The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (4)

Amber stood there.

The lizard knocked again, this time with a few words and a flick of his spines.

She sat down where he wanted her.

He grunted and looked away, watching all the people who were watching them. He muttered under his breath, glanced skyward, scratched his throat. If he had a reason for calling her over, he was in no hurry to tell her what it was.

“Meoraq,” said Amber.

He grunted, still without looking at her. Scott was at the head of the crowd now, just beyond the invisible boundary marked by the lizardman’s swords, listening to the complaints of the people who’d had their bags kicked.

“Meoraq,” said Amber again, reaching for his arm.

He caught her before she could touch him, but he looked at her.

Now what?

“Hand,” said Amber, feeling stupid and a little desperate. She pointed at her own, caught in his unbelievably strong, scaly grip. “Fingers.” She wiggled them.

Meoraq released her, frowning, and watched as she brought her arm up between them.

“Fingers. Look! One, two, three, four, five. Hand,” she said, now pointing at her other one. “And fingers. One, two, three, four, five.”

He said nothing.

“Head,” said Amber, pointing at herself. “Hair. Ear, see it? And this one. Ear. Two ears. Eyes. One, two. Two eyes. Nose. One nose. Mouth. All of it together? This is my face. My face is the front of my head. It…Damn it, will you say something?”

He did not, but after a long, frustrating silence, he slowly raised his hand.

“Hand,” said Amber, rubbing her eyes.

He splayed it.

She straightened up a little. “Fingers.”

He made a fist and brought them up one at a time, listening as she counted them off. He began to point—at the fire, his tent, the trees, the grass, the sky—stopping only once, when one of the Manifestors broke the boundary-line of his camp. Other than that warning hiss, he never made a sound. He made no attempt to repeat the words she said for him.

But this was progress. This could work. She would make it work.

Amber talked, breaking things down into smaller and smaller words, talking until her throat went dry. Meoraq watched, listened, and was silent.

 

7

 

The longer he listened, the more certain Meoraq became that the strange chatter of the creatures who called themselves humans was indeed a true language, entirely separate from his own. This troubled him. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word. This was the first law of Sheul, repeated no less than twenty-three times throughout the book of His Word, and apart from the obvious, it had been interpreted to mean that there must be a single language so that all men might hear and understand the wisdoms of Sheul. Where once there had been countless tongues spoken over Gann, there was now only one: Dumaqi, the speech of men.

So. That the humans neither spoke nor even seemed to understand dumaqi was therefore an ominous sign of their true nature, but Meoraq had to admit that he had not emerged from his mother’s womb speaking it either. He would have to meditate on the matter. In the meantime, this left him struggling to make sense of a creature who thought all she had to do to talk was move her mouthparts around. And really, what else could they do? A human’s flat face had no snout, which meant no resonance chamber, and Sheul alone knew how hard it must be to make those wriggly little mouthparts shape the sounds those deformed tongues could not. Given their limitations, their absurdly simplistic language was no more than sounds strung together, entirely lacking the subtle nuance and precision of dumaqi. By the end of that first day, Meoraq was already beginning to glean some understanding from the creatures’ jabber. Not much. A word here. A sound there. A name.

Amber. Her name was Amber.

She sat with him throughout the grey hours of the day when all the other creatures came, stared awhile, then left again. Her hands moved as she spoke, gesturing here or there to add emphasis to her simple sounds, often returning to indicate just her, just him. Her gaze remained disturbingly direct; her eyes were so damned green.

When darkness fell, they lit more fires—heaps of wood that gave out more smoke than heat—and sat around them to mutter and stare. They had no meat after their one failed hunt, but the one called Scott eventually brought out a satchel of something in small, wrapped portions for his people to eat. Meoraq was himself overlooked, but as the stuff appeared quite disgusting, he was happy to make do with cuuvash. And since Amber was sitting with him and had not been offered anything, he snapped her off a square too.

She took it. Not immediately and not without a glance back at her people, but she took it. And after watching him bite into his, she gnawed off a piece of hers and sat, frowning with her entire malleable face, chewing it like cattle.

Scott came back over, also frowning. He spoke at some short length, gesturing. Amber answered. Scott spoke again, louder. Amber took another bite of cuuvash and appeared to ignore him. Scott aimed his next roll of gibberish at Meoraq. Now Amber said something, but Meoraq pointed two fingers at her and she quieted. “No one speaks for a Sheulek,” he told her. To Scott, he said, “Go away,” making shooing sweeps of his arm so that his meaning could not be misinterpreted.

Scott talked, not louder but much, much longer, before finally pointing aggressively at Meoraq’s cuuvash.

“Get your own,” said Meoraq, contentedly grinding his cuuvash against the roof of his mouth until it was soft enough to swallow.

Scott waited, moving his angry eyes back and forth between him and Amber, but eventually walked away. Meoraq watched him at the largest fire, speaking tirelessly and looking like nothing so much as a city governor holding court. He could see that Amber was listening, although she did not watch, and she did not appear easy with what she heard. She looked at the remaining portion of cuuvash in her hand and, after only one small bite, tried to give it back to him.

Meoraq turned his head to watch the clouds roll over the moon and pretended not to see. Eventually, she put the cuuvash in a fold of her clothes and he looked at her again. That freakish little nub of a nose. Those fat, purplish folds around her mouth. The rounded shells of her ears.

And her eyes. The living green fire of her eyes.

“No one man can ever comprehend all the wonders of Sheul’s making,” he said, speaking to himself more than to her. “So it says in the Word and I always thought that I believed it. But how could I believe it when I never truly understood until now how much further the wonders of His making could surpass a man’s comprehension?”

“Mee’orakk,” she replied and reached to touch his chest.

This time, he allowed it, frowning down at her hand where it pressed on his bare flesh. “No man could have imagined a hand like that,” he mused. “Five fingers and those round, flat, useless little claws. Scaleless. Hairless. Soft. And yet what have you done with that hand but touch a Sheulek?”

“Amber.” She patted herself just above the twinned swellings of her chest.

“I hear you,” he said, studying them. “Are those really teats or do I just think so because I suspect you to be female and am looking for proof? If they are teats, where is the baby? It would have to be a suckling to swell you so. Or babies, I suppose; you have two teats, you must bear two babies.”

Amber said her name. Meoraq replied with his. He watched her slap her hands to her face and hide behind them, rubbing just as though she had brow-ridges to rub.

That was kind of cute.

“I have to pray,” Meoraq told her, told them both, really. He retreated to his tent to do it and meditated there for some time, fruitlessly, before commending himself to his Father’s divine hands, here in the camp of these creatures, and lying down upon his mat to sleep. He did not undress. He kept his kzung drawn beside him. He feared no creature-assassins but was ready for them. He breathed the way he had been taught, counting six steps over and over, and stopping to listen each time the creatures approached his tent.

As he waited for Sheul’s peace to overtake his restless mind, he found himself wondering what the young of these creatures might look like. He could almost imagine them—twin monsters in miniature—small hands and greedy mouths at work at the fullness of their mother’s teats (Amber’s, for no other reason than that she was the human he’d been sitting with all day), perhaps one at each.

Outside, the wind gusted, moaning like a woman lost to fire. Scott’s voice briefly overtook it and Amber answered, her tone as fearless as her hand had been upon his body. Meoraq listened, smiling, then rolled onto his side and closed his eyes to sleep.

 

* * *

 

He dreamt.

Dreams, by their very nature, frequently touched at strangeness and he was not a man who attached much importance to them, even when he recalled them upon waking, which was not often. But this…

When he became aware of it (he could not say ‘at its beginning’ for, like so many dreams, it seemed to have much more history than he could recall upon waking), he found himself seated in the lessons room at the training hall in Tilev. Many others were with him, paying rapt attention to Master Tsazr at the head of the hall, who was going on in his terse, impatient way about something. None of this yet seemed odd. It had been twelve years and some since his ascension, but Meoraq still dreamed of his training days upon occasion. At least he was wearing clothes in this one.

But when he turned his head, he saw that half the students around him were humans. Amber sat at his side, a lessons slate in her lap and a stylus in her five-fingered hand, scratching out notes in alien markings. At his other side sat a dumaq, a stranger, wearing the garments of an exarch with the hood pulled so low over his face that Meoraq could see nothing but his painted snout. His was rather a plain robe, sparsely trimmed and not entirely clean, nothing at all like the fine dress of Exarch Ylsathoc.

Without looking at him, this stranger said, “What is it you seek in Xi’Matezh?”

Wasn’t that just like an exarch, to involve himself in someone else’s personal business?

But Meoraq found himself answering, and answering with both honesty and respect: “I seek communion with Sheul.”

“A man need not travel to the end of the world to seek what can be found upon his knees in his own courtyard. Your House is empty,” the hooded figure said before Meoraq could reply, not that any reply came to his dreaming mind. “Should not a son see to the continuance of his physical father’s honor rather than undergoing lengthy journeys in his spiritual Father’s name?”

Meoraq rarely felt emotion in dreams, but shame stung at him now. Shame, oddly, and not annoyance at the presumption of this stranger. “I never said that I would not take stewardship of Uyane!”

“You certainly seem eager to postpone it.”

“No!”

“No? Then why—” The exarch’s head cocked, still revealing nothing but paint and shadow and now the pinpoint gleam of one eye. “—do you seek Xi’Matezh? What would you ask of Sheul that requires so arduous a journey?”

And rather than tell this man his prayers were for Sheul alone, Meoraq said, “If it is Sheul’s will that I am retired to Uyane, so I will serve Him.”

The exarch dipped his head once, acknowledging, expectant.

“But I do not wish to spend all the years of my remaining life bound to stewardship if it is not His will!”

“Is the House so hateful?”

“The House?” Meoraq looked over his shoulder where, as only seemed right and natural, the lessons room had opened into the rooftop courtyard at the fore of House Uyane. He could see the stone couch his father favored beneath the drooping branches of a ribbonleaf tree, and the wide steps where he himself used to sit when he was at lessons (or when he was hoping to steal a glance at the servant girl who scrubbed the courtyard tiles). “No,” he said now, puzzled. “It is my father’s House and has all my love.”

“Not all, it would seem, if you would travel to the end of the very world to escape it.”

“It is not the House I wish to escape.”

“No?”

Meoraq looked again, but now the courtyard had become his father’s innermost chamber, as seen through the eyes of the young boy he had been on the only occasion he had seen it. And just why he had gone to such a forbidden room, he could not recall, but he could perfectly remember how it had been: the light of lamps behind the screen casting shadows on every wall, the scent of some flowery incense heavy in the air, and the cupboard of his father’s bed standing open so that he could see the broad, scarred field of his father’s back as it bunched and heaved and arched.

Meoraq averted his eyes fast, but the sounds persisted. His father’s deep, steady breaths. His mother’s feeble, mewling cries. The stealthy rasp of scales moving together. The wet pull and suck of sex in its second round.

The stranger was watching, his long hands steepled beneath his chin. “This embarrassed you.”

Meoraq did not reply and did not look again.

“Is it not a lord’s responsibility to preserve his bloodline? To sire sons of his loyal woman?”

His loyal woman. Meoraq’s jaws clenched.

“Surely you do not question Yecedi’s loyalty?”

“I am sure she was ever faithful to my father,” Meoraq said curtly. And he was. Yecedi had passed directly from her father’s own House to Rasozul’s and did not leave it until the day she died.

“She was a good woman.”

“I suppose so.” Meoraq shrugged his spines, wishing the sounds of sex would stop or at least that his mother’s urgent moaning would. “She was a perfect high-born wife, obedient and invisible and able to produce three strong sons upon command.”

The exarch looked at him. “Do you think your father gave it as his command?”

The sounds died away suddenly, swallowed up by the lessons room wall. Meoraq glanced that way, saw dark stone and students, and shrugged again.

“Of course, when you bore that night your reluctant witness, your father had already done his siring,” the exarch mused. “What embarrasses you most, I wonder? That you saw your father in Sheul’s fires, or that you saw him with your pregnant mother instead of some pretty young servant?”

“My father had no business taking her to his bed!” Meoraq burst out.

