The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (5)

 

BOOK IV

 

 

 

PIONEERS

 

Meoraq was a warrior and had been all his life. He had been born under the Blade, raised in the training halls of Tilev, called to serve as Sheul’s own Sword in judgment. These were the ways he knew—to cut, to grapple, to conquer—and every man who ever spoke a word in his presence spoke it with respect and by his leave.

He was Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul, who was son of Ta’sed, son of Kuuri, and forty-three names more, every man of them a Sheulek in his own time, all the way back to Uyane Xaima, who had walked with Prophet Lashraq himself. He was the veteran of better than three hundred judgments and if Sheul willed it, he would either go on to three hundred more or retire to stand as champion of Xeqor. He was a warrior. He was not a cattle-drover.

The humans said they were ready to follow him. Yes, they said this, even on the night before, when they bedded themselves down free of sentries and of care, trusting him to keep all danger from their little camp. They said this when it pleased them to wake the following morning, most of them not only after dawn, but well after. Those with tents made no effort to strike them. Those nearest the fire were setting it alight. They all assured him they were ready and then they just sat there!

Meoraq worked his way through four humans, dragging them bodily onto their feet and setting them in a line, but when he reached for a fifth and noticed all four of his humans had drawn off into a cluster, he had to cry surrender. He bellowed it, in fact. And then he stormed off in search of Amber.

She was sitting on a crate at the edge of camp with her Nicci. Both had their packs on their laps. Amber stood when she saw him, although he noted she put her pack down, rather than shoulder the strap for travel.

“What are they waiting for?” he demanded. “Did you not tell them dawn? Where is that chattering cattle’s ass who calls himself your abbot?”

Amber’s green eyes rolled heavenward, just as any dumaq’s eyes might do if one were entertaining thoughts best not spoken aloud to a Sheulek. “Oh Scott!” she called in a curious, lilting way. “Meoraq would like a word with you.”

“A word? I’d like my hand upside his snout, if only he had one! Half the morning is gone! S’kot!” Meoraq grabbed Amber by the arm and dragged her with him as he strode ahead to meet the human hesitating toward him. “I wanted these people ready to march at dawn! Where is your obedience?”

Scott looked at Amber.

“He’s not happy about the delay,” she said.

“What delay?” asked Scott.

Meoraq drew back. “Is he serious?” he asked dangerously.

“Yes,” she sighed. “Look, Scott, he wanted us on the road first thing this morning. First thing. Like, the sun comes up and we get going.”

Scot heard this without apparent concern, certainly without apology. “Well if that’s what he wanted, he should have been ready.”

“What in Gann’s grey hell does he mean by that?” Meoraq demanded.

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?” she asked Scott. “He’s been ready for hours. His teepee’s packed. He’s got his good, um, belts on. Or whatever he’s wearing…Are those suspenders?”

“This is a travel harness!” Meoraq snapped, clutching at one of its buckles. “And it’s a damned expensive one! I would have to sell three of you as cattle to make the cost of this harness and I can hardly see the sin of that since you have made no effort to obey me as men must do! Get your damned humans on their feet and make them ready!”

“And what was that?” Scott asked after a wary moment.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s a safe bet that it’s got something to do with all this standing around.”

“Fine.” Scott turned boldly away from Meoraq and addressed Amber alone, folding his arms as though he wore a pair of blades upon them. “Tell him that if he wanted us to start early, he should have had our food ready on time.”

“I should have what?” Meoraq hissed.

“Are you high?” Amber asked, and while it was impossible to read either her malleable face or her tone, both were clearly touched by some sort of emotion. “He’s not running a hotel here, he doesn’t owe you a continental breakfast!”

“He does if he wants us to follow him anywhere. I like this camp exactly where it is, Miss Bierce. We have the high ground here, we’re in easy reach of water, we have the herds—”

“This is not your decision, human!” Meoraq snapped. He could feel his throat warming in pulses. His color was coming in. He made an effort to take deep breaths.

“What herds?” Amber asked. “The saoqs are hours away these days and you have no guarantee that they’re coming back.”

“Deer don’t migrate, Miss Bierce.”

“These aren’t deer, you dumb dick! Stop acting like this is Earth!”

Meoraq terminated her further words with a silencing grip on her shoulder. “Enough. Speak my words, human. Do not speak for me. I am Sheulek.”

She shut her mouth and waited, glaring at Scott who made a point of gazing loftily back at all his lounging people as he said, “If you want to go, go. No one’s stopping you. But you are going to have to give me some incentive before I uproot these people a second time. We have everything we need right here in my camp. I’m not leaving just because you say so.”

“So be it,” said Meoraq, once he was himself quite calm. “Sheul has put you in my path and until I know the reason, I accept that I must care for you. So I will make a hunt for you. But if you want to share in it, you will have to be at my camp.”

Amber relayed this, more or less, while Meoraq stood behind her and punctuated the words with hisses where necessary. “Now here’s a little something from me,” she said at the end of it. “In all this time, you haven’t done a goddamn thing except hold meetings and tell us everything is going to be okay. When Meoraq walks away, you don’t get to say that anymore. Instead, you get to tell them to pick up a spear and figure out how to use it before they starve to death. You think anyone is going to care how far they have to walk as long as they don’t have to do that?”

Scott said nothing. His face had turned a deep purplish-red color, like shadesweet fruits left too long on the vine and gone to poison. “I’ll think about it.”

“Think as long as you like,” Meoraq told him and turned to Amber, “Gather your things and whichever of your people—”

“You do and you’re out of here!” Scott shouted, grabbing at Amber’s shirt. “Don’t you dare say one word to anyone, Bierce! This is my camp! Mine!”

Meoraq had never lost his temper so entirely or so quickly in all his life. Shoving Amber aside, he seized Scott by his soft, pink throat and lifted him right off the ground. “No one interrupts a Sword of Sheul!” he bellowed. “Not abbots, not judges, not governors, and not you, you freakish little gutter-bastard! Give me your obedience or I’ll send you back to the clay that shat you out!”

Scott strangled and battered futilely at Meoraq’s arm.

“Obedience, I say! Show me your fucking fist! Tell him—” he roared, turning, but Amber was nowhere to be found. Meoraq blinked, breathing hard, looking left and right and finally down, where Amber sprawled across the wet ground, clapping one hand to her head and staring dazedly at the sky. Blood, red as those shadesweet fruits in their fullest, dappled her fingers and streaked her hair.

And his first thought, unwelcome as a cold draft blowing across a dark and empty room, was not that she was injured, but only that she was a woman lying at his feet upon her back. He saw that and somehow forgot his anger even as it continued to throb in his throat, just as he forgot the human gasping for air at the end of his fist.

But thankfully, that moment ended.

Meoraq turned all the way to her and let Scott go. He didn’t mean to throw him, but he wasn’t careful either, and Scott crashed into a wooden crate and slid gasping to the ground. Meoraq was on one knee in the next instant, chasing her hand away to probe through the springy, matted mass of her hair.

The damage he found was little more than a scrape, neither deep nor wide. It bled, as head wounds were apt to do, but Amber did not give any kind of cry when he nudged at it. She pulled irritably out of his reach instead, saying, “I’m fine, damn it! You pushed me in the mud, not off a cliff! Christ, these pants were clean just, uh…I guess it was a week ago, but still! Damn it, Meoraq!”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m what?” She noticed the red smears on her fingertips and stared at them without comprehension, then touched at her head and studied the fresh daubs of blood she took away. “I didn’t hit a rock or anything,” she said, seeming puzzled but only a little troubled. “It must have been you.”

He drew back, his spines flaring forward.

“You have rough hands,” she told him. “Your…you know, your scales.”

He stared at her for a long time before slowly looking down at the faint sign of her blood, like red frost, on the side of his hand.

“There he goes,” said Amber, climbing to her feet. She was watching Scott, who had already retreated across the whole of the camp to gather his lieutenants and hiss at them. “It doesn’t look like he’s telling people to pack up and get ready, either.”

“I do not care,” said Meoraq distantly. He clenched his hand to a fist and opened it again, watching the blood shine where it was still wet and crack where it had already dried. “If it is to be Sheul’s lesson that I learn to herd cattle, so be it. I shall tether them up in a line and whip their flanks, but they will walk, by Gann.”

He heard a dry, fleshy, smacking sound. Amber had clapped both hands to her face and was holding them there. “You can’t talk to them like that,” she said, sighing in the same breath that she spoke, which was a clever human trick.

“Of course I can. I am Sheulek.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I am owed all obedience.”

She sighed again. “Listen. This is…This is a social situation, okay?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means…You have to make friends with these people.”

“Eh?”

“Friends.” She cast about with her eyes, then shrugged her arms out in futility. “Friends, you know? You need them to like you.”

She said it, as she said most things, with sincerity even though he knew it for a lie. Friendship could be pleasant, but it could also be a dangerous distraction. A boy born under the sign of the Blade did not play with the other boys of his caste, but competed against them, brawled with them, beat and were beaten by them. The masters at Tilev allowed no leisure hours in company, only study, meals and sleep, where every stolen whisper risked a slap across the snout. The brunts at least had some leeway to chat amongst themselves, but were set against each other so often and so brutally as part of their training that even then attachments were few. After his ascension, his duties as a Sheulek kept him moving from city to city, and what company he might share with a man like Nkosa was kept brief. A Sword of Sheul must always be honed and ready to strike, and personal feelings could only complicate things.

“Do you like any of these people?” he asked, gesturing toward the camp where a few humans were reluctantly gathering up their gear.

She dropped her eyes as if it were a reprimand before glancing shamefacedly at her people. “I should.”

“Why?”

“Because…Christ, I don’t know.” She covered her face again, baring her teeth as if she wanted to bite something. “Okay, so I’m a horrible hypocrite and the last person who should be trying to explain this to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less true. People need people.” She grimaced even as she said it, not in a smiling way. “What would you do if Scott convinced them you were some kind of…of raging, man-eating, bloodthirsty lizardman?”

“Kill him,” Meoraq said with a snort.

She stared at him for a moment before asking, in some exasperation, “Wouldn’t that just prove him right?”

“I might as well, since he’s already convinced them in your scenario. At least he wouldn’t be around to gloat afterwards.” He watched Scott as he moved among his people, touching them, bobbing his head, speaking lengthy and serious words, and motioning quite often back at Meoraq with the whole of his Gann-damned hand. He found himself toying idly with the thought of killing the man, then more than idly, and then he let it go and looked at Amber instead. She was also watching Scott. The blood in her hair had dried, forming a short series of stiff, brown spines, which stuck straight up as if she were in a state of great surprise, comically at odds with the solemn expression on her face. He looked back at Scott and said, “I did not intend to strike you.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m fine.”

