Miss I-Don’t-Need-A-Man. Let me tell you something, I’m not spending the rest of my life getting slapped around by your scaly dickman! You and your scale-bait sister ought to remember that not everyone can fuck their way to the lap of luxury on this planet and show a little goddamn respect to the guys who are picking up your slack!”

Enough. Meoraq swept his samr from its sheath and turned around, but he had only just put his foot on the first descending stair before the scrape of the cupboard door silenced the human below. It was Amber’s voice that rang out next, slurred but strong and filled with fire: “You want to thank your God and his that I am a girl, Crandall, because it’s my girlie squeamishness at seeing a man sliced up the middle that’s keeping you alive right now. You don’t like it? Feel free to go back where we found you! Otherwise, shut the fiddling fuck up, and if you say one more word about my sex life, I will knock every tooth out of your ungrateful mouth, so help me, God. There’s only one person who calls me ‘woman’ and gets away with it and buddy, you aren’t it.”

Silence. Not even mutters. The cupboard door scraped shut again.

‘She doesn’t like them,’ Meoraq thought sullenly, tapping one finger along the hilt of his sword. ‘Why does she want them with us?’

For answer, the memory of her exhausted, broken voice: We’re all that’s left. Please. That has to matter.

It did. Of course it did. Did the Prophet love all those he brought into Sheul’s light in the days after the Fall? No, no more than the Ancients deserved to be saved from the wrath their great sin had brought upon them, but the Prophet understood what apparently Uyane Meoraq only gave voice to: Life is the most precious of God’s gifts. When so few of the Ancients survived the Fall, Prophet Lashraq did not judge this or that one unlikeable and therefore unworthy to seek God’s forgiveness. No. He forgave them all their past and welcomed them, every one.

Meoraq glanced upward through the rough roof of the lodge’s storeroom, properly chastened, and sheathed his blade. “I hear you, Father,” he said. “Not so clearly as my wife, but I hear You and I am humble to Your will.”

Sheul’s hand touched his shoulder as below him, Crandall muttered something uncouth and kicked the walls of the underlodge that sheltered them in the wildlands where Gann ruled. Meoraq sighed, feeling the bitterness and anger in his mortal heart until he had mastered them and could set them aside. Then he turned away from the humans in his keeping and went out into Gann’s world to hunt.

 

6

 

It did not take much work to make the underlodge habitable for a lengthy stay. Cleaning, of course. The crafting of various tools. The mantle shelf needed repairs, which Meoraq could manage, and half the cookware he was able to find had been broken, but the ways of working clay were unknown to him and they would just have to make do without. The one metal pot he’d found and his own stewing pouch were more than enough for his needs. If his woman were well and at his side to help him, the lodge would have been fit and comfortable by the second day. As it was, he had four lazy humans who seemed to think the job of improving their camp to be a show he enacted for their pleasure each day, and Amber, who would be only too willing to help and tear open her wound in the effort. So it all fell to him.

Nevertheless, it gave him something to do and so Meoraq worked. He fixed the shelf. He manufactured a simple grass sweep to get what had already come in out again. He found a way to turn one of the leather walls of his unneeded windbreak into a curtain so that the humans had ‘their’ half of the lodge and he didn’t have to look at them as much. They were all much happier with that arrangement.

To further keep himself out of slapping distance, Meoraq took lengthy patrols, familiarizing himself with this land of hills and forests. He hunted when he had to, but one mimut each day was more than enough to sustain his small party, even after he relented and allowed the other humans to share his meals. He searched daily for medicinal herbs, but found no more healershand, only a little iseqash, and a small patch of wild phesok. He stared at this last discovery three days, meditated three nights, and then went back and took it, for despite the plant’s dangers, he knew Amber would need it.

She had showed many encouraging signs of recovery in the first days. She drank as often as he gave the order, and although she required his help to make her way up the stairs and out to pass her waters, she did that often as well. She could not stand very long and had twice collapsed from the effort of climbing out of the cupboard (against his orders), but she rested well when sleeping and seemed alert when awake.

And all these things were very good, but Meoraq cleaned her wound at the start and close of each day, and he could see the infection growing in her. At first, it was only that yellowish crust around the edges of her wound, easily wiped away. Then the viscous pools of pus welling up around the beetle heads. Her skin swelled and grew hot. She needed more iseqash in her tea to sleep at night and began to ask for it during the day. As the pus thickened and took on a greenish tinge, her lethargy and confusion grew until she did little more than lie in the cupboard and stare into the fathoms. Then came the night he woke to her moans, struck a light and found her shined with sweat and insensible beside him, impossible to wake. When he opened her bandages, he could smell rot.

So be it.

Meoraq put his palm over her burning brow and bent close, his mouth against her flushed cheek. “Sheul has been with you, Soft-Skin,” he told her quietly. “Believe that He is with you now. And so am I.”

She moaned.

He covered her over with his blanket and left the cupboard, closing it gently behind him. It was early, well before dawn. The curtain that halved the living space was closed and the only sounds to be heard beyond it were the growling breaths Amber called snores. Moving quietly, so as not to disturb them (and Amber said he wasn’t ‘nice’), Meoraq cut the sleeve off one of their spare tunics (if the owner didn’t want it cut, he shouldn’t have left it on the floor), tied a knot in one end to form a crude sort of bag, then went up the stairs and out into the forest.

“O my Father, guide me now,” he said, but he did not need Sheul to find what he was seeking. He had laid the bait for this most particular prey himself.

Near to the stream where he had brought his mimuts to be butchered lay a small, reeking heap—wet flaps of skin cut from the belly where winter’s fat was thickest, tailbones and the sagging pouch of the anus, intestines, feet, ears. It was too cold in these early hours for the carrion-beetles to crawl droning over his offering, but he could hear their countless bodies grinding together deep in the rotting flesh.

Meoraq knelt and brought out his makeshift pouch. He lifted a rancid coil of intestine, unleashing a plume of steam and fresh stink into the air. The beetles burrowed deeper, leaving their offspring to squirm together, exposed to morning’s chill.

Nauseating. He did not hesitate. He ran his open hand along the rumpled surface of rotting offal, taking exquisite care not to crush the larvae. He could not feel them in his hand, but seeing them there was bad enough. No matter. He shook them gently onto the sleeve and reached down for more. It took some effort to target only the larvae and not the mess they were feeding upon, but he had all he needed in just a few more passes and soon returned to the underlodge with the churning mess of them unpleasantly secured in the sleeve.

Amber had not moved, save to throw off her blanket. He let her alone for now while he arranged a fresh compress and bandage for her. Last of all, he took a dried leaf of phesok from the pot by the hearth and put it in his mouth. The taste was golden, surprisingly sweet, not at all what he’d expected. He chewed resolutely as he returned to his wife’s side and cleaned away the old, soured dressings.

She moaned, but turned toward him when he put his hand on her cheek. He spat juice into her mouth. She sputtered, swallowed, panted, all without opening her eyes.

Meoraq watched her for a time, then grunted and brought out his carrion-beetle larvae. He shook out half of them and waited for them to burrow into her heat, spitting juice for her to drink when it overfilled his own mouth, then shook out the rest and covered them loosely with the compress. He was beginning to feel light-headed. Never mind. A Sheulek must be above the distractions of his flesh. Most distractions.

He sat in the cupboard with his woman, chewing and sometimes spitting, and ultimately beginning to sway just a little. Amber’s face seemed to soften, blurring into new lines only to throb itself back into sharp focus. His Soft-Skin. His good woman. His wife. She was so unbelievably ugly.