“Is it not the duty of a loyal woman to answer all her man’s desires?” said the exarch with the faintest hint of sarcasm.

“No, it is the duty of a loyal woman to sit in her damned room and grow her son! What was she even doing in that part of the house that he saw her?”

“Perhaps she was invited,” the exarch murmured, steepling his fingers again.

“He could not have passed fewer than three other women if he went to fetch her out. Any one of whom would have been honored to receive his fires!”

“Do you think so?”

“But, no! He had to have gone all the way to her room and back and for what? Sheul does not give a man sexual urges so that he can spend them with a woman already carrying his child!”

“The bond between man and woman is sacred even in the eye of Sheul. Nothing they took as their pleasure together offended Him.”

Meoraq snorted.

“When you take up the stewardship of House Uyane, will you not want a woman such as Yecedi?”

Meoraq tried to snort again but it came out as a hiss. He rubbed at his snout, then his brow-ridges, and finally his throat, where he could feel anger throbbing.

“A good woman. A loyal woman.”

A mewling little breed-pot, forever shackled to Meoraq’s wrist. He would have to live with her each and every day, unless he were away defending his House or his city’s honor, and he would not be permitted to send her out until after he had at least two grown sons to guarantee his continuance. Or unless she were barren, in which case he would have to replace her immediately with an entirely new mewling little breed-pot.

“Is it so impossible to imagine you could be happy with a woman?”

“I am frequently happy with women,” Meoraq snapped.

“With one woman.”

He rubbed his brow-ridges. “If that is Sheul’s will.”

“And so you travel to Xi’Matezh.”

“Yes.”

“To pray for Sheul’s guidance.”

“Yes.”

“That He may lead you to a good woman to take into your House.”

Meoraq hissed again and shook his head. “Yes.”

“Perhaps you could find one here.”

“Here?” Meoraq looked around the lessons room, at dumaqs and humans side at side, all the way to Master Tsazr, indiscriminately lecturing all. “There are no women allowed in the training halls!”

It was a dream, and his voice, which had gone unnoticed all this time, suddenly rang out like tribunal bells. Every head turned.

“Uyane!”

He snapped to his feet at once, dream or no dream, and Master Tsazr came swiftly forward to slap him deservedly across his snout. It did not hurt in the dream, but it still staggered him some. Master Tsazr had a wicked hand.

“No women in the training halls, eh? Have you come to work your mind?” Tsazr inquired caustically. “Or your clay?”

“My mind, sir.”

“I have my doubts. Amber.” The human name fell perfectly from Tsazr’s mouth.

“Yes, sir.” The dumaqi words came perfectly from Amber’s.

“What is the day’s lesson? Remind Uyane.”

“We speak of the Ancients, sir.”

“Tell Uyane your lesson.”

Amber turned her soft, flat face toward him. The bad light of the lessons room made her pale skin seem wholly white, her dun-colored hair seem grey as ashes, and her nondescript training garments as black as the Abyss, but her eyes were still green as new leaves and deep as wells. She said, “Our numbers swelled until our cities covered all the earth. When we had no more land to cover, we built our cities on top of themselves and milled in them all together, like yifu. We took the holy gifts of medicine and science and used them in frivolous and dangerous ways. We made machines to give us comfort and used them until we poisoned all our earth and water and air. We made trade of sex and suffering and war. We mocked Sheul and we corrupted Gann.”

“The Ancients corrupted Gann,” agreed Master Tsazr, striding along the rows of silent students and pausing often to run a speculative (and largely dismissive) eye over each face. “And Gann in turn corrupted them. The Ancients turned from Sheul, devastating the land to fuel their wickedness and making constant war upon themselves until at last Sheul rose up and smote them with His judgment. Uyane!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Name the three acts of the Fall of the Ancients.”

Thank Sheul in His heaven for an easy question. “The first act was the punishment of wrath, when every man was consumed by rage and war enveloped all of Gann.”

“For how long?”

Meoraq stared for a moment, utterly thrown. Back came Master Tsazr’s hand, but it could not knock answers into him when there were none.

“Amber,” said Tsazr, turning around. “How long did the act of wrath last?”

“It is still among us,” she replied, which was the most nonsensical thing she could have said here, in Sheul’s world of peace.

But Master Tsazr grunted approvingly and walked away. “Speak on, Uyane. What was the second act?”

“The curse of blight,” he said at once, “when the land failed and the skies were filled with storms. The cities of the Ancients fell and famine and disease preyed upon the landless people.”

“For how long?” asked Tsazr, casting a cold eye back at Meoraq.

He looked at Amber, but she was bent over her slate, making human letters. In another moment, Meoraq was reeling from the dream-like painlessness of Master Tsazr’s blow. Amber’s voice drifted up from his side, the dumaqi words made haunting in her human mouth: “It is still among us.”

“Uyane.”

Meoraq straightened up and put his arms to his side, only to find that Master Tsazr had somehow been replaced by the strange exarch with the low hood.

“What was the third act of the Fall of the Ancients?” this figure asked in Tsazr’s voice.

He knew this one, thankfully. “It was the return of Sheul and the hope of His forgiveness. And it is still among us,” he added, anticipating the next question.

The stranger did not reply, but the silence that swept the lessons room proved more disconcerting than his hooded stare. Meoraq looked away and saw the prairie all around him; he looked back and there was Amber before him and they were sitting, face to face, in the dark of the humans’ camp.

“We built a ship,” said Amber. She raised her hand to make a wedged shape and passed it between them. “And it flew through the sky, beyond the clouds that covered our world, into the lights that shine forever.” Her arm arced up, graceful as the neck of a thuoch. Her eyes never left his and they were green, so green. “But the ship was hurt and it fell here, out of the storm. It broke open over Gann. It died and many died with it.” Her hand fell to earth and opened, her fingers flaring out and curling slowly back toward her palm. Her second hand lit upon this imagined carnage, made walking fingers, and stepped out onto the grass. “But some of us survived and now we’re here. We’re here and there’s no way home.” She looked back over her shoulder and let out a shaky breath, then turned back and caught his hand in both of hers. Her hands were soft and warm; her eyes were terrible in their beauty. “I need you.”

Something in him shivered right down to the core of his soul. He tried to say her name, but the magic of the dream ended, it seemed, with his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, just as he always had, and shook his head with disgust. His next attempt was nothing but a hiss and a choke of meaningless sound.

“Please, Meoraq,” she said. “I need your help. And you need mine.”

He did not remember getting up, but they were standing suddenly, the two of them together before a dark structure he somehow knew was Xi’Matezh. They were standing, yes, and his arms were going around her just as if that were not a perfectly appalling thing to do. He could feel her heat against his body and her horrible face was right before him and her name, ah, her name was like wine in his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, bending close. “Mm—”

 

* * *

 

“…mbr,” he mumbled, and the sound of his own voice jolted him awake.

Meoraq opened his eyes and was, for one disorienting moment, shocked to see that Amber’s own were not before him. He found his lamp and lit it, but saw only the interior of his shelter.

What did he expect? Meoraq clapped a hand to his head and rubbed roughly at his scales, then rolled over and sat up. His cock was out, he noticed, pinched between his belly and his loin-plate and still dully throbbing with Gann’s lusts. He retracted it with great distaste and pressed a hand over his slit to hold it in while he tightened his belt, meditating on the dream. Already, it was so tangled in his mind that he could not say what the message had been.

Dreams. Only fools and priests believed they had messages.

He put on his breeches and opened his tent.

The creatures slept in heaps all around him, cocooned in more of those silvery bedsheets. They looked like fat, metal maggots. A deeply disturbing sight.

And there was Amber.

He could see the twin lump of herself and the other human that clung at her, together in the grass at the very edge of his camp. At the edge of Scott’s camp as well, far from any fire. The sight of her sleeping in the open air like an animal did something unpleasant to his emotions and gave him back disturbing fragments of his dream…particularly there at the end, when he’d been holding her.

Dream-nonsense, he told himself brutally. If he hadn’t awakened when he had, he probably would have bitten her or something.

The image his mind sent out at that thought was not that of a monstrous dumaq devouring Amber neck-first, however, but of a mark of conquest upon her naked shoulder. His cock, safely constrained behind his loin-plate, throbbed with Gann’s senseless need.

Meoraq shuddered, started to retreat within his tent, and then rose resolutely and tromped over to where Amber lay. She roused at the noise, pushing back her damp cover and squinting up at him through sleep-dazed eyes. “Get up,” he said, and beckoned, knowing she would not understand him. “To your feet, soft-skinned creature.”

More humans stirred. “Wzzee wnt?” someone called, and Amber answered, “Elleff’ai’no,” in a puzzled fashion, but she got up.

“I dreamed of you.” Meoraq led her to his firepit and pushed on her shoulder until she sat. He crouched to knuckle through the ash until he found a bit of branch only half-burnt, then woke the embers to a flame bright enough to see by. “And while dreams are largely foolish things, Sheul often hides some shard of insight there. So do I recall one thing I think to be His wisdom. Take this.”

She let him thrust the charred branch into her hands. She frowned at it, and then her brows raised and she gave him a startled sort of look. She dropped to her knees at once before him, intent and eager as she patted her hand across the ash to flatten it.

And she began to draw. Not the strange markings she had made across her lessons slate in his dream, but an image of some rounded shape (we built a ship), amplified by sweeping motions of her arm, which she made fall by drawing a line just beneath it (it broke open over Gann). She started drawing line-men to spill out of it, chattering explanations, and Meoraq leaned back on his heels to listen. He did not try to mimic her words, but he did interrupt now and then with questions of his own, raised with gestures and drawings in the ash.

The story he was able to glean through this crude communication was a confusing one. She seemed to be trying to tell him that the creatures he saw before him now were all there were, not just here, but in all of Gann. He tried many times to get her to tell him where the ship had sailed from and how they had come inland so far without being seen, but kept getting the same baffling response: The ship did not move on water, but through the sky. She seemed to want him to believe they had not come from Gann at all, but from some other world. She illustrated this by drawing two circles in the ash and the rounded shape of the ship between them, sketching the line of their travel over and over and jabbing at the sky above them with her stick.

She must think he was an idiot. That a ship had sailed, Meoraq did not doubt, and perhaps it had even come across the sky if it were some relic from the time of the Ancients or a machine made after that fashion. That it had come to some disaster seemed equally plausible. That they were all there were in the world, as helpless as newborns and meaning no harm to anyone, was patently absurd.

And yet…

And yet, there was Amber, grimacing at him happily as she told her tale. He liked to think that his years in service to Sheul had given him some power to see lies when they were told to his face, and even though hers was a strange one, it could still be read. When he gazed on Amber, when he looked past the cold and hunger and other hardships of travel in the wildlands, he saw no evil. He saw sorrow and he saw loss. He saw anger sometimes and sometimes guilt. He saw strength and determination and so much tenacity that he often questioned his odd certainty that she was female, but he had never seen deceit in her. Not when she looked at him. Not when she looked at anyone. There were things she did not say, perhaps, but what she said was honest.

We built a ship…and it flew through the sky…

Meoraq took the stick from her hands and swept the ash flat. He looked at her, frowned, then looked past her to the other creatures, all of whom had gathered by now and were watching him with unreadable emotion across their grotesque faces. He thought of the dream, but it was a glancing tap at best; dreams were of no value in the waking world. He was not easy about what he was about to propose, but he felt Sheul’s hand upon his shoulder and, although His ultimate plan was not clear, His immediate will seemed obvious.

Meoraq sketched out a few creatures—round heads atop line-bodies; he was not a great artist—and then, not without a moment’s misgiving, drew himself among them. He tapped the image, saying, “Sheul has put you in my path for a reason. I will stay until I know what it is.”

“Wutz’i sa’en?” Scott asked.

“Do’ispeeklzzrd?” Amber replied, tossing the words crossly over her shoulder before reaching out to try and take the stick from Meoraq.