He grunted, then pointed brusquely out at Scott (with the whole of his own hand, ha). “How long is this likely to take?”

“I don’t know. Longer than it has to, I’m pretty sure.”

“Are you prepared to travel?”

“Me?” She looked around at the crates where she had left her pack and her Nicci. “Yeah, I’m good to go.”

“Then let’s see if we can hurry them along.” He shrugged his own pack higher on his back in a meaningful way and started walking. A great outcry rose up from those humans who noticed, and it had not fully settled before Amber was hurrying to collect not only her pack and her pet human, but one of the heavy, sealed sacks her people usually used to sit upon. Its weight gave her obvious difficulty, but she heaved it up and managed a loping run back to his side. Soon all the humans were finally scraping themselves together, shouting out for him to stop, to wait, to give them a damned minute, just as if he had not given them all morning.

Meoraq listened, at once annoyed and grimly pleased with the commotion he had caused, and unthinkingly gave Amber a two-knuckle tap to the shoulder in a far more intimate welcome than he ever should have given one of her kind, much less a woman of any kind. Luckily, she took it for a command, looking back over that shoulder in a puzzled way at the humans who were struggling to follow in his wake.

“Yeah, they’re coming,” she said. And looked up at him with half a smile, half a frown. “But I don’t think you made any friends.”

“In the Book of First Hours, it is written, ‘If every hand of every man reached out to you in friendship, so it would yet remain they reached from Gann. A true son of Sheul is never tempted, but seeks always to clasp the one hand that reaches down from heaven.”

“I got…practically none of that.”

“It means I am Sheulek,” he replied, patting her companionably but safely on the unfeeling swell of her pack. “And I don’t need friends.”

 

* * *

 

Which was just as well, since he made none that day.

Meoraq knew it was no easy thing he asked of them. He had waded through the hip-deep bog of reeking water that the lowlands became in the rainy season, crossed the middle plains under the sweltering wet heat of summertime, and climbed the highland steppes when the icestorms raged so violently that his clothes were frozen to his body. He had walked both by day and by dark of night, upon whole roads and fallen roads and no roads at all, and he had done all these things with no company apart from the ravening beasts of the wild and the equally ravening men who had gone to Gann. He had suffered and survived the consequences of his ignorance, recklessness and, yes, outright stupidity, and knowing the humans were strangers to this land and its hardships, he was resolved to forgive much.

In forming this resolution, Meoraq had perhaps failed to recognize that he was not the most forgiving of men.

No matter how many times he ordered them to stay together and be quiet, they soon drifted apart, shouting back and forth whenever they had something they wanted to say. When his words were not enough to bring them under control, Meoraq dealt out a few cuffs. Mindful of human fragility, they had been the most glancing of blows, hardly more than two-knuckle taps, and yet they yelped (and occasionally bled) and whined about it so much that he soon cried surrender and let them do what they wanted.

Before the first hour was ended, they had stretched themselves out so thinly, half of them were no longer in sight. The ones with the least to carry left the rest so entirely behind that when they came to an obstacle—which was often in this roadless wilderness—they had time to set up their camp so they could whine at each other in comfort while they waited for the others to catch up.

The whining! Great Sheul grant him patience against their constant whining! It was muddy. It was cold. They were hungry. They were tired. The only thing worse than having to hear it was knowing that tomorrow, he’d also have to hear them whine about how sore they were.

And they were going to be sore, judging from the difficulty they were having carrying their supplies. Meoraq had no sympathy. If they’d had the resources to construct crates, they should have made carts as well, but no, they built these enormous, ungainly casings and then heaved them up by their edges, since they didn’t even have grips or pole-holds or anything. Most of the day—not even half but most—was therefore spent either waiting for the crates, arguing over whose turn it was to carry them, or struggling to move them out of the mud, through the thorns, or up over some tumbled stone ridge.

And what could he do about it? Not a Gann-damned thing. The humans couldn’t mark half of what Meoraq told them and wouldn’t listen to the other half. He worked with them until his patience was gone—scouting ahead for the least arduous route while they rested, sharing out his water, even striking fires for them during their many lengthy rests—and told himself it would all be worth it when he stood in Xi’Matezh.

If he ever got there.

“Meoraq!” Scott called from the bottom of a steep rise which was giving considerable trouble to the exhausted men trying to carry a crate up it. “Come here!”

Meoraq, who had been waiting at the top of that rise for some time now, lowered his spines and did not move.

Scott was not deterred. He pointed imperiously at the crate and said, “Come get under this end.”

“Fuck your fist,” Meoraq replied, making sure to speak clearly and evenly.

“Right here,” said Scott, patting the crate-top. “Come on, you haven’t helped out once all day. Meoraq? I’m saying that right, aren’t I? Why is he just staring at me?”

And he whistled, like a cattleman after calves, with his soft little mouthparts puckered up like an anus. He was farting out of his face. Meoraq was rarely one for that sort of crude humor, but he laughed.

Scott threw up his hand and slapped it down on the crate-top, turning to his men. “I never know what the hell he’s thinking. Where’s Bierce?”

“Look, man.” This was Eric, who was not as objectionable as Scott, but as one of his servants, was still never going to be one of Meoraq’s favorite humans. “I keep telling you, it doesn’t matter how many people get under it.”

“He’s stronger than we are,” Scott said indifferently, trying once again to lure Meoraq down from the top of the rise. “He could probably carry this end by himself if he ever gets it through his thick head that’s what he’s supposed to do.”

Supposed to, no less.

“The ground is way too loose,” Eric argued. “We’d have to build some kind of support—”

Meoraq clapped a hand to the end of his snout and rubbed. Building anything to lift that crate to the top of this rise would take at least to the end of the day, if they knew what they were doing as they built it, which was doubtful, and if they bothered themselves to do anything about it today, which was even less likely.

“—and we don’t have a hammer or rope or even duct tape!” Eric finished. “We’re going to have to find another way up.”

Scott considered this, then turned back to Meoraq. “Do you have any rope?”

“Yes,” said Meoraq, thinking himself wonderfully patient. “However, there are no trees up here to act as anchor.”

“What?”

“Trees, idiot.” Meoraq mimed the tying of a knot, then opened his arms in a broad gesture of futility. “Rope does you no good without something to tie it to.”

Scott patted the crate even louder. “We’re going to tie it to this,” he explained, and rolled his eyes at his generals. “Not the sharpest pencil on the planet, is he?”

Meoraq started to speak, then abruptly flexed his spines forward and shrugged off his pack. He opened it up, dug out the coil of strong braid he kept at the bottom, and tossed it down to them. He watched while Scott instructed his servants in how to bind up the crate (it both amused and disgusted him to see that Eric followed the man’s directions only until Scott moved on, then quickly untied it and did it right), then moved aside so that they could ascend to the crown of the rise and see for themselves there was nothing to tie it to. Undaunted, Scott ordered his men in a line, like boys playing Heave-To with the crate acting as the opposing team.

Meoraq glanced at the tumble of rock at the bottom of the rise and moved a little further back. He waited.

“Everybody pull together!” Scott called, coming over to stand next to Meoraq. “One! Two! Pull!”

They obeyed. Grunting, straining, with Scott calling officious encouragement at them, the humans dragged the crate out of the mud and onto the slope, where they managed to drag it about halfway up before the first man’s feet slid a little too close to the edge. The ground gave, not much, but enough to throw a start into the heaving humans. Men tumbled over each other with cries of alarm and the one man who did not let go of the rope let himself be yanked painfully down the slope to land head-first against the crate, once more resting in the mud at the bottom.

Meoraq leaned out and watched until he saw enough movement to satisfy him that there were no real injuries, then turned and looked at Scott. “I want my rope back. And I want it cleaned before it’s coiled.”

Scott glared at him with color in his face and complete incomprehension in his eyes. He turned to his men. “We’re going to try that again,” he announced.

Meoraq bent his neck for a few deep breaths, rubbing at his brow-ridges.

“But first we’re going to get some branches or something to use as poles. Some people can stand at the bottom and push with the poles—”

“I cry,” Meoraq said.

Scott looked at him. “What?”

Meoraq dropped his hand and shrugged his tight spines. “I cry,” he said again, simply and without anger. “I have stood for truth in three hundred trials and surely struck down two hundred more of Gann’s corrupted in my time, and I have faced and defeated every wild beast left to this land from a denning she-ghet to a rutting bull corroki, but Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul and Sword of Sheul, cries surrender to you and your fucking crate. We stop here for the night.”

“What the hell is he saying?” Scott asked, puckering up his flat, ugly face in an expression of annoyance. “Where’s Bierce?”

“You had best find her,” Meoraq ordered, pointing right into Scott’s face with the whole of his hand. “Because I have a few thoughts and if I cannot express them in words, I mean to do it with the beating of your miserable, misshapen life.”

Scott moved unhurriedly back, saying, “I don’t know what the hell he’s saying. Go ahead and let’s make camp. We’re done for the day. Someone find Bierce before I forget how useful this thing can occasionally be.”

Meoraq grunted and went to gather up his emptied flasks, reminding himself at every step that this was a pilgrimage, there were supposed to be ordeals, and they were called ordeals because they were not endured easily.

Even without a sandglass or bells rung at every hour, Meoraq had always had a good sense of time. A man who spent so much of his life with nothing to look at except the sun (or the light of the sun, according to Master Tsazr), learned to read it almost unawares. Meoraq knew that they had left the fast-flowing stream behind perhaps two hours ago, and although he also knew it would not take nearly so long to reach it again, he was not prepared to find himself standing at its edge as quickly as he did.

Two hours…and here was the stream.

Meoraq did not fill his flasks. He shouldered them instead and, in a fouler mood than ten days’ rain outside of Tothax had been able to inspire in him, kept walking. He marked the sun as he went. By his judgment, he reached his destination and returned in just a little more than an hour, stopping only once to fill his flasks at last.

He came back into the humans’ camp, ignoring those brave few who dared to express their disappointment that he had no meat with him. He set his water down beside his pack—calmly, a Sheulek was the master of his impulses—but kept the one object he had taken from his walk tight in his fist and went in search of Amber.

He found her sprawled on her back on a heap of the wrapped cushions, which, judging from her flushed face and rough breath, she had only just finished hauling up to the top of the rise where Scott had put this camp—the first show of common sense the man had demonstrated. Her clothes lay over her in damp, rumpled folds that emphasized, rather than hid, the wasted hills and valleys of her exhausted body. Her eyes were shut; the flesh around them, dark and hollow-looking, like sockets in an empty skull. There was still a stain of blood in her hair.

Anger he had struggled all day long to contain faded somewhat. He opened his mouth, grappled with and was defeated by the sinful nonsense of her name, and turned instead to Nicci, who sat on the cushions close by, wrapped in one of their metal blankets, watching him.