He started to laugh, choked on a mouthful of juice, swallowed it, then laughed again because that was such a stupid thing to do. But a Sheulek does not make mistakes. Sheul is always with him. So there. He spat some juice into Amber and swallowed another mouthful (deliberately, this time), humming to himself as the colors began to shift around in the air, but humming quietly because the other humans were sleeping and he was so nice. Amber would be proud of him. His ugly, ugly Amber.

“I love your ugly face,” he told her, then bent down to move his mouth parts against hers. Horrible, unsanitary thing to do, and it left her bleeding a little besides. Never mind.

“I love your ugly fur,” he said, taking up many long, damp strands and spilling them through his fingers. It seemed that they kept on spilling for a very, very long time. The phesok was almost out of juice; he swallowed what there was and chewed harder.

Amber shifted below him in the bed, pushing more of the blanket away so that her bare chest was exposed. The sight attracted his staring eye and then his hand. “I love your ugly teats,” he mused, stroking at them. His hand moved up. “And I love your beautiful shoulders.”

Such beautiful shoulders. Smooth and pale as sculpted stone, perfectly rounded, perfectly sloping upwards into her scrawny neck and downwards into her skinny arms. Even the gross distortions on her chest seemed flawlessly balanced beneath those amazing shoulders.

He sucked hard on the pulp in his mouth, held it a moment, then bent reluctantly and spat it into Amber. She mewled a protest, but swallowed it. Her soft mouth, very lightly bleeding, parted for her panting breath. He could see the pink glisten of her tongue. Without warning, sexual urges swept over him, more dizzying than even the phesok in its strength. Meoraq loosened his belt, but his organ would not extrude. The urge died, leaving him with a confused re-discovery of her fevered face and the dressings at her side. It was unforgiveable, even to a Sheulek, for a man to lie with a woman on her sickbed; Sheul, in his wisdom, had prevented it. He spoke a shamed thanks, but already his eye was moving on, becoming fixed on the oddly graceful whorls and ridges that ringed her ear. He sucked on the phesok pulp again, but it had no more juice to give him. He spat it into his palm instead, shook it off into the other room, then closed the cupboard door and lay down beside his woman. He supposed he’d ought to pray, but couldn’t quite focus on what words to say.

Meoraq pulled the blanket up around Amber’s beautiful shoulders, then dropped a careful arm around her chest where it could not hurt her. ‘I am cuddling,’ he thought, pleased with himself. Then the dreams started, dreams of Amber beside him at Xi’Matezh reaching out to hold his hand when the doors hushed open, Amber sitting with him on the rooftop garden at home with the first of his many sons in her arms, Amber holding Nicci’s hand as they waited in a long line of white-garbed people before a great glass-walled shrine. Always it was Amber, sometimes with him and sometimes with her blood-kin, now creased with age and now half-grown, fighting and laughing and weeping and in every way alive. The dreams were glorious and it was a very long time before Meoraq, reluctantly, closed his eyes and slept.

 

* * *

 

Amber woke up first to the sounds of people talking none too damn quietly in the main room. Not even really talking, but actually hollering up the stairs to other people outside, just like it wasn’t first thing in the friggin’ morning, which it had to be because Meoraq was still sound asleep beside her.

Her annoyance was the first thing she was really conscious of. The second was a tickling sort of sensation in her side. She started to scratch at it, but was smart enough to stop herself as soon as her fingers touched the bandage. She really did not want to tear herself a brand new gash now that it was finally starting to heal up. And it must be healing up because that’s what things did when they healed, right? They itched? And even though this was more of a tickle, it tickled like six bitches in a bitch-boat, so it better be healing.

Ah, it was great to feel like herself again.

Amber smiled to herself without bothering to open her eyes. She sensed she could open her eyes if she wanted to, however, which was better than she’d felt all night. In fact, the last three days had been like trying to cross quicksand—sinking further and further the more she moved. Yesterday, she’d been absolutely certain she was going to die. The stench coming from her side had been so bad, she was amazed Meoraq could stand to touch her, but he didn’t even mention it.

And maybe he knew something she didn’t, because she felt worlds better this morning. Apart from a headache and an absolutely epic case of morning-mouth, but if that was what it took to wake up free of the fever that had been chasing her down, she’d learn to love it.

But the tickling…

Amber squirmed, as if shifting her weight could actually help. It didn’t.

Out in the main room, Dag was stomping around and bitching about having to go all the way out to the stream for water when it was raining.

“Coming down hard enough,” Crandall commented. “Could probably just stand outside with your mouth open and drink just fine.”

“Give it another hour and you could probably drown that way,” Eric added. “Sheesh, did the lizard die in there? What is keeping him?”

“Keep your voice down,” Nicci said. “They’re sleeping.”

“Sleeping, hell,” Crandall muttered. “They’re probably screwing.”

Amber frowned, then caught herself reaching to scratch again. Dammit, this was going to drive her crazy!

He’d put some sort of plant in there that first day. She didn’t recall it itching—the pain had pretty much occupied all her nerve-endings at the time—but maybe that was the trouble now. He probably wouldn’t like it if she just opened up her own bandage and took his leaves out, especially since they might be working, but she couldn’t stand this and anyway, he was asleep and therefore did not get a vote.

Casting furtive glances at the alien snuggled up beside her, Amber began to extract herself from his uncharacteristically clingy grip. He slept on, oblivious, even when she picked his arm up and put it down again on her thigh. Next to go was the sweaty (and now smelly) blanket. She could see the bandage now. It wasn’t even tied on. Maybe it tickled because it was loose. Felt like a bigger tickle than that, though. God, it was all she could do not to get in there with both hands and just go to town.

She pulled the bandage off, already reaching with her other hand to gingerly pick away whatever voodoo he’d packed in there. For a moment, she thought it was rice.

For a moment.

Her breath caught, but she sucked it in and shrieked anyway, tearing up her throat like her screams were made of fishhooks. Meoraq bolted up, banged his head, and dropped back down with a snarl of sound she could not begin to process, much less translate. If she hadn’t been frozen by horror, she might have dug the maggots out then, but the split-second it took for her to act was all the time he needed to recover. When she did slap wildly at the boiling mass of their pearly little bodies, he caught her.

“The hell is going on in there?”

“Getthemoffmegetthemoffmegetthemoffme!”

“What is wrong with you, woman?! Lie still!”

She fought, but there was no fighting, not before he straddled her thighs and bore down on her from above, and certainly not after. Kicking was futile under the blanket. Bucking dislodged some of the maggots, but only so they could rain their repulsive little bodies down over her stomach and her hip and oh God what if one bounced high enough to land in her mouth?!

Screaming for release, screaming for help…just screaming. It was all she knew, all she was capable of. There were maggots in her!

Then the cupboard door flew open and there was her baby sister’s half-glimpsed face, staring at the lizard atop her in open-mouthed shock. And then she screamed.

Meoraq looked around, startled, because even an alien had to know that wasn’t a human scream of fear, but of rage. Little Nicci dove at him, clawing for his eyes, so that Meoraq was forced to release one of Amber’s twisting arms to shove her back. Amber immediately went for the maggots. He caught her again, swearing vigorously, and pushed her arms together, wrists-to-elbows. Now able to restrain them one-handed, he reared back and whipped his belt off. He used it to bind Amber’s arms together so that she was unable to scratch anything but her own arms, which she did in helpless panic.

The next time Nicci came for him, he was ready. He caught her in one hand and dragged her with him as he flipped athletically from the cupboard onto the floor, and from there across the room to the water bucket, where he dunked her head repeatedly.

Nicci’s screams turned to sputters. Amber’s went on, but they were dying in spite of her, torn to hoarse shreds by their own violence. No one else was making a sound.