He wasn’t done with it. He took her wrist with a stern look and moved her hand back to her knee. He captured his drawings within a circle, making it clear they were bound together, and then leaned out to sketch the shrine at Xi’Matezh. He’d never seen it, but he’d seen enough of them to know they all pretty much looked alike: a round, walled courtyard and tall, central tower. “But I see no reason to interrupt my journey,” he went on, tapping first the ash-creatures and then the ash-shrine. “So we will go together.”

“Wutztht?”

“Stldntno, Scott. Stldntspeeklzzrd.” Amber leaned forward, reaching across him to point at the ash-shrine. “Wutzthz Mee’orrak?”

“Meoraq,” he corrected, and then shook that away irritably. She was never going to say his name properly and it didn’t matter at the moment. He touched the ash-shrine and said, “This is Xi’Matezh, the holiest shrine remaining from the age of the Ancients. We will go there—” He emphasized this with several lines between ash-creatures and ash-shrine. “—and I will ask Sheul what is to be done with you.”

“Ithnkeewntz t’tak’uzther.” Frowning, Amber patted her chest with one hand, gesturing at the other creatures as she did so, then pointed at Meoraq and made wiggling, walking movements with her fingers. “Wergo’in t’gthr? Yutu?”

“We all go together,” he told her, pointing at his drawings. “If His will is not made known to me upon the journey, Sheul shall surely tell me what to do in Xi’Matezh when I stand before Him.”

“Wut izthtpls?” Scott asked.

Amber threw up her hands, slapped her thighs, and swung around. “Frfkz’sk Scott i’dntno! I’dntspeek fkknlzzrd!”

Meoraq hissed at the creatures to silence them, then poked Amber irritably with his stick to take back her attention. When he had it, he swiftly made some sketched animals to fill the empty space between the ash-creatures and the ash-shrine. “The journey is long and dangerous. The prairie is filled with wild beasts and godless men and we are very near to winter. I will protect you—” Ash-Meoraq received a few ash-knives and the very badly-drawn ash-tachuqi nearest him was rubbed out. “—at least until I know whether or not I am meant to kill you. That you are to be a test of my faith is clear to me,” he mused, once more gazing into Amber’s unsettling eyes. “But I am Sheulek and my faith is as enduring as the wind. I shall not fail my Father.”

Amber’s pliant little brow-ridges drew together as she listened. Her eyes were green and she had felt warm and soft and disturbingly real in his dream when he held her.

“But if it is His will that I stand with you,” Meoraq said, now speaking just to Amber, “I shall not fail you either.”

“Wutz’i sa’en?” Scott wanted to know.

This time, Amber answered without taking her eyes from Meoraq’s. Her mouthparts curved upwards. She said, softly, “Eezcm’mn wthuz. Eezgnna hlpuz.”

And she held out her empty hand, just held it out, open in the air. After a moment, Meoraq put down his stick and held his out the same way. She huffed and moved to take his hand in hers. Joined.

Behind his loin-plate, some hot urge of Gann flared and throbbed. Meoraq willed it back. He released Amber and stood up. “Enjoy these last hours,” he told her. “When the sun rises, you and all your kind belong to me.”

“Meeor’ak,” she said.

“Just so,” he agreed, and gave her a tap on the top of her freakish, furry head.

 

8

 

And just like that, the lizardman apparently considered the matter settled. He rose from the fire, said a few words while pointing sternly at the tents, and then walked away into the tall grass without looking back.

“Grab it!” Scott shouted, backing out of Meoraq’s path.

No one moved.

Meoraq kept walking and was soon swallowed up by darkness.

“You let it get away,” said Scott, and for a change, the accusation wasn’t aimed at Amber.

“We’re not set up to take prisoners,” Eric told him. He pointed back at the lizardman’s teepee. “He’ll be back. He left his stuff.”

There just wasn’t a whole lot to do at that point. Scott hustled the Fleetmen into his tent for an emergency debriefing (all but Mr. Yao, who went back to his bivy in spite of Scott’s threats to consider that insubordinate behavior). Everyone else drew off at first to sit and talk in low worried voices about if and how this changed things, but it was early and not entirely dry, and one by one, people drifted back to bed. Amber sat up until the fire died and even dared to interrupt the debriefing to ask for a flashlight, but Scott said no and it was just too dark to move around without one. She paced around the edge of camp for a while, banging into crates and tripping over bags of concrete while she strained her eyes trying to see shapes in the black. There was nothing, only the endless wind and a few icy pellets of rain, so in the end even she gave up.

Nicci was already sleeping soundly. Amber pulled out her blanket and wrapped up to stay dry. She lay down, but only to huddle close to her sister and share as much warmth as she could. She was way too wired to sleep now, couldn’t even if she’d wanted to. She was only keeping Nicci warm while she waited for the lizardman to come back.

The next thing she heard was a heavy, squishy, thumping sound, like someone falling over in the mud close by. Amber pushed her blanket back and dragged her head up into the light of late morning.

“I fell asleep,” she croaked and dropped back to the ground, slapping both hands to her face.

A low grunt answered her. The lizardman walked around the scaly deer he had just deposited on the ground in front of her and hunkered down to investigate his firepit. His little leather stewing pouch was slung over one shoulder like a ladies purse, bulging and heavy-looking, which had to have some connection to the dead deer, which was slit wide open and was all shiny and pink and empty inside.

‘Gross,’ thought Amber sleepily, trying to rub her face awake. Then she thought, ‘Food,’ but that wasn’t quite right, was it? No, it was Meoraq’s food and that was a very different thing.

She looked back into Scott’s side of the camp and saw dozens of people watching, looking like nothing so much as a horde of hungry prairie dogs, motionless and staring. At their center, Scott slowly stood up, towering over the rest of them for a few seconds before Eric and Dag popped up too.

She started to say something to Meoraq—just what, she didn’t know, especially since he wouldn’t understand it anyway—but then saw that he was making a fire. Amber sat all the way up, trying to pay attention to how he did it, but there wasn’t time. He just cleared the ground, laid out some branches and a few bundles of grass, put something from his pack up next to the kindling and then there was fire.

“Nicci, look at this,” said Amber, reaching out to pat her sister’s hip. “Look what he’s doing.”

Nicci rolled away from her. “Is he building a starship?” she mumbled.

“No, but—”

“Then I don’t care. Leave me alone. I’m sleeping.”

“Oh come on!” There was now a roaring fire where nothing but ash and mud had been less than a minute ago. Amber found Nicci through the crinkly blanket and shook her. “Look at this!”

Nicci heaved a sigh and raised her head just as the lizardman pulled the long sword off his belt and hacked the head off the deer. It rolled over, tongue lolling and sightless eyes staring. Meoraq picked it up and set it over the fire, carefully balanced on rocks to keep it out of the forming coals. The deer’s scaly lips shrank back, steaming, into a dead, idiot leer.

Nicci looked at this, then at Amber, open-mouthed.

“That’s not what I wanted you to see,” Amber said.

Meoraq grabbed both sides of the dead deer’s ribs and broke them well apart, forming a meaty platter where he upended his stewing pouch. Lots of shiny organs came tumbling out—heart, liver, kidneys…other things—along with a small splash of blood.

Amber slapped her hands over her face again.

“Thanks so much for sharing that!” Nicci punched her blanket into her duffel bag and stormed off through the mud to the other fire, where just about everyone else was already up and sitting together. They let her in, listened to whatever she had to say to accompany those angry arm gestures. A few of them looked at Amber.

Damn it.

Meoraq watched Nicci go without obvious interest as he cut up his assortment of organs and impaled them on sticks. He put these gut-kabobs over the fire, licked his fingers, then started cutting the deer out of its scaly hide.

“Looks like it’s going to be another great day,” she muttered, taking Nicci’s blanket back out and rolling it up neater. “Thanks for coming back, Meoraq.”

He covered his eyes with the back of his least bloody hand and muttered, “Meoraq,” under his breath. His spines twitched up and down as he thought. Then he pointed the tip of his knife at the half-butchered animal and said something.

“Meat,” she said. He hadn’t needed any help to catch it, either. He hadn’t even needed a spear. “And I, on the other hand,” sighed Amber, turning back to watch Nicci at the other fire,” never tried so hard to do something in my whole life as I tried to run that goddamn limping thing down. Take a note, lizardman: That was the best I could do. Amber Bierce’s very best was a miserable fucking failure.”

He caught her by the chin and pinched, not hard enough to hurt (although it was impossible not to feel the tremendous strength in that grip), but enough to shut her up. He pointed his knife down at the dead thing. He spoke again, just one word.

Did he want her to repeat him? Amber tried. “Soo—”

He pinched harder. Spoke.

“Saw…ow. Ak. Saw-owk.”

“Saoq,” he corrected, but released her. With the tip of his finger, he quickly drew a deer-shape in the wet dirt. “Saoq,” he said again, and stabbed his knife into its muddy heart. He said something else, pointed at the dead animal and said it again.

“What does that mean?” Amber asked. “Is it ‘dead’ or ‘meat’ or ‘hunt’ or—”

He caught her chin and pinched. He said his word.

“You know, I realize we’re the aliens here, but Scott wants you to learn English, not for us to learn lizardish.”

Pinch. He leaned close. He spoke once.

She repeated him., then crossly added, “Meat. Meat.”

He grunted, released her, and went back to butchering the animal…the saoq. He cut away a chunk of meat and held it up. He said a word.

“You should also know that I took Spanish from the second grade on up to the seventh and I flunked every single year.”

Meoraq cocked his head. He reached for her chin.

She pulled back out of his reach and said the stupid word.

The corners of his hard mouth turned up. He grunted, pulled the meat off the blade of his knife and skewered it on a thin bit of branch instead. He propped that over the fire beside him and said a new word, pointing at it.

Cook? Fire? Whatever it was, she parroted it back obediently.

His mouth opened in a hissing grimace. He took one of the gut-kabobs off the fire and held it up, steaming and dripping juices down its skewer, still partly raw and a little black around the edges, but enough to flood Amber’s mouth with eager water. He gestured at it, his spines flaring in what she could only hope was an encouraging manner.

She said the word she thought meant meat and then strung it all together into what she hoped was almost a real sentence: “Meoraq cook saoq meat.”

He winced. Sighed. Put the kabob back over the fire and looked at her.

“If you don’t like it, learn English. At least I’m making an effort here. Listen!” She reached out to pat the corpse. “Meat—oh yuck, it’s still warm. Oh God, and sticky!” She started to wipe her hand off on her pants, then changed her mind and dragged it over the ground instead. She only had so many clothes. “Meat! Say it with me! Meat!”

He frowned at her, silent.

“Any progress, Miss Bierce?”

Meoraq’s gaze shifted past her to watch Scott join them. His spines flattened. He bent over the saoq, ripping it out of the rest of its hide and muttering under his breath.

“What do you want?” Amber asked.

“Nothing. I’m just not comfortable leaving the heavily-armed alien unsupervised.”

“I’m here.”

“Also unsupervised.”

Scott probably had more to say, but whatever scathing insult he was cooking up turned into a gagging cry as Meoraq shoved a skinless, disemboweled, dead deer against his chest. He tried to back away, but Meoraq only shoved harder, more or less forcing Scott to embrace the corpse.

“What does he want?” Scott demanded shrilly.

Meoraq spat out some suggestions, then looked at Amber and cocked his head.

She replayed his words and realized there were a few in there she knew. “He wants you to eat it.”

Meoraq gave the corpse a last push and pointed firmly back at the other fire. He hissed through his teeth, his flat spines scraping at the top of his scaly head.

“And he wants us to leave him alone,” Amber translated. She started to get up.

Meoraq’s hand slammed down on her shoulder and seated her with a squishy thump back on the ground. He hissed at her next, exactly the same way. On his throat, faint lines of yellow color were coming into his scales. He pivoted at the hip and pointed at the other fire, spitting out lizard-words faster than she could follow. The message, however, was clear: Go back to your side of the camp and stay there.

Scott backed up, holding the carcass clumsily before him like a shield. “If that thing attacks me again, I’m holding you responsible,” he warned.

“He’s not attacking you, he’s feeding you,” said Amber, rubbing her shoulder. “Am I responsible for that? Seriously, Meoraq, that hurt.”