He gestured uncomfortably at Amber. “Is she sleeping?”

Nicci spared the prone human beside her a glance. “Looks like it.”

Meoraq grunted and beckoned to her. “Leave her. You mark me well enough. I require my words carried to your abbot. Come.”

Nicci reached out to nudge at Amber. “Wake up.”

Amber’s eyes opened, but the impossible green of them was dulled into something greyish. Dead. She looked at Nicci, who was wrapping herself up again, then at Meoraq, who was battling the urge to slap Nicci right out of her shiny metal blanket.

“Hey,” Amber muttered. She visibly gathered her strength, then rolled onto her side before pushing herself into a seated position. Her arm trembled as she raised it to rub at her face. “I can’t believe I actually crashed like that.”

Crashed. Not a word he’d ever heard for rest, but one almost painfully apt. She had not been sleeping, not lying that way under the open sky with rain pooling over her eyes. She had crashed, like the ship she claimed had carried her here.

He wished briefly and with singular bitterness that he really had gone hunting after all. She looked terrible and what did he have to offer her but—

She saw the object in his hand and her brows pinched together. “What’s that?”

He looked at it himself, just as if he had not been the one to pick it up and carry it here. His anger returned, an ugly shadow of the good, clarifying fire it had been, but just as undeniable.

“I need you,” he said and curtly added, “To speak.”

“Yeah, okay.”

And she took his arm.

Reached right up and took it.             

Meoraq held very still as she used him to climb to her feet, unsure where he should be looking. He was excruciatingly aware of everything around him: the wind whispering through the grass, the piercing warble of laughing humans, the smell of wet leaves and earth, Nicci’s silent staring eyes, and above everything, the warm press of all five thin fingers that gripped him.

No woman in all his life had ever…ever touched him like that. In other ways, yes. He tended to be permissive with his women, particularly if they, like the woman in Xheoth, came to his room more than once. Those he took in conquest after trial, like the flat-headed girl in Tothax, were permitted to struggle, but they rarely did and even they did not touch him like that—flesh to flesh, uninvited and unrepentant for it.

Then she let go and moved away, taking the short, limping steps of an old woman. “Oh Scott!” she called in that musical way.

At some short distance, surrounded by his generals, Scott turned around. “Miss Bierce,” he said without welcome.

Amber smiled. “Everly.”

Meoraq stepped between them.

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, thrusting the object he had collected on his solitary walk—a plain stone, charred along one side—out before him.

Scott looked at it. So did Amber, although she had to come around the side of him to see.

“What did he say?” Scott asked in a tight, impatient way.

“He…wants to know what that is.”

Scott looked at her. She rolled her shoulders and shook her head. He frowned.

Meoraq waited.

“It’s a rock,” said Scott.

“And do you know where I got it?” Meoraq inquired.

Amber asked.

Scott’s brows puckered. “How the hell should I…? This better be what he’s really saying, Bierce, because if you’re just trying to make me look stupid—”

“You don’t need my help to look stupid.”

Meoraq gave the rock a terse shake. “Answer!”

Amber rolled her shoulders again, adding, “I hope to God you don’t want us to walk back and look because I’m done in, lizardman.”

“I took it from your fire-pit!” Meoraq bellowed, so suddenly that both of them—and quite a few of those around them—jumped. “We have been walking all day and for what? We are still in easy distance of your first camp’s fires! I could walk further on two broken legs!”

“What’s he saying?” Scott asked.

Amber ignored him, beginning to scowl up at Meoraq in her fearless, senseless way. “Hey, I think we’re doing pretty goddamn good here!”

“We have not gone half a span, human! Not even half of half! Do you know what a day’s shamefully idle distance is for me?”

“Do I care?”

“Five!”

She looked at him, then down at herself, and up at him again. “Look at me!” she said angrily. “Do I look like I can go any further than I did today? Do any of us?”

“I could,” said a human.

“Shut the fuck up, Crandall!”

“Well, I could. Hey, realistically, we did, what? Two miles?”

“It had to be more than that,” said Scott, looking alarmed.

“Uphill, loose terrain, bad weather, and of course, lugging the heavy stuff. It took us forever to get going and every time we took a break, we’d end up sitting around like two hours. I wasn’t going to say anything,” he added, rolling his shoulders. “I mean, I realize you guys aren’t soldiers.”

“But we could have done a lot better,” Eric said quietly.

“Well, you just tell him we need this equipment,” said Scott, turning back to Amber. “And while you’re at it, you might find a nice way of suggesting that he pull the stick out of his scaly ass or someone just might have to kick it for him.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? He understands English just fine!”

Scott frowned at her, then looked at Meoraq.

Meoraq slapped him.

“And we’re not slowing you up for the fun of it,” Amber told him as Scott staggered back. “This stuff is heavy.”

“Then leave it behind! I have never seen you so much as open those crates! How can they be so essential?”

“What is he saying now?” asked Scott, cradling his jaw just as though Meoraq had broken it.

“He wants to know if what we’re dragging around is important,” said Amber.

“What we’re dragging around is none of his business. His only job is to act as our guide.”

“No, human,” said Meoraq, darkly amused by the man’s audacity in spite of himself. “My only true task is to serve Sheul as his Sword and his Striding Foot, and in that pursuit, I am given all liberty. All, S’kot. To defy me is to defy Him, and the cost of that defiance is death.”

Scott continued to glare, although his brows creased above his snapping eyes with a human expression of confusion. “What did he call me?”

“He didn’t call you anything,” Amber replied. “He just said he doesn’t work for you. And…something about God, I’m not sure what. And I think that bit at the end was him telling you to quit arguing with him.”

“I’m not arguing with him! He’s arguing with me! Look, Meoraq,” he said, turning briskly to face him even as he edged out of easy striking reach. “I can appreciate your concern and I share it. If it was within my power to expedite our progress, I would.”

“You could carry something,” Amber remarked in a dry tone.

“Your input is not requested, Miss Bierce,” said Scott without looking at her. “If you can’t act as an interpreter without inserting your uninformed opinions, I will end this discussion right now.”

She opened her mouth.

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning and squeezed it. Miraculously, she silenced herself, even if she had to roll her eyes first. “I am prepared to hear you, human,” he told Scott. “But so far, I have heard only your insolence and a lot of human whining. I will not carry you all the way to Xi’Matezh!”

“It isn’t his decision, Miss Bierce!” Scott said loudly once Amber had repeated this in their own rumbling tongue. “It’s mine! And you can tell him that we aren’t going to be walking forever! Someday, we’re going to have to make a permanent home with a permanent infrastructure! These things are essential to our ultimate goal and, regardless of how he thinks this inconveniences him in the short-term, we’re keeping them!”

Meoraq cocked his head. “He has a tendency to use longer and stranger words when he thinks he’s losing an argument, have you noticed?”

“Oh boy, have I noticed.”

“Don’t talk to him!” Scott snapped, glaring from one to the other of them, his face coloring up high in the cheek. “You’re just the translator!”

Meoraq acknowledged this with a grunt and did his best to address Scot without sarcasm. “If the things you insist on carrying are vital to your settlement, I will allow you to hold them for now, but the weather is turning and I will not be caught by it.”

“How bad is it going to get?” Amber asked, frowning.

“If this day is anything to measure by, the mountains will be hip-high in ice before we come to cross them,” he told her, then gave her a hard rap on the brow with one knuckle. “Speak my words. And tell him that he must prove these things to be truly needful before I allow them to anchor us further.”

“It’s all necessary!” Scott barked before she had hardly begun to obey. “Every single item is absolutely imperative to our survival in the new colony—”

“Oh Christ, not this again,” sighed Amber, rubbing at her eyes.

“—except you!” Scott finished, rounding on her.

“I’m the translator,” she told him. “And the translator would like to know what fantasy you’re living in where half a filter pump and fifteen bags of concrete is useful.”

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning. “My words, human. Give this fool my words now and have your own arguments later.”

“What did he just call me?” Scott demanded. “Did he just call me an idiot?”

“Oh, that you understand, eh? Then understand this.” Meoraq moved Amber aside and pointed at Scott with the whole of his hand in undisguised contempt. “I do not ask your will. I declare mine. Open the crates and I will judge them for myself.”

Scott looked at Amber.

“He wants to see what we’re carrying,” she said.

Scott’s face filled with color. “No!”

Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. He folded his arms, lay his first fingers along the hilts of his sabks, and calmly said, “I would be very clear, human. Do you answer her or are you defying me?”

“It would be pointless!” Scott insisted, backing away. “He couldn’t possibly understand anything we showed him!”

Meoraq drew his samr and looked at Amber. “Did he just call me a fool?”

“Oh come on!” Scott was now retreating rapidly, trying to shield himself among his people except that they kept moving out of his way. “Look at him! How am I supposed to explain a solar generator to a…a…”

“Lizard?” Meoraq hissed, advancing.

Scott bumped his back end into a crate and scuttled around it at once. “It’s highly sophisticated technology and you…that is, your species…You’re not very advanced!”

“So now we are all fools!”

“Meoraq.”

He looked back at Amber, catching at Scott’s clothing to keep him close. His samr remained in his hand, raised and ready to use. He grunted an inquiry, but kept his spines flat, a silent warning that he was not of a mood to entertain foolishness.

“I know this is going to be hard to believe,” she said, “but he’s not insulting you on purpose. We really do have stuff in there that…that you probably won’t understand.”

He eyed her while the human in his grip held very still, and at last, not without some reluctance, the truth she spoke found resonance in him. He was not Sheul, after all. It was not for Uyane Meoraq, born of clay, to know the infinite workings of the world and all things in it. So it may well be that the land which had vomited out such creatures as these humans had also allowed for the making of many equally unknowable things.

Meoraq raised his spines with some effort. He let go of Scott’s shirt-front. He prepared himself to abide by another’s judgment and gestured roughly at the crates around him with his samr. “Do you say these things are necessary then?”

“Yes,” said Scott.

Meoraq turned all the way around and stared at him until Scott backed away, tugging at his clothing and turning various shades of red. Meoraq looked at Amber again. “We have a long way to go and the weather has already begun to turn. We will never make the crossing into Gedai at a quarter-span’s travel each day. You must understand this. If the things you carry are indeed so vital as this cattle’s ass insists, you will have them, but if they are not, you must give them up. I will carry tools, human. I will carry shelters. I will carry any instrument of your profession that will help to settle you at our journey’s end. I will not carry sentiment.”

She sighed and rubbed at her face.

“What’s he saying?” Scott pressed.

She looked at him and then rubbed her face some more. “Scott, we have to leave some of this stuff behind.”

“Out of the question!” Scott turned an extremely unwise sneer on Meoraq. “This discussion is over!”

“Is it now?” he hissed, raising his samr.