Meoraq turned in a full circle, hauling Nicci with him, to face off against the rest of them. “Are you all mad or is it just your women?”

“Hey, do what you want with them,” said Crandall, holding up both hands as Amber howled for help.

Meoraq tossed Nicci in a heap by the hearth where she curled herself up small, sobbing, and returned to the cupboard. He studied Amber while she struggled in her bondage, then reached out and laid his hand over her mouth.

She stared up at him in weepy dismay, unable to believe he could be so calm when there were bugs eating her.

“I have Gann’s own headache,” he informed her after a moment’s meditation. “So I am going to ask just once what is wrong with you and you are going to answer quietly. Now. What is wrong with you?”

He removed his hand.

“I’m rotting,” she whispered, and felt tears drop hotly out of her even though she couldn’t blink. “I’m rotting! There’s maggots in me!”

Behind him, the others recoiled and immediately began to mutter at one another. None of them looked very upset, only a little wary and a lot disgusted.

Meoraq, on the other hand, just kept staring at her. After a while, he closed his eyes and went someplace private with his God. He was gone a long time. His eyes opened. His head cocked, demonstrating resignation and some small amount of humor. He took a deep breath and said, “I know there are maggots in you, insufferable woman. I put them there.”

And as Amber still reeled from that, he bent down and began to put them back.

The panic was gone and the adrenaline with it. She could do nothing but sob out wailing, incoherent pleas as he scraped up all the disturbed maggots and placed them carefully back in the wound. He put the compress back on. He loosely tied the bandage. Then, in that same calm, deliberate, God-alone-knows-how-hard-it-is-not-to-slap-you-woman voice, he said, “The maggots eat only dead flesh. They will clean your wound and at day’s end, I will wash them away.”

Amber cried harder.

“They will eat the beetles as well, but—”

“Beetles?!”

“—but you have had many good days of healing, and—”

“You put beetles in me too?!”

“—and I think the wound will not reopen if you are careful.” He gave the bandage a final light tug and glared at her. “Being careful means you will lie still. Agreed?”

Still weeping, she made herself nod.

He unbound her arms. She had to keep clutching her elbows to stop herself from immediately grabbing at her side. She could feel him looking at her, his stare almost as physical a thing as his irritation.

His thumb brushed at her cheek. That was all for a while.

“Get out,” he said, adding crossly, “Not you,” when she tried to sit up. “The rest of you. Get out.”

“It’s raining.”

Meoraq clamped both hands suddenly to his brow-ridges and bellowed, “I don’t care!”

Dag wisely shut his mouth and backed away.

After a minute and several deep breaths, Meoraq began to speak in the tight, rapid way of the kind of anger he usually reserved for dealing with Amber herself: “God has given me the strength thus far not to knock the head off your skinny neck but don’t try His patience, human, because mine is gone!” he finished at a shout and had to stop for some more deep breathing. “I suffer your presence as a gift to my woman’s gentle heart and for no other reason, so get up and leave my camp one damned hour or be turned out for all time at the point of my blade! Don’t whine at me! Go!”

A shuffle of feet and murmurs marked their obedience, but sniffling told her Nicci, at least, had stayed.

Meoraq let her. He sat down on the edge of the bed, prodded broodingly once at his brow-ridges, and then put his hand on Amber’s thigh and waited.

What was she supposed to tell him? Knowing intellectually that the maggots served a useful and even necessary purpose meant nothing compared to the feel of them crawling and writhing inside her own body. Inside her own meat! It wasn’t just a bunch of maggots, it was a premonition of her own mortality in a universe without a God—a playful sampling of an afterlife in which she was nothing but food for the lowest forms of mindless life—and Meoraq could never begin to comprehend that. Oh no, he rode around in God’s back pocket all the damn time!

“I dreamed of you,” he said suddenly, softly. He continued to gaze out into the main room and not at her, but his hand again brushed back, this time along her shoulder. “I dreamed much. Awake and asleep.”

Amber pressed her palms over her eyes and made herself take deep, slow breaths until she finally quit leaking. The maggots rolled and wriggled and dug themselves around under the compress; knowing what they were, she could no longer feel them as anything so benign as a tickle. She’d probably never feel a real tickle again quite the same way, either. She had god-fucking-damn larvae crawling around inside her and he was talking about his dreams!

“They’re in me, Meoraq,” she said shakily. “They’re eating me like I’m already dead.”

He sighed. “I know. And I suppose it is terrible. Yet you live, Soft-Skin. You live and will be well.”

“For how long? God! Why are you trying so hard to save me?”

She meant her outburst for him, but he apparently took it for a prayer, because after a respectful silence, he grunted and said, “What does He tell you?”

“He? What, you mean God?” Momentarily unpinned, Amber erupted into giggles just as fantastically inappropriate as her hysterics had been. “He tells me I’m going to need saving for the rest of my stupid life, that’s what He tells me!”

And Meoraq nodded, either oblivious to her sarcasm or pretending to be. “Then I will always be there to save you.”

“Oh for—Leave me alone, lizardman! Let me die already! I’ve done nothing but get hurt from the moment we got here. This isn’t fair!” she burst out, once more on the brink of hateful tears. “I don’t get hurt! I’m the strong one!”

“Yes,” he said, with no trace of irony.

The dam was good and broken now. It all came flooding out of her—not tears, but words—in a hot sluice of emotion as bitter as bile: “I hate this! I hate lying here day after goddamn day staring at the top of this goddamn cupboard! I hate riding around in your stupid sled and watching you have to carry me! I hate that every single fucking creature on this planet wants to eat me and half of them have tried! And I hate you telling me it’s all God’s will!”

“His will is great, Soft-Skin. There is room for all things in His eye.”

“If God actually wants me to lie here with maggots in my guts, I want no part of him. I hate your God!”

It was the worst thing she could think of to say to him—the most vicious, blasphemous, mean thing to say—and she did it half-hoping he would walk out and give the tears struggling inside her an easy way out. Instead, he snorted, as if she’d told a joke that was perhaps in poor taste but still very funny.

She stared at his back for a long time as anger was replaced by exhaustion. The itch in her side just grew and grew with every passing helpless second.

“And I hate you,” she whispered.

“Lies.”

“What can I say?” Amber asked at last, her voice raw and shaking. “What can I say to make you leave me?”

“Try insulting my father,” he suggested.

“Stop making fun of me! I can’t do this, Meoraq! I can’t spend the rest of my life being your God-given burden!”

“Your trials are mine, Soft-Skin. As you learn from them, so do I.”

“Bullshit.”

“Truth.”

“What are you learning right this second?” she demanded.

“Patience.” He glanced upwards. “I learn that a lot when I’m with you.”

Amber clapped her hands over her face again. “You’re a zealot.”

“And you hate me,” he prompted.

Again, he waited. She did not reply, but her hand went to the bandage at her side, wanting to scratch but tortured by the image of crushing their disgusting little bodies into slurry right inside her.

He did not look at her, but must have been able to track her hand regardless, because he said, “It will heal.”

“But there’ll always be something else. Something worse.”

“Such is life.”

“I don’t want to live like this.” Her hand went to her side again, rubbing sickly at the skin around the bandage since she didn’t dare touch the actual site. Her stomach cramped; she might survive the maggots, but honesty had turned toxic and there was nothing she could do but keep on puking it up. “And don’t feed me that what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger bullshit! What doesn’t kill me just makes me worse! I don’t want to be ugly like this!” She scratched miserably at the places that didn’t itch, scratched until she felt blood wet beneath her fingernails, until he reached back his hand and stopped her.