“Meoraq!” spat the lizardman, still glaring at Scott. But then he leaned back on his heels and cupped the end of his snout, taking deep breaths and muttering to himself, and when he looked at her again, the scales on his throat were all black once more. “Meoraq,” he said, and gestured toward her, grudgingly inviting her own name.

“Meat,” she said, using his word and rubbing her shoulder some more.

He flung up his hands, took one stomping step toward the fire and the gut-kabobs roasting there, then pulled himself up with a jerk and really stared at her.

“Yeah. Amber-meat. And if you make some joke about bacon—” she began, rounding on Scott, but he had taken advantage of Meoraq’s distraction to retreat. She could see him at the other fire already, surrounded by worshipful Manifestors, rewarding their loyalty with someone else’s food. And they loved him for it.

Something nudged her arm. Meoraq, impatiently trying to get her attention. He had another gut-kabob in his hand, this one a bit overcooked, and as soon as she was watching him, he plucked the chunk of liver off the top end of the skewer, said a word, and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t chew, but she could see the underside of his jaw moving as he worked his rigid tongue back and forth against the roof of his mouth. He swallowed, said the word again, and pointed at her with two fingers.

Her stomach growled. She clapped a hand over it stupidly, but it was too late. Meoraq looked at it and then at her, frowning.

“Meat,” she said in lizardish, stubbornly adding, “Meoraq’s meat,” just to let him know that she had no expectations.

His frown became a glare, so she knew she’d said it wrong, but he understood enough to pluck a second kabob off the coals and put it in her hand.

“You don’t get it. I don’t want you to take care of me,” she told him, trying to push it back at him. “I want you to show me how to take care of myself. Okay? Because I can’t be…” Her eyes wandered, seeking and finding the wisps of blonde hair flying above the crowd that could only be Nicci’s. “I have to take care of myself,” she said at last. “I have to take care of her.”

Meoraq rolled his eyes and scratched at the side of his snout, scowling at her. He started to speak, and then suddenly leaned out and caught her by the chin again. The scaly pads of his fingers dug in and forced her to face him. Red eyes that could never even pretend to be human stared her down while he talked at her. The word for ‘eat’ was in there. He hissed at the end of it, just a little, like putting an extra-hard dot on an i, then let her go and pointed at her kabob.

She ate it. It was tough as hell and overchewing it brought out all the wrong elements of its flavor, which was vaguely like beef, but darker, earthier, almost bitter with minerals. She was all too aware of how she looked as she struggled with it—the fat chick stuffing her face—but the first bite turned into the last one embarrassingly fast. When she looked up, sucking grease from her empty fingers, Meoraq was still holding on to most of his, his head slightly canted, watching her. So was the saoq’s head in the fire. Both of them with nearly the same expression.

“Thanks,” mumbled Amber, rubbing her mouth.

Meoraq grunted back at her. He took a piece of what might be kidney off his skewer, then paused, his gaze shifting beyond her, and popped it into his own mouth.

She looked back, already knowing she was going to see Scott, and there he was, marching toward them. He wasn’t alone. Since the saoq was cooking and staring at it couldn’t help it roast faster, quite a few Manifestors were trickling over to Meoraq’s small fire, hungrily eyeing his gut-kabobs, his roasting severed head, even the bloody heap of hide. The lizardman watched them circle without expression, but the hand that did not keep an easy hold on his saoq-kebob drifted down to the hilt of one of his swords.

“You might want to give him some space,” Amber remarked.

Scott took a step back at once, then pinked and glanced behind him at the watching Manifestors. “I can’t believe you say that thing isn’t dangerous. It’s a textbook example of a hostile alien predator. Textbook. Even if we could disarm it, he could still bite someone’s hand off.”

“He’s not hostile and he doesn’t bite.”

Meoraq naturally chose that moment to take a huge bite of liver. His relatively few yet large and apparently very sharp teeth sheared through the tough meat so easily that they snapped audibly when his jaws met. He eyed Scott, contentedly eating in his lizardish way, and drew his hooked sword to tap against the toe of his boot.

“Really?” said Amber, looking at him.

His spines flicked.

“The only reason for anything to have a mouth like that is for biting,” Scott announced in a knockout imitation of a man who knew what he was talking about.

“Olfaction,” said Mr. Yao.

They all looked at him—Amber, Scott, and the lizard.

Mr. Yao rolled one shoulder in a shrug (Meoraq’s spines swept forward; he rolled one of his shoulders too, just a little bit, as if testing its range of motion). “I’m not a doctor of medicine,” he said. “I’m an evolutionary biologist.”

A short silence followed this statement. Mr. Yao seemed to be expecting it.

“Okay,” said Amber at last. “I have no idea what that means.”

“It means that I have studied the way animals evolve. I was assigned to this mission to assess whatever forms of life we might have encountered on Plymouth. There was always a chance, you see, that it might be inhabited, even though the probes never detected any higher signs of intelligent life.”

“Higher signs like what?” Amber asked as Scott said, “This is probably classified and you shouldn’t be discussing it with civilians.”

Mr. Yao chose to answer Amber. “Signs such as city lights, roadways, radio or satellite transmissions. Anything, in other words, that could be detected by a probe. They never found anything, but Plymouth was an Earth-class planet with a wide range of eco-systems. There were plants, it stood to reason there would be animals, and while they would surely be of some alien design, those designs must still serve some logical purpose, such as—” He glanced at Scott. “—the reason why certain animals have a snout-like mouth. Not to hold teeth, but to hold scent receptors.”

“Okay, that’s a great theory,” Scott said dismissively, already waving one hand to try and cut Mr. Yao off. Meoraq’s head tipped; his eyes tracked each movement of that hand. “But you can’t possibly prove it. This is an alien.”

“Nature follows necessity,” said Mr. Yao. “Generally speaking, the more pronounced the nasal area is, the more advanced the animal’s olfactory ability should be. Since our friend does not have many teeth, it can be assumed he uses that space for some other purpose, such as scent reception. In fact, if you look at him closely—”

They all did. Meoraq returned their stares without obvious concern, except that the sword he was playing with lifted ever so slightly.

“—you will see several pit-like pores around his mouth, separate from his nasal openings. Certain animals—particularly reptiles—have two distinct olfactory systems, one of them used mainly to detect pheromones. If I were to hypothesize further—”

“There’s nothing to be gained by discussing any of this,” Scott interrupted. “Regardless of Mr. Yao’s ideas on alien physiology, just the fact that the lizard is armed to his extremely sharp teeth proves that it has the potential to be dangerous.”

“He also has the potential to bring us food,” Amber pointed out. “And I noticed you took it before you started all this bullshit about how dangerous he is. Look, if he’d wanted to sneak out and come back with an army of raging lizardmen, he could have done that. If he’d wanted to slit our throats in the night, he could have done that too. Instead, he brought us breakfast and you’re bitching about it.”

“Thankfully, it’s not your job to concern yourself with the safety of others, Miss Bierce, because you appear to be as bad at that as you are at teaching English. I, on the other hand, can be objective about the benefits and detriments our native friend brings to the colony. So why don’t I do my job and you can try to do yours and everybody will be much happier?”

“Fuck you, Scott.”

Scott nodded as if this were exactly the answer he’d expected. If he’d reached out to pat her on the head as his smirking expression indicated he might, she might have lost it, but he didn’t, so she didn’t. He walked away, taking his Manifestors with him and instructing these to gather wood and those to build more fires so they could all see how commanding he was.

Amber watched them go, confused and pissed off and mostly tired and cold and still hungry. She had always been very good at dealing with life’s little shit-heaps, but she honestly couldn’t see any way out of this one. She could see it getting worse almost by the minute, but she couldn’t see how to stop it. All she could do was get the lizard talking as quickly as possible and hope that once the others saw that someone was with them who actually knew what he was doing, all this Commander crap would just…blow over.

‘Never happen,’ she told herself in the voice of her dead mother. ‘If it all goes right, the lizardman will be Commander Scott’s friendly native guide. If it all turns to shit, he’ll be the mistake you brought into camp. Either way, Commander Scott is here to stay, so you can suck it up, little girl…’

“Or you can blow it out,” Amber finished, then sighed and looked at Meoraq. When he looked back at her, she made herself smile. “We’re going to do this,” she told him. “We just have to start simple, right?”

He frowned.

“Right.” Amber patted herself on the chest. “Human. Say it with me. Human.”

Meoraq’s gaze dropped to her hand. He grunted and handed her what was left of his gut-kebob. He told her to eat it, then got up and went into his tent, leaving her alone with the saoq’s slowly roasting head and its silent, judgmental stare.

 

9

 

The first days among the creatures who called themselves humans were a true test of Meoraq’s discipline. Oh, they weren’t wild, or at least, they weren’t aggressive. Although they remained cautious and their leader in particular did a lot of barking from a short distance, they accepted him into their pack without challenge. It was what they did afterwards that wore on a man.

In spite of their clothing, their shelters, and their primitive attempt at language, Meoraq often found himself questioning his conviction that these were intelligent creatures—people—and not constructs of Sheul’s devising made just before their first meeting. They showed no ability or even any interest in taking care of themselves. Except Amber, who made herself positively obnoxious every morning when he set out for the day’s hunt.

Meoraq had no experience with either cattle or children and had to rely upon prayer and his own instincts where the bulk of their care was concerned. At times, he marveled that he had not lost one yet, especially since it seemed that the instant his attention wandered, they were squabbling or wandering out into the plains or falling asleep with their fires unbanked. Some days it seemed his prayers were evenly split between asking Sheul for guidance in keeping them from killing themselves and begging Him to let Meoraq do it himself. And perhaps the humans sensed it, because although they ate what he fed them, none of them dared to come too near.

Well…one of them dared. The fearless little spear-hunter. Amber. She spent more time with him than with her own kind, and far from shooing her off, he shamelessly encouraged her by feeding her and allowing her and her friend, Nicci, to sleep by his fire. But if he showed a certain proprietary interest in her, it at least served a greater purpose. After all, nothing could be accomplished until they could talk to one another.

Amber had not flagged in her determination to teach him the crude speech of her people, although she seemed amenable to learn dumaqi as well, inasmuch as her physical defects allowed. As the days passed and she continued to mangle the simple words he gave her, he could see her frustration mounting, but he refused to resort to humani. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word; his many meditations on the First Law had brought him no clear answers, only the same vague feeling that these were people, and if so, then Sheul had deliberately made them in this mold, with the deformities that made dumaqi impossible for them to speak, and if that were true, how could he, Meoraq, born of clay, judge them for being as God made them? Nevertheless, it remained true that he must hold to the admonitions of the Prophet and speak only Man’s tongue. He could see that Amber understood his words far less than he did hers, but she had made some progress already and could only make more. With Amber, Meoraq found he could be at least a little patient. With the others…

Yet for all the aggravation of tending them, it was not so terrible an ordeal. He’d never kept a pet before and keeping close to fifty of them all at once in the wildlands was not how any man ought to begin, but he seemed to be having some success at it and he had to admit, he liked having someone to talk to, even if she couldn’t talk back.

Funny. He’d never thought of himself as a personable sort. He spent the greatest share of his life alone. Travel along the empty roads between the cities of his circuit took the bulk of his time and what was left over was rarely passed among company. It was not considered fitting for a Sheulek to socialize with others of his caste. Even the thought felt scandalous and slightly sinful—God’s Striding Foot at the garrison’s recreation hall with common watchmen and gatekeepers. He might pass a few moments before a trial with a man like himself, as he had passed them with Sheulteb Ni’ichok Shuiv in Tothax, but these moments, while pleasant, were few. Home was the one place where he might be allowed to relax in the company of other men, to trade stories, share nai, tell low-humored jokes and laugh at them without embarrassment, but only once a year, only for the cold season, and only with the most immediate members of his family. It was something of a curiosity to discover that he liked looking into Amber’s ugly face and listening to her earnest gibberish. He liked telling her—over and over and over—to put her spear down and go back to sleep and see her sulk as she obeyed him. He liked coming into camp and seeing her stand to greet him, even if it was just because he fed her so often. He liked her company and he supposed it must mean the rest of them had some redeeming quality as well.