“I don’t want to fight,” said Amber. “I’ve been hauling a sixty-pound bag of frigging concrete around just so I wouldn’t start a fight, but for God’s sake, enough is enough. Maybe it used to be the cutting edge of colonizing technology once upon a time, but it’s all junk now, Scott! The only really useful things are the crates themselves and only if we empty them out and use them as shelters!”

“I don’t know whether you’re really this stupid or just short-sighted, but in either case, if you can’t see the big picture, it is not my job to draw you a new one, Miss Bierce. I’m done talking to you,” Scott declared, turning around. “Both of you.”

Meoraq had been right on the verge of sheathing his samr until he heard that. And although he managed not to run the pompous little piss-licker through the middle when he did hear it, he had reached the end of his patience with these negotiations. He stormed over to the nearest of the crates, jammed his samr into the topmost seam, and pried the thing open to look for himself.

He didn’t know what he expected to see. A Sheulek did not involve himself in the menial task of guarding those infrequent caravans that traveled between the cities and he had not the smallest notion of what was involved when households moved themselves. He supposed he had anticipated furniture—Scott’s furniture, no doubt, which he would recognize by its overwrought and garish making—and he had even the sour tickle of a notion that he might find rich food or wine or something of that sort too luxurious to share out with the likes of those who served him. It might have been works of art or chests filled with official robes or coffers of coin or anything at all.

Anything but this.

Meoraq ripped his samr free and leapt clear of the thing in the crate. It did not move. The light of the fading day gleamed dully off its metal hide, showing him a square body, armless, faceless, motionless.

“Meoraq, it’s okay,” Amber said.

He swung on her, pointing back at the crate with an arm that actually shook. “You knew about this?” he demanded. “You?”

She wrinkled her soft brows at him.

“Where did you…” His samr trembled again. He shook his head to clear it and aimed his blade with force at Scott instead. “Where did you get this?”

“Okay, well, he’s obviously decided to freak out,” Scott began, rolling his eyes. “So as soon as you figure out what he’s saying, come and get—”

“Stand and be judged!” Meoraq roared. “I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand and I will cut you down if you do not answer just as if you answered for Gann! Did you build the fucking machine?”

“Meoraq, what’s wrong?”

Her voice, so timid that it might have been Nicci’s instead, somehow fell on him as a hammer, knocking the wind from his lungs and the bones from his body. He dropped his arm limp at his side and stared at her, his thoughts in such storms that even he didn’t know what he was thinking.

Perhaps they had only stolen it. They weren’t using it, after all. It had been crated all this time. He’d never even seen anyone near it, except to sit on it. A man could pass through the old ruins without offending Sheul, open those doors, fill flasks at those pumps. He had himself read by the light of those ancient lamps without a twinge of conscience. The only unforgiveable sin…

“Did you build it?” he asked her. “Say truth.”

“No, but why?”

“Why? How can you…” He backed away from her, shaking his head harder and harder. “How can you ask? How can you pretend not to know?” He fought with words and his temper, then lost both and shouted, “How can you bring that…thing into my camp? How dare you stand against the Word of God in a Sheulek’s camp!”

“This is exactly what I was afraid he’d do,” Scott said from the distance he had taken during this distraction. “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing so he…he thinks it’s a demon or—”

“I think it’s a machine!” hissed Meoraq, never taking his eyes from Amber’s. His chest hurt. He wished he’d killed her the day she’d first dropped gasping at his feet in the thornbreak than come to this moment, this betrayal. How could she dare to look at him like this, as if she did not know what he was saying? “And you must tell me the truth. Is it one of the Ancients’ making or your own?”

“It’s ours,” she said. “But no one here made it, if that’s what you keep asking. It was made clear back on Earth. That’s kind of my whole point,” she added, directing herself to Scott. “It’s broken and no one here knows how to fix it, so why are we still hauling it around?”

He seized on those words. “It cannot be restored?”

“No, and before you say one stupid word, Scott, look at it! What, are you going to chisel a solar panel out of stone? Make wire out of grass? It’s dead. The only reason we’re dragging it around with us is because it came from Earth.”

“From…your homeland? You carry it…as a keepsake?”

“Something like that. But if you honestly expect us to start putting the miles behind us, we are going to have to drop the dead weight.”

“I can think of some weight we can drop,” said Scott.

“Quiet, all of you. I must pray.” Meoraq bent his head and closed his eyes, shutting away the immediate whispers of the humans around him. The Second Law forbade the children of Sheul from seeking to remake the machines or to master them as the Ancients had done. In the Word, it was written that the man or woman who removed those devices from the ruins to be restored or put to use had broken faith with Sheul and could not be redeemed. He could think of no passage that forbade the keeping of a dead machine, but he certainly was not easy with the idea of carrying it about in a closed litter like an unholy relic.

Meoraq opened his eyes and there were Amber’s, impossibly green, unafraid. They showed him no guilt, no stain of sin. They were the very eyes of innocence.

But even a child could touch a naked blade in innocence and go to Gann for it. The machine was here, dead or not, and Scott at least spoke as if restoring it for use were part of his ultimate goal, this thing he called colony. Amber did not seem to think that possible, but still the humans were carrying it, revering it, and if it was not a working machine, what did that make it but an idol to Gann?

“Get your things,” he told her. And turned around. “I share no camp with the trophies of Gann’s age of dominion. We move on, humans.”

“We are not leaving our—” Scott began, and for a wonder, Meoraq did not have to say a word. One of his own men reached out and caught his arm. Meoraq could not hear what was said, but Scott looked hard at his samr when it was done and made his face change colors. He had no more objections.

“How far do you want us to go?” Amber asked. She had gone only as many steps as were necessary to take her Nicci by one hand and the strap of her pack in the other, but both dragged behind her. “Because I know you don’t think we were trying very hard, but…but I just don’t have a whole lot more left in me.”

Some of the other humans agreed, softly at first, but adding more and more voices until it seemed they were all whining at once. They were hungry. They were tired. They had walked all day. Their feet hurt and their backs and their shoulders and every other part of their malformed bodies—a growing litany of complaint that scraped and scraped at him until it finally stabbed itself in.

“Damn it, why can’t just one of you do what you’re told without whining at me?” he exploded, and turned on Amber. “You tell these bawling calves that I am slapping the very next mouth that opens!”

The furry stripes above her eyes rose in arches. “Wouldn’t I have to open my mouth to do that?”

He tipped his head back and took a deep breath, letting it out very slowly.

“What did he say?” Scott asked after a moment.

“And why would he want her to open her mouth?” asked Crandall.

Amber started to turn toward them. Meoraq caught her chin and made her look at him instead. “I am a Sword of Sheul and I honor Him always. Always. To see His laws broken and do nothing is to break them myself. Do you mark me?”

“I think so.”

“If the land of your birth makes such machines, then your land is lost to Gann. But you have left it, and that, at least, may be some sign that you can be redeemed. Perhaps this is why you were set in my path. Tonight, I choose to believe so. But not even for one hour will I tolerate Gann’s corruption among us now that I know of it. Do you mark me?”

She stared at him for a long time while her people whispered at each other behind her. “Are you telling me the Devil built our solar generator?” she asked at last. “Because I’m all for leaving it behind, but that’s just stupid.”

“What I tell you is that I honor Sheul. And if you honor Him also, you will not require me to enforce His laws. You will obey because it is His word and you love Him.”

“Because I what?” Her face puckered as if in pain, although she huffed out a laugh at him. “Meoraq, I don’t even believe in my own God, much less yours.”

“Jesus, Bierce, don’t tell him that,” said Crandall, more amused than alarmed.

“Well, I don’t. So please don’t ask me to haul my tired ass another two miles or even two meters because God hates our broken solar generator, because I won’t do it. I’ll stay here and take my chances with the smiting.”

“I ought to let you,” Meoraq said, releasing her. “That would teach you a very brief, very profound lesson. But I won’t. If you will not go for Sheul’s sake, go at my command and I will honor Him for both of us. Nevertheless, we are leaving.”

“The hell you say.”

“I do say.” And despite the seriousness of the situation and the insult he surely would have taken had it been anyone else who stood against him in this way, he felt the stiff set of his body ease and heard his voice quiet. “And you will not defy me,” he told her, only her, “even though you are sore and weary, because you know I would not give that order without cause. Get your people ready.”

She pressed her hands to her face and shook her head several times, but at last she sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

This was all that Scott could stand. “Goddammit, Bierce, you are not in charge! You don’t have people here and you don’t give orders to any of mine!”

Meoraq caught Amber by the shoulder as she began an answer and moved her firmly aside. He advanced, and kept on advancing as Scott retreated, until he’d backed the human up right against the machine’s shining carcass. He put his hand on the hilt of his samr and leaned over, face to ugly human face. “What are your orders, S’kot? Do you walk with me or go to Gann?”

Scott glared at him, deeply colored in parts of his face and very pale in others. A paradox, like his mouthparts, which were tightly pressed together and yet trembled. “Someone, say something.”

“You’re a dick,” said Amber, somewhat less than obediently.

Meoraq snorted, stirring the hair on the human’s head, and tapped his samr. “If I draw this again tonight, it will be to strike the head from your skinny neck. Mark me, human, or do not mark me. My patience is gone.”

He did not see much of understanding in the sullen face that stared back at him, but when Scott spoke again, it was to command his people to gather their things. The few tents and small packs they carried did not take long to set in order and soon the whole grumbling herd was following in Meoraq’s wake. Whenever they found air enough to whine at one another, Meoraq quickened his pace until at last they were quiet. He meditated as he drove them, thinking this was the first ordeal of his pilgrimage that he truly felt as though he’d conquered, and even if the humans were angry (or even if he cared if the humans were angry), it was still a far easier walk than it had been all the rest of that day. Tomorrow, they might even thank him, but even if they didn’t, they would walk. He was Sheulek; they were his, and it was long past time they knew it.

 

2

 

Once upon a time, Amber Bierce lived in a two-bedroom apartment. She shared a closet with her sister and had a shelf and two drawers for her other clothes. She had four pairs of shoes, two coats, a scarf she never wore, a new pair of gloves every year because she could never find the old ones, and socks. Once upon a time, Amber Bierce had her own bed, a mattress and boxsprings both, sheets and blankets and pillows that had to be just right or she couldn’t get to sleep. Once upon a time, food was nothing but a phone call or at the most, an extra stop on the bus ride home, and she could curl up on the couch and eat as much as she wanted even if she wasn’t hungry, just because it tasted good, and maybe even drink a beer or two before she took her shower…washed her hair…brushed her teeth…went to bed.

Once upon a time.