“No warrior should be ashamed of the scars he carries. Each one is proof of courage. Even this one.” He touched the pink marks of his teeth he’d left her with on the night they’d first been together. “Perhaps particularly this one.” His eyes shifted to meet hers. “You are mine.”

“Because God gave me to you.” She tried to say it in her old tough-Amber voice, but it came out in a lost crybaby-girlie way instead, all the sarcasm lost in a quaver. “Thanks a lot, huh?”

He grunted, gazed at her for a long moment of silent thought, and just when she thought he was about to speak, he bent down and kissed her.

His rough mouth scoured across her lips as gently as she supposed he could do it, considering he couldn’t feel what he was doing. His breath, warm and dry and tasting faintly stale, blew in to mingle with hers. His tongue, hard and smooth as wax, nudged into her, inviting at first and then demanding.

She felt nothing at all for a second or two, and then something inside her seemed to erupt and she was kissing him back the way a drowning woman drinks air. Her hands dug at the back of his neck, pulling him closer even as their mouths mashed painfully together, and closer was never close enough. She sucked and bit and ground at him, making all the semi-mute, unlovely sounds of carnal desperation, and for God’s sake, Nicci was still sitting right over there, but as soon as his hand skimmed beneath the blanket to grip her bare breast, she didn’t care and wouldn’t have cared if they’d been center-stage in front of thirty thousand people.

“You are my—” He snapped his bone-hilted knife out of its sheath and stabbed it down over the head of the bed. “—insufferable—” His mouth scraped at hers, licked away a bead of blood, and came back for another kiss. “—senseless—” The hand at her breast rasped over her skin in a sudden, urgent journey to delve between her ready thighs. “—faithful wife.”

“Don’t!” she moaned, even as she bucked up against his questing hand. “I wasn’t! You know I wasn’t and you don’t want me anymore!”

“Shall I swear it before God?” His hand moved, stroking steadily and with embarrassing ease in and out. He looked down at it, his eyes smoked and hungry. “Upon this altar, all vows are surely made sacred. Let Him hear me. Let you hear me.”

She cried, clutching at him.

“You are always for me, Soft-Skin. Though your nearness and infirmity are a terrible trial upon my years of discipline, I will stand fast with the aid of God against my natural lusts. And when you are whole again, I will fill you. Between those hours, and for every other hour from now until the end of Time, you are for me.” He paused to watch with grimacing, lizard-like satisfaction as she came to a swift, violent climax. His hand stilled, but stayed where it was, cupping and not quite caressing her. “This day will end,” he said, softly. “You and I will go on.”

She caught his hand as he withdrew it, clutching it in both of hers and holding it to her heaving chest. He waited, but she couldn’t find the words to fit the storm of thoughts howling through her, and at last he pulled from her grip.

“Rest now, Soft-Skin,” he told her, standing up and away from the cupboard. The first thing he did was to cinch his belt even tighter, which she guessed meant he was concerned about protruding. The thought made her smile, and he ducked back inside to claim that smile with another of his harsh kisses. “When you wake, I will have tea for you. It will be bitter and unpleasant and you will drink it all.”

“Meoraq—”

He put his hand over her mouth, his eyes sternly narrowed. “And you will drink it all, woman. Give me your obedience.”

She rolled her eyes and raised her fist.

He tipped his head and gave her a warning hiss, then removed his hand.

“Yeah, fine. I’ll drink it all.” She sighed and lay back in the cupboard, rubbing at her side.

He glanced at her hand, then stepped away. He didn’t tell her not to remove her bandages. He didn’t have to. The maggots itched and ate at her every bit as much as they had before, but she guessed she could handle it. She hated it…but she could handle it.

He dressed, muttering to himself as he strapped on weapons and buckled things. The words she caught were enough to tell her it was one of his many prayers, this one on her behalf. When he was done, he came back to tap her shoulder briefly in a parting salute, and then he left. Her man, off about his manly business.

Amber pulled her blanket up with a sigh and tried to get comfortable. Her side itched. Her stomach still hurt from all the emotional craziness. She had a huge pot of bitter tea to look forward to and plenty of cupboard ceiling to stare at until then. It was going to be a long day.

‘Yeah, but the day will end,’ she thought, and smiled.

“I thought he was hurting you.”

Oh yeah. Nicci was still here. Amber felt herself blush a little, but only a little. Mostly, she just felt sexy and quiet and tired and good.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I flipped out completely.” Yeah. Flipped out. Right before she made out. Could you still call it making out when someone rubbed you into cumming from your toenails? Probably not. Sheesh, what a sleazeball she’d turned into.

“He’s different with you,” Nicci said.

“Is he?” She really didn’t think so, but upon reflection, she decided it might seem that way. He was himself with her. He was different with the others.

“You’re different with him.”

“Am I?” That was less surprising. She’d been different since she first set foot on this planet. Nicci just wasn’t used to the whiny, weepy, hysterical Amber yet.

Nicci got up and came over to the cupboard, looking down at her with an expression that was disturbingly lifeless. “I want to go home.”

Amber stared up at her, more than a little thrown by this statement. What did she honestly expect her to do about it?

“Do you?” Nicci asked.

She still had no answer.

“If we get to this temple and there’s a ship there and someone can fly it and we can go back to Earth, are you coming with me?”

Amber’s mouth moved. No sound came out.

“If there isn’t a ship,” said Nicci, “are you going to take care of me?”

“Nicci—”

“Or do you think you’ve done enough? After you brought me here, after you made me come with you, are you just going to wash your hands and say you’ve done enough? You got your man who loves you and will take care of you and save you forever, so maybe you don’t care anymore, but I’m still here, Amber. I still need you.”

“I’m here,” said Amber, reaching out to touch her arm. There was no answering touch, not even a glance in that direction. It was like touching a corpse. “And I’ll always be here for you, Nicci. We’re sisters. Nothing’s going to change that. Look, I know it’s hard, but you can do it. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to sit around. I can teach you how to make hides and clothes and stuff.”

“You said you’d always take care of me.”

“I am.”

“Not like you used to.”

Amber nodded, accepting this, then shook her head, and then just sat there and stared at the cupboard ceiling. “I don’t think I did either of us any favors hovering over you like that back home,” she said at last. “Mama wasn’t much of a mother…and neither was I. I love you, Nicci, I do…” She sighed and rubbed her eyes, then made herself turn around and face her expressionless sister without flinching. “…but I’m not going to carry you for the rest of your life. The ship crashed and I’m sorry…but it’s time to move on.”

Nicci said nothing, did nothing, just let the minutes tick out. At last, she reached out and gently closed the cupboard door, leaving Amber in the dark to listen as her baby sister walked away.

 

* * *

 

The remainder of the day passed in relative peace, although given the chaos surrounding his awakening, anything short of a direct attack could be considered relative peace. The humans kept their distance, wisely. Meoraq’s headache had lost its sharp edges over the course of the day, but it still sat heavy behind his eyes. He had drunk four pots of tea and his throat still felt scratchy and tasted like a long lick up Gann’s slit. He was aware that all these things made a light penance for the sin of chewing phesok, but it still made for a deeply unpleasant day.

He meditated as much of it away as possible, rousing only to attend his or his woman’s most basic bodily needs. When he wasn’t meditating, he sat at the table and stared at his humans, making a game of herding them from one wall to the other by his looks alone. He made no patrols, no hunts. When he decided he was hungry enough, he ate half of the previous day’s stew, cold. If Amber had asked, he would have stirred himself to heat the rest for her, but she claimed a weak belly and took nothing but tea all day. As for the other humans, they could eat cold stew or starve for all that Meoraq cared.

All days end, as he had reminded his wife that morning. In the last quiet hour before dark, his day’s idleness bit back at him in an entirely foreseeable manner: He was not in the least tired.