But they did test a man and every now and then, it was either walk away from them and their constant neediness or slap them until either his hand or their heads fell off.

So it was that the end of a very long and trying evening found Uyane Meoraq, twelve years a Sheulek in God’s service and honest victor of hundreds of trials, outside the vague boundary of the humans’ camp, hiding in a tree.

He knew he was hiding. He could even see the humor in it, in a sour sort of way. A Sheulek was the master of his clay. He knew no fear and no hesitation when he stood in the arena in the sight of Sheul, and yet here he was. Not so far away that he could not leap down and defend them if the humans drew some danger into their midst, but hopefully out of sight. The coming winter had caused most of the leaves to brown and a few to drop, so he was not as invisible as he would have liked, but corrokis couldn’t look up and perhaps neither could humans.

It was surprisingly pleasant up here. Meoraq was not a man fond of heights under most circumstances, but today he found the scope of the view soothing to his eye. The evening air was cool but dry for the moment, and there was enough light yet that he could see small herds of saoq moving in the prairie, and the larger dark dots of corrokis grazing among them.

He supposed he had time enough for a short hunt before the sun was gone, but he had brought one meal into this camp already today and that would just have to be enough for the greedy bellies of his humans. He himself had most of two bricks of cuuvash yet and he didn’t mind eating some in front of them. For now, he was content just to feel the edge of his appetite as he meditated with his eyes open, clearing his mind of all thought but open to the will of Sheul on the slim chance that He should speak, and just watching the world while he still had it to himself.

It was peaceful.

But it didn’t last.

It began with one human, the one called Scott, trudging noisily through the trees and yawning against its hand with no apparent purpose to its wanderings until it leaned itself up against the very tree in which Meoraq sought refuge and opened its breeches.

Meoraq had no intention of watching the human undress, but before he could avert his eyes, the human reached into its clothing and drew out a short, thick tube of discolored flesh. The human held this limp and repulsive appendage in its hand as it scratched sleepily at its hair, and after a moment or two, out arced a steaming sluice of bright yellow fluid.

It was pissing. Standing up.

But through what? It hung, finger-length and flopping, beneath a short thatch of dark hair, much darker and curlier than that which grew on Scott’s head, and above a second distended lump of flesh Meoraq presumed to be its bladder, externalized by some quirk of human design. The appendage itself seemed to be boneless and had no real distinguishing characteristics that Meoraq could see at this height, apart from its loose outer skin which could not quite cover the dark, bulbous tip from which its urine endlessly poured. That stream, as well as the coincidental placement of the appendage between the human’s legs, made it seem uncannily like…

By Gann, it was its penis.

It was pissing out of it.

It was pissing out of its soft, blotchy, malformed cock.

Two more humans were coming. The one called Scott glanced in the direction of their noisy approach as his stream slackened, then actually waggled the flabby spout of his organ to shake free the last drops of urine before folding itself back into his breeches. The humans met and grunted greetings. Scott retreated; the other two opened their clothing, muttering to one another, and drew out two more floppy cocks to piss through. They differed somewhat in size and color, but that was all.

So they were uncontestably males. Which meant that there were also females. Amber would be a female. He had suspected that from the first and he felt absolutely nothing at having his suspicions confirmed because it did not matter to him if a human were male or female any more than it mattered if, oh, if a saoq were male or female. Animals were animals, and in a purely animal sense, the only question worth pondering was whether some or all of those human females might at this moment be breeding.

Meoraq forced himself to look down, to study the limp things the human males had and ponder the breeding of humans. He had no experience with the husbandry of animals; if there was a way to look at these creatures and know how quickly it made young or how many it could drop in a litter, Meoraq did not know what it was. He thought he’d ought to know too, because whether or not they were breeding at the moment, if they had opposing gender, there would be offspring eventually. If the swollen teats of their women were anything to measure by, those offspring might already have been recently birthed, but they were not in evidence now, which could mean the females would soon be ready to conceive again.

He had to think of Amber then, much as he had been fighting it. Amber and her silly spear. Amber, who spent so much time sitting at his fire and taking the little bites he fed her (right from his hand) and trying with such spectacular unsuccess to mouth his words. And yes, Amber, who was female, not that this mattered, and who might be breeding (he caught at his snout to stop the hiss that shot insensibly out of him) as she damned well should be (Meoraq swung himself down and out of the tree’s fork, moving fast from branch to branch until he dropped with a curse to the ground) instead of running over the wildlands with pointed sticks!

“Although You have made no law against this,” Meoraq acknowledged, glancing heavenward as he aimed himself for the humans and their camp. “And I admit I like better to see her at her foolish hunt than to see her N’ki doing nothing but waiting to be fed in proper female fashion.”

Nicci did everything in proper female fashion, come to think of it. She sat quietly, kept herself largely invisible and showed obedience to male command, since now he knew Scott to be male. Amber did none of these things, really. She talked almost constantly when she was with him, even reaching out to touch him if she did not think she had enough of his attention, and she let her frustrations show plainly on her ugly face. She kept apart from the rest of her kind, but was quick enough to argue with them if she thought they gave her cause. As for obedience, ha! He tried to imagine Amber as a proper female, to picture her in her father’s House (it greatly resembled his own in Xeqor) kneeling meekly, her neck bent and hands turned to heaven…

He couldn’t do it. Perhaps she had been feminine once, but no longer.

He liked her better like this anyway.

There had to be something wrong with him.

It was not far into the evening, and yet the humans were bedding themselves down in broad rings around the fires when he returned. Amber was still sitting up, wrapped in the shiny skin of her blanket, watching the other humans gnaw on saoq bones and talk at each other while she sat alone. She did not look at him until he had been standing over her for quite some time and she did not smile when she finally did.

She. So he had been thinking of her all this time, but he wanted to be sure. He needed to be sure. Just why he needed to be sure this instant, he didn’t know and did not explore. He simply hunkered down and started drawing in the dirt.

She watched listlessly until he had made two images, featureless blobs with arms and legs and hairy heads. She knew they were human and said so, tapping at them without enthusiasm even as her attention wandered back to the fire.

He caught her chin and made her look at the drawings as he, not without an internal wince, carefully added twin curves to one image and a short line to the other.

She studied the pictures in silence, her mouthparts slowly turning up at the corners. “Yeh. I ges we ki’indaskipt tht’biht. Man,” she said, pointing at the male figure. And at the female: “Woman.” And then she patted herself on the chest, right above the swellings of her—yes, her—teats. “Woman.”

‘If they are people, it is not a sin,’ he thought vaguely, and his belly warmed at once. ‘If they are people, she is a woman in your camp, under your protection, and she owes you every obedience.’

Even so, it would still be one of the unforgiveable sins and he knew it. The Word forbade all men, even Sheulek, to lie with a girl not yet in her woman’s years, or with any woman in her sickbed, or with a milking mother, unless she was his wife. Amber may indeed be female, but the proof of it was as good as a warning.

He made himself the master of his clay and put aside sexual thoughts—mostly—to add a third drawing to the first two. He wasn’t happy with it. He’d made it very small, armless and legless, as if wrapped in a blanket, but the effect was disturbingly grub-like instead. He scowled, started to rub it out and try again, then just looked at her and gestured around the camp. “Where are your children?” he asked boldly.

She tapped the grub. “Ba’bee. Orkid I ges. Ch’iild. You no litelpursen.”

“Where are they?” he asked again, determined to keep her focused. “Where is your child?”

She actually seemed to understand some of that, enough to draw back and crease up her brows at him. “Mine? Dijju’just say werz my ba’bee?”

He started to point at her teats, then changed his mind and pointed at those of the dirt-woman instead.

“Oh.” She chuffed and looked down at her chest anyway. “Yeh. Theh’alwez luklyk’thss. D’ssnt alwez meen therza ba’bee. We don’t hev enee ba’bees heer’rytnow.”

It took some time to break that apart and bring it together in a way that made sense and once he had, he did not quite trust the meaning he took away. Hesitantly, he tapped the dirt-woman directly on one of the teats, then tapped the dirt-child.

“Nope,” said Amber, a clear and definitive negation. “Jsst big’buubs.”

He leaned back, trying very hard not to stare at them. It was grotesque to think her teats were always swollen, but if there was no suckling, then there was no sin in mating with her.

And that was where his mind went, yet again. Right there. Like a lodestone clamping on to steel. There was something really wrong with him.

As he grappled with this, one of the figures at the fire rose and came back to join them. Amber’s friend, Nicci. She sat—he knew it was a she by the teats—and gave Meoraq a wary nod.

“Wutz he duun’eer?” Nicci asked, eyeing the pictures in the dirt as if she thought they might be poisonous.

“Nuthnn,” said Amber, showing her teeth in a smile. “Litel’lengwij lessn thatzal. Sex’ehd lzzrdstyl.”

Nicci frowned, slowly drawing up her knees and hugging them to put the barrier of her skinny arms and legs between them. This act pulled the fabric of her breeches very tight across her loins, forming folds that made it appear as if she had a slit. Meoraq looked at the sky.

“Itz nuthnn,” Amber said again, no longer smiling. “Luk itwuz bountoo cummup.”

“Why? Wutz he wantwthuz?” Nicci whispered, her eyes still fixed on Meoraq.

“Nothing! Fr’Cryzzakes, eeza lzzrd! Eez jst nevrseen buubz b’for!”

“Thn wutabout tht?”

Silence. Meoraq risked a glance to see why and found the two of them studying the diminutive dirt-penis on his dirt-man.

“Peepel tokabout yutu,” said Nicci.

“O fuktht!” Amber spat with startling venom. “Thziz my j’b Nicci! You wanna givmeeshit about’ow I doit, doit yorgod dam slf!”

She threw off her shiny blanket, punched it down into her pack, and stomped away.

Meoraq watched her go, frowning. He’d embarrassed her—and he could hardly claim innocence after drawing a penis and showing it to her—but he himself felt no shame. In truth, he felt nothing as she fled him except a simmer of resentment at this Nicci, who had turned an awkward but promising conversation into a big puddle of piss.

They sat there, and after a time, he went ahead and looked at her.

She flinched and ducked her head, so exactly like a dumaq woman that he expected her to mewl at him. Gann’s unreasoning lust both leapt and curdled to nauseating effect. He got up at once and stalked away to his tent.

Safely shut away from human eyes, he tore off his tunic and boots, threw himself on his mat and gave the loin-plate girding him a vicious slap. It stung his palm a little. It hurt his stubbornly extruding cock a lot, but he doubted that would teach it any lasting lessons. Even now, in this storm of furious reproach, he knew that if it had been Amber who bent her neck to him, he would be on her, in her, right this instant.

Six breaths, Uyane. A slow-count of six. One for the Prophet, two for his brunt, and onward, as many times as it takes to remember that you are the master of your clay.

Six breaths. Six more. Six again.

Of course, Amber never would bend her neck.

Six breaths. Lashraq. His brunt. Uyane, father of his own line. Mykrm. Oyan. Thaliszr. And back to the Prophet.

Unless she were looking at her boots. Then she might, but then she wouldn’t care what he thought about seeing the back of her neck. And she certainly would never make that sound. She didn’t know anything about how to be a real woman, and that more than anything bothered him, because what did it say about him that he still wanted to have sex with her?

This was part of the ordeal. It had to be. Sheul had made the humans to test his resolve, his patience and his resourcefulness, and He had made Amber specifically to test his self-control. He needed to stare that down, own it, conquer it, and get on with his damned life.

Six breaths, like rising stairs. Meoraq climbed them over and over, determined to find peace at the top. He had almost done so—almost—when out of the pure black nothing, he suddenly thought, ‘You don’t like her in spite of the way she acts, you know. You like her because of it.’

‘I don’t like her at all,’ he thought back defiantly. At once he felt the Sheulek in him judge that for the lie it was. He may hate the feelings he had—they felt dangerous and deviant, even when they were not wholly anchored to his loins—but he couldn’t pretend he didn’t have them.

And sometimes…he wasn’t even sure he hated them.