Now and then, as Amber lay on the rocky ground with the cold rain trickling in under the emergency blanket to warm against her reeking body, that apartment and that life seemed as hazy and unreal as the fairy tale words she used to invoke them. It was occurring to her more and more often these days that life wasn’t going to get any better. Easier, sure. Already, it was easier. They still hadn’t managed to walk far enough in one day to make Meoraq happy, but they were making a hell of a lot better distance without the concrete and crates. They ate almost every day, not a lot, but enough. No one was sick, no one had tripped over a rock and broke his head open, no one had found a thick limb on a short tree and hung himself. Perhaps even more impressively, no one had pissed Meoraq off to the point where he left. Bad enough when he stomped around, hissing and hitting people, and praying as loudly as he could for patience; it was so much worse when he got quiet and just watched them.

Watched her.

She could never tell what he was thinking on those nights, but she was often gripped with the fear that those were the nights he thought the hardest about leaving, and if he did, it would be her fault.

Because they weren’t friends. She wanted to be, tried to be, but she’d never been good at making friends and now that her life actually depended on it, she had no idea how. He was gone in the mornings when she woke up and he didn’t walk with anyone on the daily hike, just kept moving around them, ever vigilant and increasingly pissed off. By the time camp was struck, he was rarely in the mood to be bothered by anyone, let alone her, but sometimes he sat with her when the time came to feed his whining humans and sometimes he stayed to talk while everyone else went to bed. On the nights he didn’t, she sat up alone. She had no friends and when she was stupid and girly enough to feel bad about that, she just told herself that Amber Bierce didn’t care what other people felt about her. Once upon a time, it had been true. Once upon a time and far, far away.

“Are you sorry you found us?” she asked one night, one of the good nights, when she’d been able to pretend that she wasn’t just some pest he had to take care of.

And he said no, said it without even seeming to think about it first. But he also didn’t seem surprised by the question or her (not quite) teasing expectation that he might say yes.

“You think you’ll be sorry when it’s over?”

“That would depend on how it ends, but I doubt it.” The blunt bony spines on the top and back of his head flared forward and relaxed back in that shrugging way he had. “Right now, it’s too easy to imagine that it will never end.”

“Will you miss us when we’re gone?” she asked, grinning and expecting a resounding lizardish version of ‘Hell, no,’ but to her surprise, he took the question seriously.

“There are qualities I’ll miss,” he said after a considering pause, adding with a glance toward Scottt, “If the company were better, I imagine I’d miss it more.”

She waited, but he seemed content to stare into the coals all night, so she said it for him: “Aren’t you going to ask if I’m going to miss you?”

He looked at her for a very long time, then told her to go to sleep.

She did. She dreamed about the ship again, the night it blew up, filling the whole sky with that tower of howling fire. This time, everyone got away okay, and they were all there, thousands of them, even Jonah, but Scott was there too, telling everyone in his soothing, determined way that they could leave as soon as they were all on board and so they were walking, all of them, in a neat, orderly line right back into the fire. Eric and Maria went together, holding hands. Jonah followed, the bloody sweat on the side of his bald head already turning to steam. Then Nicci, shaking off Amber’s clutching hands and crying. Amber tried to chase after her, but the heat pressed her back, and still they all kept walking until there was no one left but her and Scott.

“Your room is ready, Miss Bierce,” he told her, savagely triumphant in the firelight. “All you have to do is say you’re sorry and I’ll let you come too.”

She woke up too damn close to the fire, with Meoraq on the other side of it, just watching her. The dream died at once, tangling itself up as it receded until she was left with only few vague images and an upset stomach. And a staring lizardman.

“I don’t talk in my sleep, do I?” she asked, trying to smile.

He didn’t smile back.

Her stomach flipped slowly over and curled into a hot knot. “What did I say?”

“You said you were sorry.”

She stared at him in horror. He looked back at her without expression.

“Well, I’m not!” she blurted.

“Should you be?”

“No!”

“It was a dream,” Meoraq said, getting up. “Dreams don’t mean anything.” He came over to her side of the fire and pulled her blanket back. His body was cool and rough and heavy on top of her, and it felt good in ways that sort of thing never had back on Earth. He caught her chin in a pinch, made her look at him when he entered her. “Dreams are only dreams,” he told her seriously. “This is real.”

She came hard, kicking and thrashing, and suddenly found herself alone in the mess of her blanket with rain falling into her stupidly gaping face and Meoraq once more on his side of the fire, watching her.

He didn’t speak, didn’t move, certainly didn’t come over and have sex with her.

“I don’t talk in my sleep,” Amber whispered shakily. She didn’t try to smile this time. “Do I?”

His spines twitched forward. “No.”

“You’re talking in my sleep,” Nicci muttered, curling up tighter.

Amber pulled her blanket up and rolled onto her side, away from Meoraq. Her thighs clenched on the useless heat of an empty place that still stubbornly insisted it was having sex. She wanted to cry so bad it hurt as much as her stupid dreaming womanparts, but Amber Bierce was not a crier. Or at least, she never used to be, once upon a time.

Everything was different now. She didn’t know what she was anymore.

She closed her eyes and although she didn’t think she slept, it seemed that she only floated in that black pool of misery a few minutes before she heard the heavy leather flap of Meoraq’s tent slap open. She sat up, raising one hand to shield herself from the grey light of morning. He thumped her on the shoulder with a knuckle as he went by, but didn’t look at her. His spines were already pretty flat. It was going to be one of those days.

She felt awful. She was stiff and crampy and sore all over, and her feet started screaming the second she stood up on them, but the worst was her head, which felt swollen and throbby and almost hung over. Dehydration, she guessed, but what the hell was she supposed to do about that? They filled Meoraq’s huge waterskins every chance they got, but there were fifty people drinking from them and there wasn’t always enough. And her stomach hurt. She couldn’t possibly be getting her stupid period again this soon; she thought this was plain old hunger and there was nothing she could do about that either.

She wanted more than anything to go back to sleep, but she could hear Meoraq stomping around, rattling poles while he took down his tent and making conversation with God on the subject of all the lazy humans he’d been saddled with, so Amber rolled up her blanket and put it in her duffel bag. Even that hurt and it only hurt worse when she picked it all the way up and hung it on her shoulder.

‘I don’t think I can do this again today,’ she thought, just like she had a choice.

Where were they going? Meoraq had a name for it, but he’d never bothered to tell them what the name meant and no one had asked. He could be taking them to the human-zoo or home to meet his parents or to the world’s tallest cliff so he could pitch them off. No one knew. No one cared, as long as they had someplace to go and some way to pass the time until they were all dead.

‘It’s not that bad,’ thought Amber, and it probably wasn’t.

Not yet.

Meoraq was making more noise, deliberately she was sure, and when he ran out of patience for being passive-aggressive, he’d swing into aggressive-aggressive and expect her to translate while he told everyone off. Like people didn’t hate her enough already.

Amber bent down to give Nicci’s shoulder a shake. Nicci moaned and pulled her blanket over her head.

“Come on, don’t do this. We have to get ready to go before the lizard blows a gasket.”

“You smell.”

“Everyone smells,” said Amber, but she backed up and put her arms down at her sides. “We’ve all been wearing the same clothes for, like, six weeks. You’re no bed of roses yourself.”

“I’m rosier than you are,” Nicci muttered under the blanket.

“What do you want me to say?” Amber asked, blushing dully. “I’m fat and I sweat a lot. Feel better? You have to get up now.”

“Why?”

“Meoraq wants to get moving soon.”

Nicci rolled over.

“Come on.” She gave her sister’s shoulder another shake and was again shrugged off. “We’ll get washed up before we have to go, okay?”

“How?’

“What do you mean ‘how’? Down at the stream.”

“You go.”

“Come with me.”

“No. It’s freezing.”

“Please, Nicci.”

“You’re the sweaty one, you go.” But she rolled back over and peeled her blanket down. “I’ll be ready when you get back, okay? I just need a few more minutes.”

“Come on, please? I…I don’t want to go by myself.”

“I didn’t want to come here at all.” Nicci pulled the blanket back up over her head. “But you didn’t care then and I don’t care now. Leave me alone.”

Amber waited, but her sister ignored her…and she did smell. She looked around, but although she could hear Maria talking to Eric inside their tent, none of the other women were up and she sure didn’t want to ask a guy to come with her.

It didn’t matter, she decided as she started for the tangled clot of trees that grew around the stream. She’d be close enough to shout if something did happen and nothing was going to happen. She didn’t want anyone to see her naked anyway. She didn’t even like to see that.

The walk felt a lot longer than it was. Her feet crunched over dead thorns in the grass and stumbled over rocks. The wind blew her hair in her eyes and her hair stank. She felt awful, but she couldn’t decide if it was feeling sick or hurt or just ugly. She took her boots off down by the water and walked out into the cold mud and looked down at her reflection in the slow-moving stream. She couldn’t see herself at first, just Bo Peep after a bad night.

She got undressed and didn’t look at herself again.

The water was very cold, but it wasn’t freezing. She lost the feeling in her feet pretty quick, which was something of a relief, but the cold water and the wind started her shivering, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t bear to wade in any deeper, so she splashed and rubbed as best she could, wishing she had soap, knowing it wasn’t enough. Crouching awkwardly over the stream, she dunked her hair and rinsed until it stopped smelling like smoke and sweat, and smelled like smoke and sweat and wet hair instead. Eventually she gave up and waded out to get dressed. She still stank, but she’d done her best, so okay, what came next?

She dipped her old shirt in the stream and started to wring it out, then gave up and just tossed it on the bank on top of her pants. There was no point in cleaning them…or pretending to clean them, seeing as she had no soap. She wasn’t going to drag her dirty laundry around with her if she didn’t have to. She put on a clean pair of underwear. The elastic was going; she hitched it up over her hips twice, but it kept sagging. Nothing she could do about it. Nothing lasted forever.

“So suck it up,” she told herself. “Amber Bierce, fearless Space Adventurer, can live with loose underwear.”

Which was great, because sooner or later, she was going to have to live without it, too.

Never mind. Don’t think about it. Worry about today. Worry about walking a million miles in the rain gasping like a beached whale. Worry about Meoraq being too disgusted at the end of the day to look at you. Worry about Nicci.

Amber opened her duffel bag and pulled out her last fresh pair of pants. She put them on, at first only seeing how blindingly white they were, and then noticing with a start that they were big on her. Not quite to the falling-off stage, but not just loose either. She was actually going to need a belt soon and where the hell was she going to find one?

Uneasily, she put on her shirt. It was the same size as the one that had been so stiff and tight over her belly the day she’d gone into the Sleeper, she knew it was. And it was still stiff; the excess fabric stuck out on either side of her like wings, flapping loudly in the wind.

“Big deal,” said Amber, pulling at the front to make the reassuring roundness of her stomach stand out. “It’s not like you didn’t have it to lose, little girl. If it comes to that, you could stand to lose some more.”

But not a lot more.