His humans were already settling in for the night, sharing out the remains of the stew and throwing sullen glances at him. That cheered him somewhat, but it really was a poor show of his true character and he’d ought to pray about it. In the meantime, however, there was Amber.

Although she had been dozing most of the day, she did not share his restlessness now. She was sleeping soundly when he woke her to tend her wound. The maggots had done their work well; the flesh looked pink and had a strong knit going where the beetle heads had been placed. He washed the wound twice with tea and licked it thoroughly, ignoring Amber’s informative mutterings as to how ‘gross’ he was.

But with this done and the wound wrapped again, he had nothing else to do. If he were in the city, Meoraq could simply light a lamp and read the Word or take the rooftop or find some other way to entertain himself, but he was loathe to waste what little lamp oil he’d brought with him out of Chalh. In their winter’s camp, when he had spent days on end confined to a cave, he’d always had the option of rigorous sex to exhaust himself before bed. He didn’t know what he was going to do with himself tonight.

“Are you tired?” he asked, without much hope.

“Yeah. Why? What’s up?” She visibly rallied herself to appear alert. A good woman was always thinking of how to lessen her man’s burdens and see to his needs. Meoraq’s selfish heart burned a little, but not enough to keep him from undressing and crawling into the cupboard with her.

“We going to fool around?” she whispered when the door was shut. Her hands were brazen on his back. Her little teeth nipped at his shoulder.

“No,” he said. “That would be unforgiveable.”

“Oh.” She drew away and nestled herself into the bedding. “Good. Because in all honesty, I had maggots in me all day and I’m feeling about the most unsexy I’ve ever felt in my life. Want to talk?”

He did, but she was so obviously weary and he didn’t have anything to say anyway. “Just sleep.”

She did—the only command he’d ever given that she’d followed without question—and he lay with her in the cupboard for a time, resting in the hopes that he might sleep as well, but it was not to be. He could hear the humans bedding down, their low chat giving way to grunts and shuffling, and then to the growling breaths of heavy sleep. Meoraq tried to meditate, but his mind was as restless as his clay and in the end, he rose and pulled his breeches on, then climbed to the surface where he couldn’t disturb anyone.

The night was warm and windy, but dry yet. He basked a short while in the pleasant sensation of standing against the wind and what a fierce, masculine picture it must make, and then heard the clumsy tread of a human footfall on the stair behind him. Nicci, he saw. He reminded himself to be polite.

“How is she?” Nicci asked quietly.

“She rests in Sheul’s sight,” he replied, moving aside in case she wished to go past him and out to the fleshing pit to urinate.

She joined him at the doorway, but that was all. Her eyes went to the horizon, to the distant black line before the mountains that was Praxas. She gazed on it in silence and without expression.

Meoraq groped for something to say as the moment stretched itself indefinitely outward. “What do you want?” he asked at last.

“Nothing. I can’t sleep.”

He grunted, thinking she might manage a better effort were she lying down with her eyes closed. Of course, so could he.

“I’m sorry I, um, attacked you. Earlier.”

He glanced at her, then back into the trees. “I forgive you.”

He waited for her to leave. She didn’t.

“Am I bothering you?” she asked.

Meoraq tipped a brooding eye upwards at the heavens where Sheul sat in judgment over every lie and told one anyway. “No.”

“Can I stand with you?”

He grunted again.

She moved a little closer to him. There was no polite way to step back, so he stood there and did his best to ignore her. After a very long, suffocating silence, she said, “You saved our lives. All of us. I thought I was going to die in that cage.”

He was uncomfortable responding to this in any way—to agree was to take the credit for Sheul’s hand upon him, to deny seemed to dismiss her suffering in that place—and so he said, “Sheul’s judgment shall fall upon Praxas in His own time,” and tried to leave it at that.

“I know.”

There was an answer he had never anticipated. “Do you?”

“If He hadn’t been with me, I never would have survived at all,” she told him, and watched his face closely.

He turned into the wind, aware that he was frowning, unsure exactly why. It had certainly been a good answer…but he could not shake the feeling that it had not been an honest one.

“Will you take a walk with me?” she asked after another grueling silence.

“Why?”

“I’m restless and I don’t want to go anywhere alone.”

Sensible answer. He did not want to agree, but this was Amber’s blood-kin, and if blood ran true in no other manner, doubtless it would do so now and she would stride out into the wild without him upon his refusal.

“A short walk,” he said, and set a course for the stream.

She followed obediently, beside and a little behind him, with head bent and hands meekly clasped before her. It was deeply disturbing to him, and after a moment’s thought, he knew why: It was the respectful walk of a well-bred dumaq woman at the side of her man. Realizing that, he tried to put some distance between them. She reached out and caught his hand. It took all his will not to pull out of that flimsy human grip, but only to walk, staring straight ahead and leaving his hand limp and unfeeling in hers.

It had never been so long a distance to the water. He had actually begun to think he had somehow lost his way when he heard it ahead of him in the same place it had always been. He checked for tracks out of habit, but no sooner had he hunkered beside the muddy bank than she was kneeling next to him, resting her hand upon his thigh. A light touch, surely. A thoughtless touch, perhaps. He could think of no good way to throw it off and so he stared fixedly into the ground with his damned thigh on fire under her unwelcome hand and wished he knew what the hell she was on about.

Of all his wishes, that was the one Sheul chose to grant.

Nicci kept her hand where it was, then turned toward him and placed the other with deliberate intent into his breeches and beneath his loin-plate. The tip of her wind-chilled finger slipped along his slit, seeking entry, but only for a moment. The world crashed back into focus; Meoraq shoved her violently away, slapping one hand to his groin and actually rubbing, as if her touch came with some polluted grease. Such was his horror in that moment that if she’d come at him again, he would have drawn and stabbed her.

But she didn’t. She sprawled across the bank of the stream and began to run water out of her eyes. “It’s okay,” she wept, trying to smile at him. “It’s okay. I won’t tell. I know you want to. It’s fine.”

He took two swift backwards steps, well out of her reach. “I don’t want this! I don’t want you!”

“I’m just the same as she is!” she pleaded, wiping mud onto her face with every swipe of her hand. “We look the same! We sound the same! You can do anything you want to me and you can…you can take care of me!”

And there it was. Shock died at once, crushed by the weight of his sudden disgust. “Take care of you.”

She crawled toward him in the muck, fumbling at her clothes, the shadows of her face in the moonlight such that it seemed a skull leered at him and it took every measure of his will not to draw his father’s blade and ram it through her throat. “I can be good,” she was saying. She might have been weeping or laughing as she said it, he could not tell which. “You can do everything you like that you’d never ask Amber. You can hurt me if you want to. You can—”

“Get away from me!” he roared, and that at last stopped her. She huddled at his feet, poised upon her knees with her bare chest exposed to him, motionless and watchful while he paced the urge to slap out of his body. When he wheeled abruptly and came back to her, she did not cringe, only lifted her head a little higher and reached out her hands.

He caught her by the wrists before she could touch him and pulled her roughly up before shoving her back. He eyed the growths on her chest with disgust and turned away. “Cover yourself.”

She did, silent and small.

“She is my wife and your blood-kin,” he said tightly, facing furiously into the wind. “This is incest! Blasphemy before Sheul!”

She uttered a high, shivery sound. He was fairly certain it was a laugh, but a laugh such as the damned must use, once death and eternity had driven them mad.

“Do you think you’re any different from them?” she asked, scorn like knives in her querulous words. “Do you really? God makes it happen, remember? It’s not a sin because God made them want me, right? So if it’s God’s will, what are you afraid of?” She came toward him, her mouth a black and ghastly crescent of a smile, to put her hands on him again. “What does Sheul want you to do with me?”