 

10

 

And that was how the time passed for Amber. Days that had seemed hellishly interminable when there was nothing to fill them but wind and rain, hunger and cold, now flew by. Even when Meoraq wasn’t there to give her his blank, silent stares as she pleaded with him to say her name, say hello, say fuck off, say anything, the time slipped away from her. If it wasn’t for Scott’s regular reminders that she’d wasted six days trying to teach a lizard how to talk…ten days…twelve…she would have lost track of them completely.

Which wasn’t to say that they hadn’t made any progress. Meoraq still had not said one word of English, but he responded to it. Of course, his responses were all in lizardish, which stubbornly resisted all of Amber’s attempts to decipher. Oh, she thought she was picking some up. She thought that every day until she actually tried to talk and inevitably insulted him. She didn’t even know how half the time. She’d just be there, clumsily coughing up lizard-words, and suddenly he’d stiffen and glare at her. If he felt like giving her another chance at that point, he might correct her (invariably with the same exact word she’d just said). More often, he just told her to be quiet and went on with what he was saying. Sometimes, he got up and left, muttering to himself and to his god on high, which was an open invitation for Scott to come over and illustrate all the ways in which she was a failure.

She tried not to let it worry her. Whether or not Meoraq ever learned to talk, Amber didn’t really think Scott would throw him out (and only partly because she didn’t think he could). She hadn’t seen a ration bar since Meoraq had started feeding them; she thought the last of them had probably been eaten in a celebratory binge during an extra-long, extra-quiet debriefing several days ago. Scott may not like the lizard, but he had no trouble recognizing the benefits of having him around.

He was off hunting at the moment, Meoraq. She’d heard him leave a little before dawn and even though the sun was now well up over the horizon, he might be gone for hours yet. Regular meals had done wonders for the morale here at camp, but steady predation had definitely made the saoqs skittish. They were nowhere to be seen anymore, not even from the top of the ridge. Meoraq never came back without one, but whatever secret tracking technique he used to find them, he kept it to himself.

And that bothered her. A lot. Amber knew her first hunt hadn’t exactly been the sort of thing to inspire confidence, but she sure wasn’t going to get any better at it without practice. She couldn’t understand how everyone could just sit around, day after day, waiting for Meoraq to come back and feed them, and sometimes even bitching to each other about how much time he took to do it, like he was a waiter slow-poking himself out of a tip.

And Meoraq, who should have been the first person to insist on some effort, was no help at all. The first time Amber had snatched up her spear and tried to go with him on his morning hunt, he’d actually laughed at her (she was pretty sure that gargling hiss was a laugh). Now he just said no, or occasionally, “No, damn it! Sit down!”

She refused to quit trying to go with him, though. Which was probably why he snuck out today before dawn. Big scaly jerk.

“How are those English lessons coming, Miss Bierce?” Scott called as Amber and Nicci came back from the bushes to join the others.

“Fine,” she said curtly and sat down. She didn’t want to sit down. She didn’t want anything to do with these people, but the alternative was just to sit by herself wrapped up in her blanket and wait for Meoraq alone. She still might do that, but Nicci wanted to be with people, so she sat.

“That’s good. When do you think you could arrange a formal debriefing?”

“It could take a while. I don’t think he has a tux,” said Amber, which was about as witty as she got first thing in the morning.

A few people laughed. Scott wasn’t one of them.

“Is that your way of saying a debriefing would be…premature?”

“Look, I’m working on it, okay?”

“No,” said Scott. “No, it’s not okay. Do you realize it’s been two weeks already? Two weeks. Now I think that I’ve been very patient with you, Miss Bierce, but it’s obvious that there’s a problem on someone’s end. Is it with him or with you?”

“Maybe it’s with the person who thinks two weeks is enough time to learn a new language.”

“I wasn’t expecting him to be fluent. A simple yes or no would be enough to answer most of my questions. Do you think he can manage that?”

Amber went back to rubbing her face.

Scott nodded as if that were the answer he’d expected. “I can’t help but think that any cognizant being would have managed some kind of communication by now.”

“We communicate.”

“You mean it grunts and hisses and you imagine you hear words.”

“I dare you to say that to his face. I fucking dare you.”

“Be cool,” Eric said.

“I don’t need to hear the profanity,” Scott agreed, smiling. “And you don’t need to be so sensitive. I admit that the idea had some merit, but communication is never going to be possible without a certain level of intelligence.” He paused, then added, “I mean the lizard’s intelligence, of course.”

Some of the Manifestors laughed.

“What exactly are you saying?” Amber asked. “That he’s not smart enough to talk? He talks all the time!”

“It vocalizes,” Scott agreed. “But an animal vocalizing is not the same as a person talking. I’m beginning to wonder if you know the difference.”

“Yeah? I’m beginning to wonder how Meoraq’s going to feel about bringing you food every goddamn day if he hears you saying he’s not a fucking person.”

Scott quit smiling. “I’m not going to tell you again about the profanity.”

“Oh what now? You going to wash my mouth out with soap?”

“Be cool, Bierce,” Eric said again. “We’re just trying to figure things out.”

“It is amazing to me,” Scott added, “that you are the only one who seems to think that you don’t need to make any effort to get along with the rest of us.”

“Just you, Scott. Just you.”

In the crowd, Dag leaned over and whispered something in Eric’s ear. Eric nodded and ran a hand through his hair. “Take a walk, Bierce. Cool off.”

She blinked at him. “What?”

He raised his head to look at her. His gaze was steady. “I said, take a walk.”

She stared at him and then at Maria, sitting next to him, and at Dag and Nicci and all of them, but the only one who would look back at her was Scott.

“Fine.” She shoved herself up, went to where her duffel bag was parked and grabbed her spear up from beside it.

“Amber, wait!” Nicci called, but she didn’t get up, just hugged herself and looked unhappy. It was Crandall who came after her, content to jog behind her and call her name two or three times before he finally caught her sleeve. When she shook him off, he gave her a slap to the ass which made her briefly see red, but only briefly. It wasn’t him she was mad at.

“Let me ask you something,” she said, just said.

Crandall shrugged and fell into easy step beside her. “Shoot.”

“Is he going to be content with humiliating me or should I be afraid for my life?”

God, she was proud of how calm she sounded. Pissed, but calm.

“I don’t know,” Crandall said.

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“Yeah, probably.” He glanced over his shoulder at the now-distant camp and caught at her sleeve again, this time pulling her to a stop. “Look, you want some free advice? Take a dive.”

“What?”

“You and Scott have been throwing punches from Day One. Time to hit the mat, little girl. Let the man win.”

“Is this a sports metaphor?” she asked, baffled. “Do I look like I know the first fucking thing about sports?”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, whatever. When you go out there today, don’t do anything stupid. Stay where you can see the smoke from our fire, give it five or ten minutes, and then come back and apolo—”

“The hell I will!”

“Oh come on, Bierce,” he said, actually rolling his eyes, actually laughing a little. “My feet are getting wet. Unbunch your panties and be a good girl for one day. I promise, it won’t kill you.”

Amber started walking again. This time, when he caught at her arm, she shook him off. “You’re still not getting that blowjob out of me,” she spat. “But you seem to prefer kissing Scott’s ass anyway.”

He quit laughing. When his smile came back, it was thin and hard and ugly. “Have fun getting killed out there, bitch,” he said and went back to camp without her.

 

* * *

 

The problem was, Amber had always been too practical. And looking at it from a practical point of view, Amber knew that she couldn’t stay mad all day. It was exhausting and it upset her stomach, but more to the point, it didn’t accomplish anything. Scott was an idiot, but just saying so wasn’t changing anyone’s high opinion of him. The way she saw it, she had only two choices: Unbunch her panties and let Scott be in charge, or find some way to convince people that the armed alien lizard in their midst was a better candidate for the job. It was obvious to her (although she didn’t know how happy Meoraq would be when he found out he’d been nominated); she just had to figure out how to prove it.

The answer, she was certain, was food. Scott had successfully taken command with nothing but a duffel bag filled with Fleet-issue rations. Meoraq hadn’t been able to shake anyone’s confidence yet, even with a freshly-delivered dead animal every morning, but he had the significant handicap of being an alien, and the only one of them with weapons, which he did not share and which he did frequently point at people if they got too close. What Amber needed to make them understand was that in addition to taking care of them, he could also teach them to take care of themselves.

She’d already stormed out of camp in a huff, pretty much exactly the way that Scott had wanted her to do, and she couldn’t help that now, but maybe she could salvage something if she came home with her own dead deer. She had her spear and enough regular meals to make her feel more confident about running down the next saoq that put her in that position. She’d go hunting. She’d catch something. And she’d show everyone what Scott and his everything-will-be-all-right bullshit was really worth. For that matter, she’d show Meoraq that they weren’t all just a bunch of starving alley cats waiting for someone else’s handouts. And maybe the next time she picked up this spear and walked out of Scott’s camp, she wouldn’t go alone.

It wasn’t the noblest motive, but it was an invigorating one. With renewed purpose, Amber set off again. An exhausting march over the thorn-covered hills and marshy ravines didn’t bring her to any saoqs, but after God knew how many hours stubbornly struggling along, she found something. A whole herd of somethings, in fact.

Like the saoqs that she kept trying to see as deer, when Amber first realized she was looking at animals and not boulders, her brain tried to force them into a shape it already knew. So they were armadillos at first glance. Armadillos the same size and general shape as those bubble-top cars that Volkswagen tried to bring back for their centennial anniversary. Armadillos with massive cloven hooves and shovel-shaped tusks. Armadillos that periodically sidled up and bashed at one another with the huge, bone-studded clubs of their tails. Armadillos that did not appear to be terrifically light on their feet, but that surely wouldn’t hesitate to trample her fat ass to death if they could catch it. And they probably could.

Watching them, Amber slowly realized that no one knew where she was.

No one would be able to hear her when she screamed.

No one would ever find her body.

And while Amber huddled in the grass, trying to decide the best way to get the hell out of there without being seen, Meoraq’s scaly hand slipped over her mouth.

She screamed into his palm, even knowing it was him. He yanked her back against his chest long enough to hiss something in her ear—blah blah blah something about God blah blah you idiot—and then he was dragging her rapidly and none too gently backwards through the grass.

After he had put a little distance and the slope of a hill between them and the giant armadillos, Meoraq stopped. He stood her up, swung her around, and snapped back the hand that had been over her mouth for one mother of a roundhouse slap.

She flinched, but only because she was stupid that way. Standing here with her heart still pounding from the adrenaline of knowing she was about to be tail-whipped and trampled to death by a herd of for-God’s-sake armadillos, she knew she deserved a lot worse than a smack in the face. She kept her arms at her sides, her spear low in her hand. She didn’t try to defend herself, even with words. She just wished he’d get it over with.

His arm hovered. His fingers flexed and curled in the air. His chest heaved in silence. The black scales of his throat were striped with yellow as bright as a school bus. Then he just turned around and started walking, moving fast and with unnatural silence through the grass. She trudged after him, her spear trailing in the grass behind her, but not for long. He came back, seizing her by the front of her shirt like a man grabbing the collar of an errant dog, and pulled her along with him at his swift, angry stride.

In spite of that, it seemed like a long walk back, made even longer with nothing but the wind to listen to. Meoraq seethed beside her, his hand still knotted in her shirt. If she stumbled over a hidden stone, he kept going, dragging her until she found her feet. He didn’t need to stop and check his bearings, never lost his breath or caught his boots in the thorns, but still the morning was over and the afternoon getting long when they got back to camp.

“Welcome back, Miss Bierce,” Scott called when they finally arrived, making sure everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at her. “We were all starting to get worried. What were you trying to prove, wandering off like that?”

Meoraq snarled something before Amber had a chance to reply, but she couldn’t make it out. He dragged her over to the fire, where the saoq he had brought back had already been eaten down to the bones. He made her sit down, smacked her in the back of the head when she tried to get up, then stalked off to his tent, muttering.

“You seem upset,” Scott remarked with a smile.

“Should I take another walk, asshole?”

His jaw tightened. “Watch the profanity, Miss Bierce, or you will.”

Meoraq swept out of his tent and stalked back to the fire. He crouched down at Amber’s side, took her wrist again and slapped a square of his jerky-stuff into her palm hard enough to sting.