“Everybody’s losing weight,” she reminded herself.

But not like this.

“You’re not starving, for God’s sake!” she snapped. “Nobody is starving!”

And this was true, thanks to Meoraq. So far, he’d put a dead saoq on Scott’s fire practically every single day, not that Amber had ever been invited to share it. Her meals came from Meoraq’s own portion and although she tried to be grateful, it was all the grossest bits: gut-kebobs, or worse, gut-stew, made from liver, heart, lungs, and who knew what else, along with whatever scraps she could peel off a roasted head. She tried not to be presumptive about it and she’d never asked for it right out loud, but when that head went over the coals, Amber Bierce knew she’d be chewing on a tongue in a few hours while Scott and his happy Manifestors got all the good parts. But she wasn’t starving, nobody was starving, and if she was showing it more than the others, it was only because she had more to lose.

Never mind. She didn’t need to worry about how her clothes fit or how much weight she (or Nicci) was going to lose before they figured out how to feed themselves. She had to think about today and how the hell she was going to survive that fucking hike. Meoraq was right; she needed to stop holding on to the stuff that couldn’t save her life.

Amber dragged her duffel bag over to a rock and sat down to rummage through it. The first book she pulled out was the one on gardening. It wasn’t the heaviest, and she knew that if Scott knew she had it—or any of these books, for that matter—he’d turn her wanting to leave it behind as an act of colonial treason. She didn’t really want to leave it either, but she also knew that just being from Earth didn’t make it holy. It wasn’t any good for gardening, not here. All the advice it had for her was about testing the pH balance of the soil or how to use the power tillers and set up the irrigation network. What was the point of knowing the optimum climate and humidity range for growing tomatoes or that planting cucumbers with radishes made them both grow healthier when she was never going to see tomatoes, radishes or cucumbers ever again?

So she tossed it and after that, it was easy to toss the rest of them: Canning Made Easy, Fundamental Agriculture, A Beginner’s Sewing Pattern Book, the Manifestor’s five-year planner and their even less-informative guidebook to planet Plymouth. Once she’d tossed them into the bushes and kicked some leaves over them, she’d halved the weight of her duffel bag, easy. And she could stop there if she wanted. She didn’t have to give up anything else. Maybe they couldn’t save her life, but they weren’t heavy. She could keep them.

“Oh suck it up,” said Amber, but she didn’t sound tough at all. She sounded like a fat chick in flappy clothes, hugging on to a pair of fucking coffee cups.

She brought them out and held them, staring until rainbows and kittens and sunflowers and letters all blurred together. They were just things, like the books. They couldn’t help her. They weren’t sacred. They were just things.

The only things she had left from that whole life. Two lousy coffee cups.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq counted them three times before he convinced himself that, yes, he’d lost a human. The very morning after he’d told them all to be ready to move out at sunrise, one of them had wandered off. Well, the sun was up, and he’d had time enough to wake every still-sleeping human and make them take their camp down and herd them all together and then count them three damned times, and he was of a mind to leave anyway and let that be a lesson to the rest of them. But he counted a fourth time, just to be sure, and on that fourth count, he realized just who was missing.

Meoraq stopped mid-stride and rubbed hard at his brow-ridges, counting his breaths. A slow-count of six and then another, and when he was calm, he opened his eyes and walked back to Scott, standing close to Nicci. “If you sent her out of my camp again, I’ll kill you.”

Scott’s flat face showed him no obvious alarm. “Miss Bierce?” he called. “Can someone find Miss Bierce? I have no idea what this th…what he’s saying.”

“He’s looking for Amber,” said Nicci. “She’ll be back soon.”

“Back? Where did she go?” Meoraq demanded. A thought struck him. “Did she take her spear? O my Father, restrain my hand. If she’s gone hunting—”

“She hasn’t.”

“No one interrupts a Sheulek!” Meoraq snapped, then paused and looked down at Nicci again. “You know where she is?”

Nicci cowered and Scott stepped forward to take her against his side. The man started to speak; Meoraq shoved him away and took Nicci by the chin, leaning in aggressively close.

“Answer me at once,” he ordered. “Where is she?”

“Down by the water, I think,” she whispered, trembling in his grip. “I don’t know. She…She left without me.”

He released her with a grunt of disgust and started away, snapping, “Stay here and be ready to travel on my return,” over his shoulder as he went.

“Hey!”

Meoraq stopped and looked up at the sky. “Why?” he said, conversationally.

“Because I want to talk to you!” Scott answered, coming to face off against him.

“I was not speaking to you.” Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges again, then folded his arms in a warning any dumaq would understand. “But since you’re here, what do you want?”

“I want you to understand that in my camp, it is not acceptable for you to get physical with us.”

Meoraq felt his spines shifting slowly forward and back again. “Go on.”

“I am in charge of these people,” said Scott, oblivious. “I’m responsible for their safety. And while I appreciate your efforts in acting as our guide—”

Meoraq tipped back his head and began another slow-count of six.

“—I am not going to tolerate all this hostility!”

Meoraq opened his eyes and leaned close. “I am going to give you the opportunity to amend those words,” he said mildly. “Because I think even you know that I have not yet been nearly as hostile as I could be.”

“Um…” Scott’s fur-striped forehead wrinkled with something that might have been uncertainty. He glanced behind him at his watching people. “Did, ah, did anyone catch that? Nichole?”

Meoraq gripped his brow-ridges again and this time hissed a little. “Father, I beg You to let me kill just one of them,” he said, then dropped his hand and bellowed, “Stay here!” right in the human’s flat, ugly face.

Scott let out a reedy shriek and threw himself backward, tripping over his own boots and falling on his backside.

“And be quiet!” spat Meoraq and stalked off. This time, he was not followed.

By the water, Nicci had said, and the humans had left a trail broad enough to lead him there even after only a single night. He had almost reached the greenbelt when Amber came out of it, carrying her pack over her shoulder. She’d changed her clothes; her clean ones were so white and loose they made her look like a candle-ward, which almost made him smile even as annoyed as he was. And if she had looked even the least bit repentant, he might have let her apologize and come back with him and have it all over and forgotten. Instead, she saw him and scowled.

So be it.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, advancing on her with two fingers pointed right at her throat. “I told you when I wanted to leave and you run off alone? No, do not dare open that mouth! I gave you an order and unlike the rest of your idiot kind, you understood it! You…” His spines flicked upright. His pointing hand lowered somewhat. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

She swiped her sleeve across them at once and pushed past him on her way up the trail. “Nothing!”

He caught her by the arm and swung her around, peering closely at her face. Her eyes were indeed swollen and red, as if she’d been sitting in smoke.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, concerned.

“I took a bath!” she snapped, yanking against his grip. “Is that all right with you? Jesus!”

“A bath,” he said, keeping an easy hold on her despite her struggles. “This is the second time you have forced me to chase you down and you know how pressing time is! A bath? Where do you think you are, human?”

“I stank.”

“I don’t care! I care that you disobeyed my spoken will and ran off on your own when all the rest of your herd is waiting on my word to move on! You—”

“I’m hungry, Meoraq!” she shouted. “I’m cold! I’m tired and I’m hurt and I’m…scared…” Some of the fire faded from her eyes. She rubbed at them and backed away, keeping her gaze averted and her arm stiff in his grip. “And I stank. And I thought I could do something about the smell. But I still stink. So…So do what you’re going to do and then leave me alone.”

The wind gusted, sweeping dead leaves out of the trees and over their feet. Meoraq watched them blow away in eddies. He did not release her.

“You are not to leave my camp alone,” he said at last. “Take N’ki with you if you must go. And tell me when you do. I want to know where you are.”

She laughed—a shrill, humorless sound. “I don’t even know where I am.”

“Damn it, stop arguing with me! If you don’t give me your obedience right now, you’ll never bathe again!”

She put her free hand up and covered her eyes. Her body was very stiff. Her breaths were short and shallow…and shook.

She was crying.

‘Oh, well done, Uyane,’ he thought, and looked up at the sky. He let go of her. “Go,” he said gruffly. “I am going to fill my flasks and once I have done that, we are moving whether your people are prepared or not.”

She turned her back on him at once and walked away, her head bent and both hands gripping the strap of her shoulder-pack. Meoraq watched her pick her way through the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. He scratched at the side of his snout, sighed, and started walking down to the water. The first thing he saw coming out of the bracken was the damp heap of her old clothing lying on the bank. Strange that she hadn’t bothered to keep them. They were filthy and not new, but they still had some good days of wear left in them to his eye.

‘Perhaps she didn’t think she had time to wash them,’ he thought to himself, hunkering down to prod at them. ‘And seeing as you came down to whip her back to camp like wandering cattle, perhaps she was right to think so.’

If they weren’t lying in the mud like this, he could take them himself, but he didn’t have a spare satchel to put them in and didn’t want to get everything he owned wet and dirty. He felt a little sorry that Amber had managed to get her feelings bruised, but she could have taken her bath last night and washed her clothes then so they’d be dry and she ready to march this morning. She had instead made the choice to wait and he refused to help her feel like more of a victim because of it. She had other clothes, clearly.

He straightened up, turned around, gave the two colorful objects perched atop the stone an idle glance, started walking, and then halted and looked back at them. Amber’s bootprints, the only ones fresh enough to hold a little water at the heels, made a clear trail from the water to the stone and onward to the trail. She had to have been sitting there, right where the objects now sat, which meant she’d put them there. She hadn’t dropped them by the bank, as with her discarded clothing, and she hadn’t thrown them into the bushes. She’d set them down carefully. And she’d left crying.

Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges and scratched the side of his snout. He glanced at the trail, which was still clear for now, and then turned away from it with a sigh and went to see what the hell he’d bullied her into giving up.

He realized what they were after just a few steps. It startled him at first, although he didn’t know why it should, really. They wore boots and slept in tents; why shouldn’t they drink from cups?

“Fuck,” muttered Meoraq, picking one up. Two cups, each with single handles sized for human hands and narrow bowls to accommodate human mouths. They were made of fired clay, or something similar, garishly painted and glazed to a high shine, and as ugly as they were, to judge by their symmetry and the craftsmanship of their nonsensical coloring, they had to be tremendously expensive. He had never seen her drinking from them. She’d been saving them. Perhaps treasuring them. And now she was leaving them.

Meoraq sighed, then unbuckled his travel-harness and slid out from under his pack. “This is not my doing,” he announced. “If she wants to crawl off and run water out of her eyes over a pair of cups, that is entirely her decision. I would have let her bring the damned things.”

I will not carry sentiment.

“She didn’t even ask me.”

Why can’t just one of you do what you’re told without whining at me?