“Kill you.”

She flinched back, her smile lost at once. The wind smeared water across her cheeks. “I’m just the same as she is,” she said in her fragile voice.

“No,” said Meoraq. “You are not. And if you ever touch me again, I will see you judged for it. Hear me, N’ki, and mark the word of a Sheulek. It is for her sake alone that I do not cut you down right here. When she hears of this—”

“Don’t tell,” she whispered. “Please, don’t. She’ll hate me.”

“She should!” Meoraq spat, but then took a slow count of six and cleared his heart of Gann’s grip. “This once. Because she is weakened…and so happy to be with you again,” he added in a bitter rush. He breathed some more. “Go.”

She slipped away like a shadow on the grass. Meoraq did not watch her. He took six breaths and six more and then knelt on the wet bank to pray until peace found him. He stood, breathed, and knelt again, this time to ask for healing for his good woman and the strength and patience to tend the humans with whose care he had been charged. He stood, breathed, and knelt a final time, wetting his fingers with mud and painting his naked chest. He prayed, and in that silent prayer were thoughts of black gratitude that Sheul had held him fast against Nicci’s hand, because for a moment…

He stood, brushed the dried flakes of mud from his scales, then returned to the underlodge alone. He did not look for Nicci among the sleeping humans at the wall. He went to his cupboard. His woman roused halfway to raise the bedding and let him come beneath, then snuggled close and began to growl softly in her sleeping breaths, the way she claimed not to do. He held her, loving her, hating Nicci—Gann and Sheul each with a hand on his heart—and lay awake for hours.

 

7

 

Being hurt sucked.

It wasn’t the pain. The pain was extremely present, but Amber could handle pain. What she couldn’t handle, at least not with any good grace, was the boredom.

Amber knew how it felt to recover from whatever had bitten her that day back in the prairie. She remembered the weakness—needing to be carried, to be fed, to be tended like some…some sick person. But she also knew that it hadn’t lasted long. She’d been pretty out of it for a while, but once the fever broke, she was on her feet and walking in just five more days. Maybe not at her full speed, but walking.

But five days after Meoraq washed the maggots out of her side, Amber felt no better. She wasn’t walking, full speed or any speed; she still needed help just getting upstairs to pee. The pain gradually subsided, but she was always cold, always dizzy, always tired. She wasn’t getting better.

“Nothing’s happening!” she moaned as Meoraq carried her outside on Day Eighteen. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You lost a lot of blood,” he replied. “Sheul can heal your flesh, but blood takes time to renew.”

“It’s taking too long.”

“Stop whining. Try to see this as a time of leisure. Enjoy it.”

Enjoy it. Amber’s experience in the cave in the mountains should have prepared her for a lot of lying around doing nothing, but what she’d failed to consider was that, in the mountains, she’d hadn’t done much nothing at all. She and Meoraq had managed to keep busy most days, and on those rare occasions when they’d run out of busywork, there was always sex. These days, sex was as far out of the question as walking up the stairs.

All she could do was lie there.

Meoraq kept busy, because he was sadistic like that, but he refused to let her out of the cupboard. He got to bustle around the underlodge doing minor repairs and arranging things in their limited space until it was almost homey. He got to do all the cooking and cleaning and hunting. He got to scrounge up pieces of wood and carve them into various utensils, which he did in a yellow-striped state of high piss-off and which he would not allow her to do for him, even though there was no good reason why not, unless he thought she was going to maim herself some more. She told him as much in one of her surlier moods. He shut the cupboard door on her.

And that was how the time passed. Meoraq hunted, gathered, patrolled, prayed, built, repaired, replaced. Eric and Dag and Crandall had occasional spasms of productivity, doing whatever small tasks Meoraq assigned them without complaining, or at least complaining in a laughing way. Even Nicci, who did little and said less, wandered in and out whenever her odd moods took her. Amber lay in the cupboard and grew blood.

Meoraq washed and licked her wounds twice each day, and while he often told her she was healing well, he never said she was going to be as good as new. The kipwe’s claws had left three broad furrows in her side, which Meoraq’s bug-based first-aid had twisted into a godawful mess. The baby-new skin growing there was pink and shiny and unbelievably sensitive; the scar tissue knotted up in it, thick and white and dead. Sunk in the middle of this was a narrow depression, slightly askew, like a second, drunken belly-button.

She hated to look at herself under the blanket, so much so that every time Meoraq left the underlodge, she snuck out and put her tunic on. For Meoraq, wearing clothes in bed made about as much sense as wearing them in the bathtub—something which was not merely unnecessary but a little bit crazy. He’d come home and take them off her. She’d sneak out and put them on. After a few days of this, he made some ridiculously mild remark she couldn’t even remember now and she’d burst into tears and cried until she got a headache. He immediately handed over her clothes, which made her cry harder.

And that was something else, the emotional stuff. Like a playground seesaw with tears on one end and throwing up on the other, as her bouts of unplanned puking slacked off, the equally sudden crying jags picked up. She felt like a crazy person and she had no one to talk to about it.

“You’re pregnant,” said Nicci, the one time she’d tried to bring it up.

“Oh bullshit.”

“When was your last period?”

“I don’t know.” But she knew it had been in the cave where she and Meoraq had spent the winter. And she knew she’d finished not too terribly long before they’d left.

“When were you supposed to get it?”

“I don’t know! Quit talking like that!”

Nicci did, but now the thought was there, itching under her scales, as Meoraq would say. It had been thirty-two days already by that time. She knew because the interior walls of the cupboard were made of bricks, cut from some sort of chalky stone, aged to a dark grey, but which left nice white lines when chipped at with the sharp tip of Meoraq’s kzung. Thirty-two days and change since Crandall had watched her bathing and decided she was ‘putting the belly back on’. Thirty-two days and change plus however long she’d been with Zhuqa, plus the six days it had taken to climb down out of the mountains, plus however many days it had been since she’d finished her period. And that was way too long.

Never mind. It didn’t mean anything. She’d get it when it was time to get it and she sure as hell wasn’t in any hurry for that to happen before she could at least walk herself out to clean up.

She waited. That was it. That was all she could do.

So she did it.

 

* * *

 

Amber woke up to the cupboard door sliding open. She kept her eyes shut until she heard the familiar sound of his strikers scraping together, but after he got the lamp lit, she raised her head to watch Meoraq go through his usual morning stretches with her usual morning depression. He caught her looking, paused mid-flex, then abruptly stopped and got dressed.

“Are you awake?” he asked, meaning, ‘Are you going back to sleep or do I have to carry you upstairs now?’

“Yeah, probably. You go ahead, though.”

He grunted and left without a goodbye or a backwards glance.

Amber reached out and groped until she found Meoraq’s sword-belt hanging on the cupboard door. She unclipped his kzung and made the day’s mark.

“Do you guys have to talk so much?” Crandall muttered behind the curtain.

“What do you want us to do, pass each other notes?” Amber replaced the kzung and rolled onto her back, staring at the familiar and hated sight of the cupboard ceiling.

She could hear Eric muttering, probably telling Crandall not to be such a dick first thing in the morning, because the next thing she heard was an angry sigh and Crandall saying, “How you feeling, Bierce?”

“Got a stitch in my side,” she replied flatly. She said that every time someone asked her that. One of these days, it was going to be funny.

“See? She’s fine.”

Now it was Dag muttering, but it was Eric who got up. He pulled back the curtain to open up the room, folded his blanket, packed his pack—a Fleetman still, after all this time—and came over to the cupboard. “Let me see it,” he said.