“I don’t want it,” she said, pushing it back at him.

He looked up at the sky, rubbing the jerky between his fingers while the scales at his throat faded between yellow and black, yellow and black. He began to talk then, but not to her. He started out calmly enough, but in less than a minute, he was on his feet, his voice steadily rising as he paced back and forth, pointing at Amber and bellowing into the clouds.

Several people eased quietly away.

“What’s he saying?” Eric asked finally.

“He’s praying,” said Amber.

“That’s a prayer?”

Meoraq swung around and shouted directly at her for a while, then threw himself down very suddenly in his thinking position—crouched low and bent forward, one hand open on the ground and the other resting on one knee, head bent, eyes shut. He breathed, silent.

“Now what is he doing?” Eric asked.

“Praying harder.”

Meoraq muttered under his breath, rubbed at his brow-ridges, inhaled, exhaled, and was still.

Everyone watched except Amber, who poked at the saoq bones in the fire and wished she had something to eat, and Scott, who was watching her.

“I would like to ask a question,” said Scott presently. “Could you, Miss Bierce, translate one so-called word of that prayer? Because I’m very curious about this lizard-god. What’s he called? O Great and Scaly One?”

Meoraq’s eyes opened.

“Do you know what I think?” Scott pressed, oblivious to the narrow, red stare now boring into him. “I think you’re making it up. I don’t think you have the first clue what that thing is saying. I think you’re just too stubborn to admit it’s not saying anything at all.”

“Dude,” murmured Dag, watching Meoraq’s head slowly tip to one side. “You might want to drop this.”

“No, I think it’s long past time we had this out.” Scott came briskly back to the fireside and stood over Meoraq with his arms folded in his most commanding posture. “Say something,” he ordered. “Say anything. Talk. Pray. Heck, sing some dirty limericks. Come on, Meoraq. Let’s hear it.”

Heads turned all around the camp as people waited for Meoraq to speak.

Meoraq kept his narrow stare on Scott and did not say one word.

People began to whisper.

Scott threw up both hands in a gesture that was at once victory and surrender. “Miss Bierce, you justified the tremendous danger of bringing that thing into my camp by insisting that it could act as our guide once we had achieved some form of communication. Now I think I’ve been more than patient with you—”

“Bullshit you have!” Amber sputtered.

“—but all I’ve gotten out of the endeavor so far is a lot of argument and profanity,” Scott concluded. He didn’t shout. It was actually worse that way. If he’d shouted, she could have jumped up and shouted back, but as it was, he just talked, sounding disappointed but so damned reasonable. “All you had to do was teach that thing enough English to tell us, oh, anything! What his people are called! What planet this is! Yes, no, anything!”

“I tried!”

“She tried!” Nicci came out of the crowd of Manifestors, past a suddenly-flustered Scott, to stand at Amber’s side. “She tried every single day. For hours. No one can make someone else speak English.”

“Yeah, come on.” And that was Maria, miraculously enough. Lawsuit Lady herself, ignoring Eric’s whispers to stand up and take a challenging step forward. “What was she supposed to do? Hold hot irons to his feet?”

Meoraq’s head tipped back. He looked at Amber.

“He can talk,” Maria declared. “Even I can understand him a little, and so could you if you weren’t too busy campaigning to listen.”

Scott gazed at her for a moment or two while Eric raked his hands through his hair. “And what was he saying, Miss Alverez?”

Maria hesitated, looking at Meoraq, who kept his eyes on Amber. “I couldn’t quite…He was talking pretty fast.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“I—”

“And yet you’re convinced it was a prayer. How do his prayers usually go?”

Maria sat down again and put her hand on Eric’s knee almost defensively. Eric wouldn’t look at her.

“So, in point of fact,” Scott continued, “you didn’t understand any of it.”

Maria opened her mouth. Eric murmured something. She glared at him, but pressed her lips together, silent.

“I can appreciate that you’re trying to help, Miss Alverez,” said Scott, dismissing her with a wave, “but Miss Bierce needs to answer for her own failures.”

“My failures?” Amber echoed. “It’s complicated, goddammit!”

“And if you have something to say, Miss Bierce, find a way to say it without turning it into a personal attack.”

Meoraq glanced at him and snorted. It was nice to know that someone else saw the irony in that, since it seemed that most of the people watching them did not.

“It’s complicated,” Amber said again, struggling to keep her voice down and sound as reasonable as he did. To her own ears, she sounded weak and sullen—a child making excuses for skipped homework. “Everything he says can change just by how he says it! Like…gann.”

“Guns?” All of a sudden, Scott was interested again. “Those things have guns?”

“If you’re going to interrupt, pay attention,” she snapped. “Gann. One sound, but I’ve heard him say it different ways to mean different things. Like, um, gann—”

Meoraq glanced over at her.

“Which I think is the name of this world. And gann,” Amber continued, dragging the word up into a higher pitch and watching his spines slowly flare forward. “Which could mean a person, or at least a person’s body. I’m not sure. Or gann. That’s just dirt. And then there’s gann, and I don’t know what that one means, except that it’s a swear of some sort. There’s others, and I can hear the differences when he says them, but I can’t…I can’t do it right.”

“Well, I still don’t hear words in there at all,” Scott announced loftily. “I’m not convinced that Miss Bierce isn’t confusing some animal vocalizations with—”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, how stupid are you?” Amber exploded. “Look at him! He’s wearing clothes!”

“Yeah, and my Aunt Harriet used to put hats on her terriers all the time, but that didn’t make them people.”

“He’s wearing boots and pants and everything but a fucking top hat and a pair of spats, not to mention all the knives! I mean, what are you really suggesting here? That someone dressed him up and turned him loose? Can Aunt Harriet’s terriers put up a tent? Start a fire? Whose food are you eating right now, you fucking moron?”

“I’m not going to tell you again to stop with the profanities. And all I’m suggesting is that the things you like to call proof of intelligence look to me like nothing more than proof that some as-yet unknown master race has trained a considerably lesser one to perform certain menial tasks. Look at it logically,” he said, turning back to the Manifestors. “As Miss Bierce herself acknowledges, he’s starting our fires, providing our food, patrolling around our camp…tasks he took on literally the moment he met us!”

Meoraq’s head tipped a little further. The fading yellow stripes on his throat grew a little brighter. He said nothing, did not move.

“But has he tried to learn our language? No. In fact, does he make any effort to speak with anyone who doesn’t speak to him first? No. Does he show the slightest curiosity about where we come from? No!” Scott began to pace back and forth in front of the murmuring crowd, gesturing now and then to punctuate his points. His color was high; his step, light. He was a man in his element and, ragged uniform and scruffy beard-stubble aside, he looked good when he was there. “When native tribes are first discovered by a civilized society, they react, ladies and gentlemen. They show awe. Curiosity. Excitement. They’re people who recognize foreign people for the first time and it’s an amazing, fantastic moment for them! But has this…Meoraq ever showed even a smidgeon of interest in…in our clothes, for example? Has he ever tried to touch someone’s hair? Indicated that he even noticed we have more fingers? Different features? Different bodies? No! Obviously, there is some higher life on this planet somewhere,” Scott concluded. “But after observing this particular specimen, I am more convinced than ever that we haven’t found it yet. What we have here is…”

He paused dramatically to think, and in that pause, Amber suddenly realized that she had been struck speechless for the first time in her life. It was a terrifying thought; maybe it had been outrage that silenced her, but she’d been just as silent all the same. Mesmerized. Not just letting him say it, but letting him say it in front of Meoraq.

She opened her mouth.

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder without looking at her and squeezed hard.

She closed her mouth, fuming.

“Okay,” said Scott, holding up both hands as if to quiet all the people who weren’t talking anyway. “What we appear to be dealing with is a kind of dog. And before you all get offended on its behalf—”

No one appeared to be offended. Amber opened her mouth again and this time got a squeeze and a silencing point. He still didn’t look at her.

“—dogs can be highly specialized animals,” Scott concluded. “We have bomb dogs, don’t we? Drug dogs. Seeing eyes and hearing ears. And of course, attack dogs. My point is, no matter how well-trained the dog is, no one would ever confuse it for a sentient life form, would they? And why not? Because even when the dog can do what it does better than anyone else around it, it still can’t think.”

“Just because he can’t speak English doesn’t mean he can’t think!” Amber insisted, shrugging off Meoraq’s hand. “He—He drew pictures, for crying out loud! He gestures! He—”

“So do monkeys,” said Scott.

“But if he’s so intelligent,” said Dag, and immediately backed off when Meoraq looked his way, “and I’m not saying you aren’t, man. But if he is, how come he can manage twenty different ways to say gann, but not human? How hard is that?”

Everyone looked at Meoraq, Amber among them. Meoraq eyed them all and then just looked at Amber. His spines were flat again.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Maybe we’re thinking of it too…one-dimensionally. Like sound is all there is. But for him, the way you say it matters as much as the sounds it makes. I don’t know.”

“That’s such a ludicrous answer,” muttered Scott, and made a point of walking away a few steps just so he could shake his head and come back. “Just admit it, you’re as clueless as the rest of us.”

“I did admit it,” she said tightly. “That’s what I don’t know means.”

“And for those people who are trying to learn a non-inflected language like English when their own is more tonal,” interrupted Yao, “it can be very difficult. There are five different ways to say ma in Mandarin. It can mean anything from mother to horse. Language is not a science, Mr. Scott. It is far more abstract than most people realize, and to this I would add that the physical structure of our speech may be impossible for him to emulate.”

“Yeah, that’s another thing,” said Amber. “His mouth. He doesn’t have lips, you know? And his tongue is all weird.”

Crandall made a loud, derisively suggestive sound that earned him all of Meoraq’s attention.

“You’re a dick,” Amber snapped. And to everyone else, said, “I mean it’s different from a normal tongue. A human tongue,” she amended, catching a narrow glance from the lizard. “I don’t think it moves much. He pretty much only uses it to chew, so however he’s making the sounds he makes, he’s not doing it the way we do.”

“As usual,” Scott sighed, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But I do.” Mr. Yao stood up and faced himself off squarely against Scott. “If your Aunt Harriet had parrots instead of terriers, you might know what Miss Bierce is trying to tell you. Our friend appears to have bifurcated trachea—a split flap at the back of his throat which produces all his sounds. The shape of his mouth could easily account for some sort of resonance cavity which allows him precise control over sounds our ears may not even be capable of hearing.”

“You said that was for pheromones,” Scott said with a meaningful glance back at his Manifestors. Some of them obediently laughed or rolled their eyes.

Mr. Yao’s lips thinned. “One does not supersede the other, Mr. Scott. I cannot advise you strongly enough to learn that particular lesson. One does not supersede the other, and if I can be blunt, I would observe that his ability to speak our language has nothing to do with his ability to understand it.”

“Which he does,” Amber insisted. “And sooner or later, he’s going to stop being polite and you’re going to get your proof about whether or not he knows what we’re saying in the form of a sword up your ass!”

The slap didn’t hurt. Not really. She staggered back a few steps, but she wasn’t in any danger of falling down, and if she’d known the slap was coming, she probably wouldn’t have even staggered. But that was the thing; she didn’t see it coming. Scott was able to pull back his arm and smack her right across the mouth and she never…never really saw it coming.

She stared at him, one hand cupped over her stinging lips, unable to quite believe she’d just been hit. There wasn’t any blood on her fingers, although she could taste it, coppery, on her throbbing lips. She looked around, blinking in a kind of numb bewilderment, and saw people she knew just looking back at her. Some of them were frowning, but whether at her for swearing or Scott for slapping, she couldn’t tell. Some of them dropped back in the crowd, or picked at their fingernails, or found something else to look at, as if she’d done something embarrassing and vaguely disturbing, like wet her pants. She looked at Nicci, but Nicci wouldn’t meet her eyes. She looked at Meoraq, but he was looking at Scott. So she looked at Scott.