“Fuck,” Meoraq said again, wrapping the cups, one in his spare tunic and the other in his spare breeches, and shoving them down deep in his pack. He felt thoroughly disgusted—with himself, with Amber, with the whole of Gann. Cocking an eye at the rolling face of Sheul’s heavens, he said, “Tell me just one thing, my Father, I beg. Is there ever a right answer?”

Sheul listened, but said nothing.

Meoraq filled his damned flasks and sat down on the stone, kicking dourly at Amber’s bootprints until he’d rubbed out all he could reach. He did not hurry back to start the day’s march. When Amber looked back to see if she was clear of him and free to do the rest of her crying, he wanted her to think she was alone. He wasn’t completely insensitive.

 

3

 

So followed several days of travel and, with compromise on both sides (Meoraq took a savage pleasure in this, that he was able to compromise with these creatures rather than beat them into obedience, and if that wasn’t proof of his humility and therefore his worthiness to enter Xi’Matezh, nothing was), they forged a tolerable routine. Meoraq allowed the humans to wake in their own time and to eat whatever was left of the previous night’s meal. Then they walked, scattered widely after their habit while Meoraq prowled around them, trying to take point, foot and both flanks along their careless line. They made frequent stops for resting, but managed, he thought, at least three spans each day and that was acceptable. Toward evening, they made their camp and Meoraq hunted. Thus far, Sheul had rewarded his efforts at herding human cattle with fair game and sweet water, gifts he acknowledged each night in his meditations and which the humans seemed to think was only their due.

After three days, they finally came out of the muddy lowlands and began the long, slow trek across the stony fields of middle Yroq. Tempting as it might have been to find a road and lead the humans across it as far east as could be managed, Meoraq forged his own path. There weren’t many roads and there were always eyes upon them; worse than the risk of encountering messengers or merchants or even a Sheulek about his circuit, a caravan of near fifty moving bodies would certainly attract whatever raiders were about. Better by far to keep to the wildlands, keep moving, and keep quiet.

But the first day in the plains was even slower than it had been when the humans insisted on carrying their machines with them. The ground was marginally more level, but riddled with broken rock and thorny overgrowth that made passage difficult even for an experienced Sheulek. The humans tripped and staggered like children just learning to walk, tearing their soft flesh and bruising their soft bodies with shocking ease. When he finally called for camp and took inspection of them, he found himself amazed only that no one had managed to break a bone yet. How he was going to get them over the mountains into Gedai loomed in his mind, more and more of an impossibility the longer he pondered it, but he would just have to trust that Sheul would provide the means when the time came. There were problems enough for him to solve right now.

His hunt that night turned up no meat, but plenty of good wild gruu. He gathered up an armload and took it back to soften in the coals, and once he’d taught the humans how to get it out of its leathery peel, they seemed to find the taste agreeable enough to squabble over. They ate like animals, barking and chuffing through mouthfuls of food, reaching across one another, picking at their teeth with the flimsy claw-like protrusions that tipped their fingers. From what he could see, they didn’t even wash their hands—not before falling on their meal and not afterwards. He left them to fight over the peels and made a lengthy patrol, stopping once to fill his flasks and bathe at a small ground-spring, and once again at a stony ridge to watch the sun set through the clouds and pray.

He did not return to camp until well after dark and he returned troubled. He had heard the calls of tachuqis behind the wind and seen the blood-stained and trampled grass that marked the site of one of their recent kills. He could only hope it was recent enough that they would not be actively hunting tonight, because a pack of ungainly, unarmed humans would be a damned easy hunt indeed and Meoraq needed to sleep.

Most of the humans were huddled around the fire he had set for them—at least they hadn’t let it go out this time—and the rest had bedded down already. A few nodded to him, their bobbing heads an unpleasant reminder of the tachuqis who were perhaps nearby, and Scott rather grudgingly raised his hand in some sort of human salute, but that was all. His time with them had taught him well not to expect better tribute than that.

“And why should they pay it?” he muttered, unbinding his tent and assembling the first of his poles. “Who am I but the man who protects and provides for them in their most desperate days? Lazy, useless, machine-worshipping pests.” Meoraq snorted, sending a scathing glance back over his shoulder, only to find Amber almost immediately behind him.

“Hey,” she said and offered him a somewhat mangled-looking hunk of gruu.

He looked at it, then at the starved and half-chilled human who had saved it out for him. The hand of Sheul was heavy upon his shoulder. He grunted and began to put another pole together. “Eat it.”

Her hand slowly lowered, melting out of the air like the grimace melting off her malleable face. She turned around.

Damn it.

“Sit down.” Meoraq kicked the rumpled roll of his tent into a kind of mat and took his own offer, indicating a place beside him and realizing only afterwards that he’d done it with the back of his hand—an intimate gesture—and not the two-finger point that would have been proper for a Sheulek dealing with subordinates, civilians, cattle, and surely humans.

She hesitated, frowning over her shoulder at him.

He said it again, speaking slowly in case it was his language and not his complete lack of tact that held her at bay, gruffly adding, “Eat with me.”

“You don’t have anything.”

He grunted and dug into his pack for his cuuvash, showing it to her before snapping off a square and putting it away again.

She sat down. The tent was still folded and not quite long enough to accommodate them both, especially as he’d dropped himself in the middle of it. Her shoulder bumped his as she settled; he heard the faint slap of her hair on his scales whenever the wind caught it; he felt the warmth emanating from her body all along his side. He thought he should probably move over and give her more room. He didn’t.

“See anything out there tonight?” she asked.

“There is always something to see.” He tore off the first bite of cuuvash and softened it, watching her jaws work as she ate her roasted root. The thought that he had provided the gruu that fed her did not annoy him the way it did to think of feeding the other humans. Instead, it made him wish he’d brought more. He brooded on this, his spines low, while he ate.

“I heard some weird sounds,” said Amber.

He grunted, inviting elaboration.

“A kind of…ooo-wah ooo-wah!”

He was more fascinated by the cupping of her hands around her mouth than the noise she made by doing so. It took a moment or two to regain focus, another moment to make sense of the clumsy human sounds, and yet another few moments to think about what it meant. “When was this?”

She hesitated again, then took an obvious guess at his meaning. “Not right here, but pretty close. I went out to look, but I didn’t see anything.”

“Not where—” he began, and stopped to frown at her. “You went out to look? Alone?”

She only looked at him.

He poked her. “You,” he said and made walking fingers. “Went out.” He moved that hand away from his body. “Alone.” And glared at her. “Against my command.”

Her brows dropped in an infuriating human scowl. “I had my spear!”

“Would you like to be burned with it, you senseless little calf?”

“Would I what?”

“You stay here!” he told her, thumping two fingers down (on his tent, but he would not notice this until later). “You do not leave the sight of this camp for any reason and you do not go even one pace away alone! Swear it to me!”

She frowned, but it was not incomprehension that made her do so, only stubborn human defiance. “Why?”

“Because I said so!” he snapped.

“I can take care of myself.”

His spines slapped flat. He stood. “Get up.”

She took that for an order to leave him and started angrily away, so that he was forced to catch her arm and pull her bodily back to him. He turned her around, held her firmly until she stopped trying to shake him off, then released her and said, “I am a tachuqi. A lone tachuqi. One only man-height, with no beak or talons, ha! I am just such a lamed and feeble enemy and you have come this close to me. Take up your spear.”

She looked around, as if thinking it would present itself, then closed her hands hesitantly around empty air and bent her knees in a clumsy warrior’s stance. She eyed him with suspicion and uncertainty in equal parts and then lunged for him.

He kicked as a tachuqi kicks, leaping up and driving his leg outward, even sweeping his foot downward in the slashing motion that would disembowel if he had the beast’s killing talon. She tried to dodge—she also finished her lunge, stabbing her imaginary spear into his side as her dying act in a move that he knew his training masters would roar with delight to see even as they beat her for her suicidal stupidity—but his boot caught her fully on the chest and knocked her hard to the ground. He bent, his hand hooked to make a tachuqi beak, and gripped her firmly by the throat. “You are dead,” he told her. “Get up.”

She did, but wary now. Her hands flexed upon a new nonexistent spear. She braced herself, mud on her chest in the shape of his boot-print, and lunged again.

He leapt back as a tachuqi leaps, arms spread in imitation of their defensive posture, and kicked her in the back as she went by. She staggered, swinging as she fell so that her spear again found its target, and ended on the ground with his hand on her throat. “You are dead,” he said again, letting go. “Get up.”

She did, breathing hard—too hard, she was too new to this, too underfed, too small and weak, too human—as she pulled a spear from the air and readied it against him.

This time, she charged, dropping to her knees and stabbing upwards in a move that was, however ultimately futile, worthy of an admiring grunt as he, the tachuqi, darted nimbly aside and tore out the back of her neck in a single bite. “You are dead,” he told her, pinning her face briefly against the ground. “Get up.”

She didn’t, not right away, but when she finally got her arms up and her feet under her, she was arming herself invisibly yet again.

“Survival in the wildlands is not a matter of persistence,” he said, ignoring her to sit down again on his mat. “Only knowledge, strength and skill. You have none of these things. Stay within your camp, human. I am with you and Sheul’s eye is upon us both.” He picked up his cuuvash and broke off another bite, pretending not to watch her.

She glared at him, weaving slightly on her feet with her empty hands still locked around an invisible spear. She was tired enough, bruised enough, muddied enough, that he thought she might give in despite the look in her eyes.

But this was Amber.

She dove at him.

He was not a tachuqi any longer. He caught her up upon the heel of his hand, her feet flying out before her with the force of her aborted momentum, and down she went upon her back much more gently than she would have gone were he an honest enemy. He held her there, waiting as she gasped herself calm, aware that every human in the camp was awake and watching them. A little water collected at the corner of one eye, just one, and it did not replenish itself once it fell. She did not cry surrender.

Meoraq moved his hand from her breastbone to her elbow and helped her to sit up. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, but she took a piece of cuuvash when he offered it and put it in her mouth. She chewed, staring fixedly at the ground.

Gradually, the other humans settled themselves, although some continued to watch them. Scott was one of these. Nicci, he noticed, was not.

“Can you teach me that?” Amber asked at last, still avoiding his eye.

Meoraq snorted. “Yes. Come to me as soon as you can present the signet of your father’s House, proving you are a son born to the warrior’s caste and we shall begin the seventeen years of training. Don’t talk at me like an idiot. We don’t have time to waste in foolishness.”

Her mouthparts pressed together into a flat, pale line. Her lower jaw trembled.

He waited until he was certain she had accepted her defeat and then said, firmly, “You will stay in sight of this camp always. You will not go even one step beyond its borders alone. Give me your obedience.”

She looked up and directly at him with eyes that were too bright and too green. “No.”

He stared at her, knowing his spines were fully extended and surprise etched in every scale of him for all the world to see. “What did you just say?”

“I said, no.”

“You did not!” he said inanely.