Amber’s hand clenched on the blanket over her side. “Fuck you! Why?”

“Because it’s making you miserable to keep it a secret. Let me see.”

Amber stared at the ceiling for a few more seconds, hoping he’d go away, not enough to actually tell him to go away, then finally threw back the blanket and lifted her tunic to the waist.

“Wow.” Eric’s eyebrows rose appreciatively. “That’s pretty gruesome.”

She felt herself relax without ever feeling herself tighten up. She’d been so sure she was about to hear him tell her all the ways it wasn’t so bad when it plainly was. “Yeah,” she said and looked at it herself. It was just as ugly as it had been yesterday, but for some reason, with Eric standing there, it also looked rounder. Her stomach clenched; the scars buckled.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore. Sometimes, if I move just right, it kinda stretches and feels tight, you know? And sometimes the new skin hurts if you touch it.” She prodded at the dimple, resisting the urge to shudder. It felt firm, if alien and horrible. She was not getting fat. “Feels like wax.”

Eric touched her stomach. She could feel the heat of his hand, but not the texture. Looking at her scars, Eric said, “I don’t think anyone’s said this yet, but you really showed your stuff out there.”

She frowned, ready to be offended if that was the insult it sounded like. “Is that a joke?”

“I don’t mean just the porcupine-thing. I mean how you went after it. For us. After everything…” He looked her in the eye at last, his hand heavy over her unfeeling scars. “You even stood up for Scott and I know you don’t like him. I guess…I guess you deserve to hear someone say thanks.”

She hadn’t realized how completely she’d given up on that until she felt how shocked she was to finally hear it. Her mouth was actually open. She was gaping.

“I’d really like it if we could start over,” said Eric. “I realize that’s asking a lot, but…Do you remember when I told you how friends matter?”

“Yeah.”

“I was trying to tell you how important it was for you to get along with us.” Eric smiled crookedly. “We really should have been making more of an effort to get along with you. It’s not too late, is it?”

Eric’s direct stare was getting hard to meet. Amber looked away and, like a ghost in a bad movie, Meoraq’s head was there, floating in the shadows just over Eric’s left shoulder.

Eric saw something in her face. He turned around and promptly tried to jump back, banging his shoulders into the cupboard frame and his hand into the door in his hurry to take it off her. “Oh, you’re back. That was quick,” he said, trying to laugh.

Meoraq did not respond, unless you counted a very slight tilting of his head.

Obviously, Eric knew what that meant now. “We were just talking,” he said, holding up his hands.

Meoraq didn’t answer, even with a grunt. He also didn’t step back, forcing Eric to retreat by sidling along the cupboard door until he had enough room to make a dive for the stairs. Meoraq watched him go, then glanced back at the others.

Dag and Nicci got up immediately and left the underlodge. Crandall followed at his own deliberate pace, laughing.

When they were gone, Meoraq unexpectedly flared his mouth open in a lizardish grin and coughed laughter of his own.

“Tell me you didn’t scare the crap of him just because you could,” Amber said.

“He put his hand on you,” Meoraq replied with a casual shrug. He went to light a fire in the hearth. “How did it feel?”

“His hand? What kind of question—”

“His words. His…” Meoraq snorted with extra-special sarcasm. “…gratitude.”

“Don’t say it like that,” said Amber, annoyed. “At least he’s making an effort.”

“He certainly is,” Meoraq murmured, smiling.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Meoraq set the heat stones in the fire to warm up, filled his stewing pouch with water and hung the half-emptied flask back on the wall. He was still smiling.

At last, exasperated beyond belief, she got it. “You think he was coming on to me, don’t you?”

“I suspect that is just what I think.”

Amber slammed the cupboard door on him.

He opened it and leaned inside, spines relaxed, smirking. “How long would you say we’ve been here?”

Amber moved the blanket and checked her notches. “Fifty-three days,” she said and heard, like a ghost of a ghost, Nicci whisper, When was your last period? She shivered.

Meoraq didn’t notice. His spines were at full attention as he leaned into the cupboard to look at her calendar. “Why are you defacing my bed?”

“It’s how prisoners keep track of time where I’m from,” she told him, making sure there was an extra emphasis on ‘prisoners’. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I don’t have a subject. I merely observe that a man doesn’t take fifty-three days to say things he feels strongly about. He had another motive.”

“You don’t believe that,” said Amber, watching him withdraw to his chair at the table.

“You sound very sure.”

“He still has the hand he put on me.”

“Ha! But I don’t need to defend my woman from his conquest,” he added. “She defends herself.”

It was praise and she knew it, but all the same, she felt that phantom tug of resistance as the fish hook tore through flesh, felt the sting where Zhuqa’s heat splashed over her eyes, tasted blood and cum in her mouth. She defended herself all right. Fierce little thing that she was.

She couldn’t hide that shiver. Meoraq noticed, but obviously didn’t know what to make of it. “Are you angry?” he asked cautiously, flaring his spines to suggest that, if she were, he was prepared to insist he was not at fault until she agreed with him.

“No. I’m not, I just…hate lying here!” she finished in a sudden illogical rush of fury. She shoved the door over as far as it could go and swung her legs out, sitting up. When Meoraq only twitched his spines, she stood. After another pause to assess him, she walked over to the table and stood in front of him.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Fine.”

He raised his chin, his eyes narrowing.

“A little shaky,” she admitted and sat with relief on the table.

“Truth,” he declared, leaning out to put the first heat stone in the water.

“But that’s only because you never let me get up.”

“Evil Uyane,” he agreed and hissed to himself, heaping embers over the remaining stones. “Vindictive brunt, who in his cruelty, would not allow his wife to tear open her soft skin.”

“My skin has been all sealed up for days.”

“Only in seeming.”

“I’m better now,” she insisted.

“Truth, but ‘better’ is not ‘healed’.”

“When are we leaving?” she asked.

“When leaving will not kill you.” He slid a pointed glance her way. “I feel I’ve said that before. No matter. Your clay requires time to strengthen. Shall we say—”

“Six days?” she guessed.

“How well my wife knows her man’s mind.”

“And then we go on to Xi’Matezh?”

“Xi’Matezh,” he agreed, or maybe he was correcting her pronunciation. “We aren’t far.”

“Half a brace, right?” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve been saying that since the mountains.”

“Less than that. Perhaps even less than half that.”

“So…You could have been there and back, like, three times by now.”

“No arguments, woman. This is not a discussion. We go to Him together.” He looked past her, loudly flattening his spines. “I have not invited you back.”

“It’s raining,” Eric said on the stair.

“Excellent. Keep me informed. Get out.” Meoraq continued to stare until Eric and the others turned around and tromped back upstairs. “Raining,” he muttered, and prodded at the heat stones.

“How long are you going to keep them outside?” Amber asked.

“They aren’t ‘out’ anywhere. They’re in the foreroom. Listen.” Meoraq looked up at the ceiling, scowling at the sound of footsteps pacing above them. “I ought to make them stay up there until we move on. I’m sick of having humans underfoot.”

She looked at him.

He noticed and predictably misunderstood. He scowled back at her, saying, “I’ll call them down once I’ve had my bath. Enough. I am still the master of this camp and I am not a harsh one.” His spines lifted in an overture of peace. “An hour, eh? A private hour, you and I, and all the world outside.”

For Nicci’s sake, not to mention the other three, Amber knew she really ought to do some of the standing up that Eric found so praiseworthy, but the idea of privacy was a powerful temptation. “So,” she said, beginning to smile. “Did you have any ideas on how to pass the time until the water heats up?”

He changed out the stone in the pouch for a hotter one. “We can walk down to the stream, if you’re feeling strong enough. We’re going to need more water if you want a bath too.”