He tipped his chin up, giving her a grim sort of nod. “I’ve given you all the last chances you’re going to get, Miss Bierce. It’s time you learned to start watching your mouth when you speak to m—”

He didn’t see the slap coming either. Whap, right across his cheek. It hurt her wrist quite a bit. All the ladies in the movies acted like slapping a man’s face was about as difficult as swatting a fly, but faces were pretty hard surfaces, really.

Scott staggered back, tripped over his boots and fell on his ass, which was satisfying to see even though she knew it was mostly luck.

“You ever lay a fucking hand on me again and I’ll knock your fucking teeth out!” she shouted. “You don’t get to tell me how to run my fucking mouth!”

“Okay, calm down.” Eric eased himself forward a step, his hands once more raised and placating. “Take it easy.”

“Tell him to calm down!” She brushed at her mouth again, but it still wasn’t bleeding on her. Her hand was shaking. She could not believe how angry she was.

Or how close to tears.

No one told Scott to calm down. Dag was helping him up. People were whispering. Looking at her. Saying things that made Scott nod in his tight, angry way as he brushed grass off his clothes.

‘I don’t care if they like me!’ she thought furiously.

“Okay,” said Scott. He straightened his sleeves, his collar, his shirt-front. His cheek was a little red where she’d hit him, but only a little, like her lips that felt so swollen and tasted so coppery but stubbornly refused to bleed. He said, “I’m not doing this tonight. If you want to freak out and start hitting people—”

“You hit me first!”

Scott threw up his hands, a see-what-I-have-to-deal-with gesture straight to God. People murmured, commiserating. Amber could feel herself blushing, feel her breath growing hotter in her chest. “I’m done with you. Done. You show me some respect or the next time you take a walk, I won’t send the lizard after you.”

Meoraq had not moved more than his eyes or his spines in all this time, but at that, he suddenly stood up. He took two steps, unhurried, and slapped Scott right out of the air even as he was leaping away. He caught him before he hit the ground, pulled him close, then said quietly, “Lizard?”

He said it strangely, softening the z and rattling on the r, but he said it and it was easy to hear because no one else made a sound.

Meoraq tipped his head to the side in that way he seemed to think was threatening and said, once more in lizardish, that no one sent him anywhere and if S’kot or any other human (he said that oddly as well, drawing out the ooo-sound and hammering a hard T on the end) thought otherwise, he would…something. The word he used was not a familiar one and in this context could have meant anything. Whatever he said, he sounded like he meant it. And then he tipped his head even further on its side and asked if S’kot understood him.

“Yes,” said Scott at once, his eyes huge.

Meoraq asked if he was sure. S’kot apparently heard nothing but hisses and grunts (he exaggerated the animal quality of these sounds; Scott flinched hard both times) of a lizard when Meoraq spoke.

“I…” Scott rolled his eyes wildly back at Amber, waxen-faced. “Say something, for God’s sake! What does he want?”

“What does he want?” Amber huffed out an angry, humorless laugh and rubbed a final time at her unwounded mouth. “He wants a fucking apology, Commander.”

Scott’s mouth worked as his face slowly filled up with color. He made a few half-hearted shrugging gestures, looking for help in the crowd while Manifestors averted their eyes and his loyal lieutenants just looked at each other. “I’m…responsible for these people,” he said at last. “I wasn’t trying to be rude, I just…need to be sure what we’re dealing with. That’s all.”

Meoraq’s eyes narrowed. His head tipped. He waited.

“That’s as close as he’s going to get,” said Amber. “You might as well let him go.”

Meoraq hauled back one hand and slapped Scott again. The sound was a shocking thing, loud as a gunshot. People jumped, Amber among them, but Meoraq kept slapping. His spines were flat, but his throat was dark; his arm raised and swung five more times as Scott thrashed in his grip, and he was calm the whole time. At the end, he just stopped and waited while Scott brayed, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Get him off me!”

Meoraq released Scott with a shove and turned around. He went back to his place at the fire and crouched down. He picked up a stick and stirred coals.

Scott looked at Amber, wild-eyed and shock-white everywhere that Meoraq hadn’t slapped him purple, his clothes still bunched up around his neck. His mouth worked a few times, but his eyes kept cutting at Meoraq. Finally, he spat, “You just remember to watch your mouth, Bierce,” then spun around, grabbing at Eric and Crandall, and staggered away.

Amber sat down and waited while people cleared rapidly away. She could hear Scott across the camp, loudly holding court, but she couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. She didn’t have to. She could guess.

Meoraq was watching her. After a while, she looked back at him.

He pointed at her and said something stern about never speaking for him again. He was a…foot?…and when he wanted something said, he’d say it.

She started to get up (but not in a huff she could be pissed off without going off in a huff like a stupid girl), but he caught her shoulder and shoved her back down. He said something she was too angry to catch, squeezed her shoulder extra-hard, then let go of her to pat her once on the head. He told her he didn’t need…something. Defending? But that he acknowledged her obedience and he forgave her for wandering off.

Forgave her. Like she’d done something wrong. Big scaly son of a bitch.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, looking back at the fire.

“Eh?”

“For calling you a lizard all those times. I guess it is pretty rude.”

He snorted, then tapped at her knee with his knuckles. He told her he knew she didn’t mean it as an insult.

“Sometimes I do,” she admitted. “Let me ask you something. Honestly.”

He rolled his hand through the air in a bring-it-on gesture that translated perfectly.

“Is there any point to this? To you and me, I mean. Talking. I don’t know.” She rubbed at her face. “It doesn’t feel like anything’s changing. Unless it’s getting worse. I don’t mean just me and Scott, although God knows that’s about as bad as it can get.”

Meoraq grunted in what she was coming to think of as his affirming way. His stare was unnervingly direct.

‘He’s getting this,’ she found herself thinking. ‘And if he’s not getting every word, it’s at least nine out of every ten.’

“Is it just me?” she asked, and immediately wished she sounded more frustrated and less…whiny. “I always thought I was pretty good at coping with things, but I’ve got to tell you, Meoraq, I suck at this marooned-on-an-alien-planet crap.”

His hand rolled again, inviting examples.

“We have to start working together. We have to start planning for our future, you know? Otherwise, he’s right, all we’re doing is killing time while we wait to die. And I realize that I could maybe be better…”

She gave him a chance to comment, but he merely looked at her, wonderfully inexpressive as only a lizard could be.

“But damn it,” she sighed, combing restlessly at her hair, “if the future means getting along with that son of a bitch, I’d almost rather see it all end here.”

His head cocked the other way. He leaned forward, the tip of his snout in kissing distance of her face. He spoke. You blah blah blah, something about God…blah blah and stop whining.

“Easy for you to say. If Scott gets bitchy at you, you can slap him around and leave. I have to live with these people!”

Meoraq scowled and scratched at the side of his snout. After a moment, he asked what kind of help she wanted.

“Oh hell, I don’t know.” She rubbed at another chunk of headache. “But I feel like I’m the only one who’s actually trying to find a way to live here! And everyone else is trying to find a way to live back on Earth. I want to go home too! I want clean sheets and a cheeseburger and a hot shower and everything else they want, but it’s not happening! We have to be here! We have to kill things if we’re going to eat and pick grass out of the water we drink! We don’t get soap and we don’t get toilet paper and if we can’t figure out what we do get in one hell of a hurry, we’re all going to die here!”

He looked briefly heavenward and then rubbed at the bony ridges over his eyes. He muttered something about his God sending him to them.

“Yeah, and I can see you’re thrilled to be a part of that—”

He snorted.

“—but I’m glad you’re here, because we’re all going to die without you.” That sounded a lot more true than she liked. She tried to hide it with a smile, but it wouldn’t stick. “Everything is so hard. I’m tired. I can’t…do this forever.”

He stood up, saying something she mostly understood without guessing: “Things will get easier when we can speak more freely.”

“Easier is a relative term, lizardman.”

“Truth,” he agreed in lizardish. “But then, life is in the journey. If you cannot have an easy journey, have an interesting story.”

“That needs to be a fortune cookie,” said Amber. “I don’t know how my story can possibly be more interesting than it already is without…well, I was going to say alien invasion or a giant lizard, but we appear to have those bases covered.”

He grunted and gazed into the fire.

After several minutes—she had all but forgotten he was there, lost in her own relentless playback of the whole rotten day—he nudged at her arm. When she glanced his way, he was holding up that square of jerky and staring straight ahead into the fire.

She took it. “Thanks. What is this stuff, by the way?”

“Cuuvash.” He clasped his empty hands and watched the embers.

She repeated him, pretending not to see the way he rolled his eyes at her pronunciation, and gnawed off a piece of the dried meat. Her jaws were still sore from the last time he’d shared this stuff, but it was still pretty good. Like jerky, only not as salty, with a richer flavor and a weird undertaste almost like cheap wine. She ate, eyeing him suspiciously. “You’re not having any.”

He said no again, but in a different way. Not yet, maybe. Then he stirred, rubbing at his brow-ridges, and looked at her. “It’s time to go,” he told her.

An icy stone dropped into her belly. The jerky…the cuuvash got stuck in her throat. She swallowed hard, coughed, and managed, “You’re leaving?”

He told her yes in some complicated way, said something about the weather and something about mountains, and that he’d only waited this long so that they could learn to talk. “Tomorrow, we leave,” he said at the end of it. It was not a question.

“We?” Part of the knot in her throat relaxed a little, but her stomach stayed tight and sickly-cold. “You mean all of us?”

“Yes.” He sent a black glance over his shoulder and cupped the end of his snout, muttering something with Scott’s name in it. He told her it would be a long journey.

“And an interesting story,” Amber guessed, rubbing at her stomach to try and ease up the rest of that rock before she had to puke it out.

His gaze shifted to watch her hand. He frowned and looked away, feeling idly at the buckle of his belt as if mimicking her movements. “You will tell S’kot to have his humans ready to travel tomorrow.”

“Sure, why not. And I’ll be ready, too.”

The corners of his mouth flicked up in a smile before his usual fierce frown replaced it. He leaned toward her, aggressively close, the way he’d been before the slaps started flying. He said something about Scott and the others…no, he said, “When you are S’kot’s human, you may disobey him all you like. When you are mine, you do as I say.”

He waited, but apparently took her lengthy efforts to translate as a sign of submissive assent. He grunted again, but in a pleased way, even though his scowl stayed fixed to his face. He leaned even closer, filling her field of vision with nothing but his scowling, scaly face. “And when you are mine, if you ever leave my camp to—” Something…and probably not flattering. “—I will—” Again, she had no idea precisely what the threat was, but, “—you may never walk again,” gave her the gist of it. He paused and frowned a little. “Did you mark that?”

“Most of it.”

“Then I have your obedience.”

“I didn’t exactly plan to go anywhere this morning,” she told him testily. “But I wasn’t lost. I was just hunting. And I wasn’t in trouble.”

“Human, you are not yet out of trouble.” But he leaned away from her and looked up at the sky. He said something she couldn’t catch in an inquiring tone, then gave her a rap to the knee with his knuckles. “God sees us both and we can both show Him improvement. Tomorrow.”

“Right.” Amber popped the last of the cuuvash in her mouth and went to work on it, poking at the coals so the fire wouldn’t die. She woke a few flames up. They crawled along the saoq bones, releasing a great smudge of black, foul-smelling smoke directly into her eyes and then went out.

Perfect.

Amber tossed down her coal-stirring stick. “God sees us, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

He seemed puzzled by the question. “Now and always.”

Amber looked at the clouds. “Could you possibly make this day any worse?” she demanded.

A drop of rain hit her in the eye. Then another. And then the skies opened up and began to pour, killing the last coals in just a few steam-hissing seconds and drenching her to the skin.

Meoraq threw back his head and roared with curiously hoarse and chuffing laughter. His hand slapped at her back once, nearly knocking her cuuvash out of her mouth, and he got up, still grinning, and walked away into the grass. She could hear him talking to God as he went, but she couldn’t hear what he said over the rain, or for that matter, over the cries of fifty Manifestors scrambling to get out of it. Amber herself stayed stubbornly where she was, already as wet, cold and miserable as she could get, determined to wait it out and start the fire again when it was over.

“And I’m still an atheist!” she shouted, swiping water from her face.

So there.