The sight of her words going over his head made whooshing sounds in Amber’s mind. She waited a second or two, then stood, moved the stewing pouch out of his reach and sat down on his thigh.

“What are you doing?” he asked, by all appearances with genuine surprise.

Amber wordlessly took his favorite bone-handled knife out of its sheath and stabbed it meaningfully into the back of his chair, above his head.

He looked at it. “Ah.”

She caught him by the jaw and aimed his face back at her so that she could kiss his rough mouth. He allowed it, but certainly did not encourage it, and when she was done, he said simply, “It is an unforgiveable sin to lie with a woman in her sickbed.”

“I don’t appear to be in it at the moment.” She loosened her tunic and slid it off one shoulder so he could see his bite-marks. “You made me certain promises, lizardman.”

He eyed the scars with distinct pride, only to glare at her. “Your humans are right above us.”

“We’ll be quiet,” she promised.

“I don’t like being quiet.” He paused, frowning as he watched her unbuckle his belt. “And I don’t think you can be.”

“Then we’ll be noisy, but we’ll be quick and finish up before they come down to investigate,” said Amber, now at work on his breeches-ties.

“My desires come from God. They should not be hurried.”

“Then they shouldn’t ought to be denied, either,” she said piously, and slipped her hand beneath his loin-plate.

“You may have a point,” he said after a moment’s meditation. “Are you sure you’re strong enough?”

She kissed him again. This time, he kissed back at her, his broad, dry tongue nudging at her lips and into her mouth to taste her. His hands caught at her thighs, kneading lightly before moving up to wrap her waist. He didn’t try to undress her; he’d probably never heard of doing it in a chair, she thought, remembering Zhuqa.

She broke the kiss with a shudder and looked away, waiting to feel arousal curdle into shame, but it didn’t happen. Meoraq, oblivious, saw the sudden exposure of her throat as an invitation and leaned forward to nuzzle at it, reaching beneath her wrap to cup her breast. He was never quite sure what to do with it once he had it in his hand, but at least he tried.

She looked down at him, faintly smiling, watching his spines flex and quiver with restraint as he fit his teeth into the impression of his scar, nuzzled, fit them again.

He was never going to be Zhuqa, no more than Zhuqa could have ever been Meoraq. It didn’t matter what he did, what he said, how he looked. Zhuqa had tried to be her lover as part of his little game, but his gentlest touch was loathsome. He didn’t deserve the hold he had on her memories now.

Amber brushed the back of her hand over Meoraq’s brow. He grunted pleasantly without opening his eyes, lost in her shoulder. Nothing they did together could ever be ugly, she thought. Nothing they did together belonged to Zhuqa.

She knelt down.

He started to move out of the chair and join her on the floor, but stopped, puzzled, at her silent insistence. When she started in again at loosening his loin-plate, he tried to help.

“Let me do this,” she said, pushing his hands firmly away. “I want to please my man.”

“It does not please me to see my woman on her knees.”

She looked at him, crookedly smiling. “I want to please my man. Whether I’m on my knees or on my feet or standing on my head.” ‘And I want to take every ugly thing he did away from him,’ she thought, but didn’t say that. It was bad enough that she could still see Zhuqa with them in this moment; she didn’t want Meoraq to see him too.

“This is a human mating technique, is it?” Meoraq asked uncertainly, watching her peel away his loin-plate. “Do I take my boots off or do you remove them for me?”

She leaned back to look at them, then up at him.

“Humans take their boots off for formal matings,” he explained, looking very mildly embarrassed. “This is a formal mating, isn’t it?”

“Do I dare ask why you were watching humans have sex?”

He mumbled something, scratching at his snout, then shook his head and snapped, “I am not to be blamed if humans insist on mating in the open wilds where anyone can see them! Do you want the boots off or not?”

“Take them off,” she said decisively. “Take everything off. Let’s do this right.”

Muttering under his breath, Meoraq stood up and shucked out of his clothes. Amber did the same, still giggling now and then, even though she honestly didn’t know what struck her so funny about the whole thing. It wasn’t the concept of Meoraq as a Peeping Tom, which was pretty ludicrous all on its own, as much as it was the idea of human mating techniques (step one remove boots step two insert penis), formal and otherwise.

“And now?” Meoraq asked, standing naked and proud above her with his hands on his hips and his best glare on.

“Now sit down again.”

“Sit?” He looked at the chair and back at her. “In the chair?”

She nodded, trying to hide her grin under her hand.

“I thought we were going to have sex.”

“We are. Sort of.” A sudden sobering thought occurred as he gingerly lowered himself into the chair. “Is it, um, against God’s laws to do things that can’t, strictly speaking, produce babies?”

“Things?” He frowned. “How strict do you mean?”

She put her hands lightly on his thighs and leaned between them to lick all along the tight crease of his slit, penetrating at the crown to tongue at his sa’ad.

He watched her very closely. Apart from the immediate and forceful extrusion of his slick cock, he did not move and did not make a sound until she leaned back to look at him again. “I have to pray about this,” he said seriously.

“I’ll wait.”

He tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

A few minutes ticked by. She changed out the stones in the stewing pouch. Meoraq breathed.

His eyes opened. “You are mine,” he told her. “And I am yours. Nothing we take as our pleasure together offends the eye of God.”

“Really?”

“He was quite clear.” He looked upwards, thoughtful. “Unusually clear, one might say.”

She cupped the hot swell at the base of his cock and bent again, this time sucking the nub of his sa’ad between her tight lips to flick it with her tongue. His taste was strong, yes, and sweet and intoxicating and entirely his own.

A pair of heavy feet came across the ceiling and started down the stairs.

“If no one has been killed,” Meoraq called, “someone is about to be.”

The feet stopped, turned, galumphed away.

Amber giggled around his clit, which made the muscles in both his thighs jump.

“Ease off a moment,” he ordered, resting both hands on her shoulders. “Just a moment. This is…this is very different.”

“Do you need to pray again?”

He tried to glower at her, but was too obviously flustered to be effective. His eyes closed. His breath deepened and slowed. He appeared to fall asleep.

Amber rolled off her knees and sat cross-legged. The floor was very cold on her ass. She dragged her discarded wrap over and sat on that instead. She traded out the stones again and waited.

Meoraq’s eyes opened. “Proceed.”

“Everything’s still all right with God?”

“Yes.”

She weighed the pros and cons of her next nagging doubt while she stroked his shaft gently in her fist, but in the end, felt she just had to ask. She wasn’t sure how…but she really felt she had to.

And then she remembered Meoraq’s ‘anatomy lesson’ the first night they’d made love. This is my masculine member…it will go here…

A smile tugged at her lips. She rubbed his cock in one hand and pointed at it with the other. “I would like to suck this.”

His spines came forward.

“And lick it all over until you cum in my mouth.”

His cock twitched in her grip. He frowned.

“I just want to be sure that’s okay.” …the most profane thing I have ever seen… “Especially if I swallow it.”

She watched his face closely, where ‘Yes, do it now,’ fought a visible war against ‘Sex is for procreation only’ and finally he passed his hand over his eyes and looked at her through his fingers. “Give me a moment.”

“Take all the time you need.”

He did some muttering, but closed his eyes and that was all for a long time.

She found herself watching the way the light played along the wet shine of his oiled cock—red light and black shadow, stark and smooth and beautiful. She wanted to feel it in her hands again. She wanted to kiss it, taste it, not to kill a ghost or prove a point, but just to hear Meoraq’s hiss and feel his hands clench in her hair. She imagined that penultimate spasm, the flood of his heat across her tongue, the roughness of his scales under her hands as she held him close to drink…