“Want to hear it again, lizardman? No. And you don’t get to argue with me about it.”

“You forbid me?” That was a killing offense, and yet he was not in the least angry. Stunned, yes, but the first emotion that bled in when shock finally faded was still not anger, only amusement. “If you have something else to say before I bind and muzzle you, I suggest you come to it quickly.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to have to do,” she told him. “Look, you’re already sick to death of us. You aren’t going to stick around one minute longer than you have to. When we get to wherever it is you’re taking us, you’ll leave.”

He opened his mouth to tell her this was not necessarily so, but closed it again with that unspoken because the alternatives so obviously included killing them and he would rather not have that possibility between them just yet. And it would be a lie in any event to say that leaving the humans behind was not a pleasant thought. She surely knew it and he would not insult her by pretending otherwise.

“Life sure as hell isn’t going to get easier,” she was saying. “Right now, the only thing standing between us and a horrible death is you. And you’re leaving. So, no. No, I am not going to stand around all damn day waiting for you to come home in one of your pissy moods because you’re doing it all yourself. If you don’t want me with you, that’s fine, I’ll figure things out by myself, but you don’t get to tell me to stay home and just…just wait to die.”

And she’d done it again. She forbade him to give her orders. Unbelievable.

“I am tending to you, human,” he said, trying very hard to sound reasonable. “It is not an easy task and requires my full attention. Do you think you can just stride out into the wildlands at my side and be anything but a hindrance? Your intentions may be good, but I can’t afford to indulge them and if you truly believe it is not an indulgence, that only proves you don’t understand how desperate your circumstances are.”

“I think you’re the one who isn’t getting it, lizardman.” She paused and raked a hand through the mess of her hair, snagging all four fingers before she had even reached her ear. She swore, disentangling herself, but the distraction quieted her some. “Listen,” she said, frowning. “Just listen, okay?”

Meoraq rubbed his brow-ridges and gestured for her to speak.

But she didn’t, not right away. She searched his face, her human mouth opening and closing, and finally she said, “There were these stray cats that lived under the building where I lived, and the lady three doors down would feed them, you know?”

Meoraq leaned back with a frown. What was she saying now? Was the argument over? Had he won or lost?

“The super kept threatening to evict her for it, so what would happen is, she’d sneak out in the middle of the night every few days and dump this bag of food out on the ground, and if you looked out the window, you could see them all together and purring as they shared it. It must have made her feel real good, like she was saving them.” She paused to frown at him uncertainly. “Are you…Are you getting any of this?”

“I mark enough. Go on.”

“Well, she wasn’t saving them. She was just feeding them. And eventually, she disappeared. I don’t know, maybe she died. My point is, she was gone and do you think the cats started catching all the rats and roaches that were absolutely infesting that building? Do you think they started taking care of themselves just because they had to?”

Meoraq glanced over at the other humans. They looked curiously back at him as they ate the food he had provided and warmed themselves at the fire he had built.

“No, they stood outside where the old lady used to feed them and yowled all day and all night, because that was what they knew how to do. And when they got hungry enough and desperate enough, what they started eating was each other. Every time you looked out there, you could see them, all those cats, with their bones showing and their fur falling out and blood all over them like…like zombie-cats, still yowling and fucking…and eating. Finally the super put out some poison. He was picking up dead cats for weeks and the moral of this story is, feeding someone isn’t saving them. You want to talk to me some more about luxuries now, lizardman?”

The hand of Sheul was heavy on his shoulder.

“I need to pray about this,” he said at last.

Her glare deepened. She folded her arms like a warrior, gripping at her slender biceps where a Sheulek’s honor-knives should be. “I’ll wait.”

He grunted and closed his eyes, finding stillness with just a few breaths. ‘Sheul, O my Father, guide me, I pray,’ he began silently, but then stopped and just sat quiet. He was not ready to know Sheul’s mind just yet. His own knew too much unrest.

There was nothing in Sheul’s Word to specifically forbid a woman from carrying a spear or standing a watch. The goodly virtues of a woman—to be invisible and chaste while in her father’s House, to show her husband meek obedience and loyalty, to be fruitful and to raise her children in the sight of Sheul—did not seem to apply to Amber’s present situation. If it dishonored her father that she was wandering the prairie in the company of so many human males, it was no concern of his. It was disgraceful behavior, perhaps, but not criminal.

You’re already sick to death of us…feeding someone isn’t saving them…

He’d felt something when she said that. He felt it again now, clarified in the quiet. He didn’t like to call it hurt…an itch, perhaps. He had fantasized many times, in much detail, during each day’s walk and each evening’s patrol about the end of this interminable journey. He had imagined walking across the courtyard of Xi’Matezh with the humans at his back and seeing the doors that had stood fast against so many travelers open wide for him. He had imagined kneeling before the holy forge at which Prophet Lashraq and the rest of the Six had met with Sheul Himself and hearing His voice spoken aloud and perhaps, just perhaps, feeling His hand with warmth and living weight upon his shoulder, looking up and seeing the very face of God looking down at him.

Ah yes.

But afterwards? If Sheul gave him no command regarding the humans who presently plagued him, what would he do with them? He could not leave them at Xi’Matezh to desecrate that holy place. Surely God would lead him to some other place. Some secluded valley, perhaps, with a slip of a stream and a few trees. He would help them build a smokehouse and fleshing pit and then he would go and let their fate fall into their own hands.

His mind conjured the fleeting impression of Amber alone with her spear in her hand, receding as with distance. He pushed it away, but now found himself thinking…If Sheul led him to that gentle valley, of course he would leave the humans there as Sheul willed. But if Sheul instead gave him his own will in the matter…what would he do then? With her?

Timeless stretches of unquiet passed and left him with no answers.

‘Well, it is very simple,’ he told himself abruptly. ‘Will you kill them?’

No. Not all of them, anyway. Scott had a way of getting under his scales, but the rest of them were only minor annoyances in a large group and once they were behind him, he thought he would forget easily enough. He didn’t need to kill them to have peace.

‘Then you will abandon them to the wilds and let them find death at the hour Sheul decides. It is not your responsibility to hold watch over all the people of the world. Besides, if they are still unable to provide for themselves after you have carried them all the way to Xi’Matezh, it can only be because they are meant to die.’

Then he would leave them to their fate, but he would take Amber with him.

‘Why?’

Why not? He would not be the only one ever to take mementos home from his pilgrimage.

‘Most people settle for bits of broken temple bricks.’

It would be as long a journey home as it was to reach the shrine and Amber made better company than a broken brick.

‘Only sometimes. She’s far more often a profound annoyance. And she’s ugly.’

He was uncomfortable with that, however true it was. Surely her flat face, furry patches, and clay-soft body would be gruesome aberrations to any dumaq, but she was human. And for a human, she was…agreeable.

‘And what will you do with your agreeable human and her agreeable pet? Because even if you convinced her to leave the rest behind—unlikely—Amber would pull the heart from her breast before she left her Nicci. Will you wander the wildlands for the rest of your days tending the two of them?’

No. With Amber, that was at least only a foolish thought. Add Nicci and it became lunacy. He would have to take up stewardship of House Uyane just to give them a place to safely stay. Even in the depths of his meditations, he could feel himself wanting to laugh at that, but before he could, the image abruptly fell on him of how it would really be to bring Amber into his House. If humans were people, then she was a woman. He would be bringing a woman into his House. His woman. And he, the steward of his bloodline.

‘At least until your brothers challenge you on the grounds that you have bound yourself to a monster.’

He’d best them.

‘You sound very sure.’

He was very sure. Even if he could be persuaded to abandon his woman and bastard children, Nduman fought with favor to his left arm ever since the judgment at Riqar and Salkith was an idiot. A well-trained idiot, but still an idiot and no match for a true Sheulek. He’d best them easily, both together if necessary, and then he’d put Nicci away in his mother’s old rooms and give her a servant or something so he wouldn’t ever have to deal with her. He could spend the rest of his life waiting to defend Xeqor and all the households of Uyane’s protection, a portrait of domesticity to do his father’s memory great honor.

‘And what will you do with Amber?’

This was disturbing for one or two short moments, and the most disturbing thing about it was the apparent ease with which his imagination was able to provide him with suggestions for how the two of them might sexually combine. Too many of his thoughts were turning in that direction lately. He accepted that for the distraction that it was, embraced it, owned it, and finally fought it down to a place where it could be ignored. Sex was not the issue. Amber was, in herself, not the issue. What was to come of the humans once he was away from them was not the issue, although it was bordering. The issue was and remained whether it was permissible or wise to set a human female at watch while he slept.

But he found he trusted Amber.

‘You don’t trust her, you just want to fuck her,’ he told himself cruelly, but the thought, although unsettling, did not sound like truth. Amber was weak and she was ignorant. She would not know every danger if she saw it. But if she did know it, by Sheul, she would defend him.

Meoraq opened his eyes on Amber, watching him with predictable exasperation and impatience. It really was the most amazingly ugly face, if one stopped to think about it. Strange, how often he simply didn’t see it.

‘She would never be boring,’ he thought, and snorted.

“That better not mean what I think it means,” she said, scowling at him with mud on her face and grass in her hair. Pinned to Gann four times, and not defeated yet.

His hand went out without his will to brush at her flat, smooth, pallid and generally disgusting brow—the second time he had done so. They both recoiled a little.

He recovered first, frowning. “So be it,” he said briskly. “We will hold watches between us at night and I will take you to hunt with me whenever possible.”

“Tomorrow?”

He hesitated, then shrugged his spines. “I could spare an hour in the morning if you rise early, although the only thing we’re likely to spear is more gruu.”

“At least it won’t run far,” she said with a crooked smile. “Maybe I can actually catch a limping potato.”

He grunted, then pointed sternly at her face. “But when I am not with you, you will stay within my camp. You go nowhere alone, do you mark me?”

“Okay, okay,” said Amber, rolling her eyes. “In the spirit of compromise, I promise to buddy up when I go to the bathroom.”

“Uyane hears your vow. You have the first watch tonight. Wake me when you begin to tire.”

“Got it.” She pushed herself onto her feet, but stayed bent awhile, brushing at dried mud and grass. This gave Meoraq the unlooked-for and not entirely unwelcome opportunity to watch her odd body in motion, so that when she finally straightened up and asked if he was going to sleep right away, the only honest answer was, “No. I think I have to pray.”

“Oh. Well…good night.” She backed up, then walked away across the camp, raising her hand as she went without bothering to look at him.

Meoraq watched her go until she took up her spear and a sentry’s position at the boundary of the camp, then resumed the assembly of his tent, trying to ignore the undeniable fact that he was profoundly, even painfully aroused. “Father,” he murmured, stabbing poles into the ground with more force than was usual. “See Your son in his ordeal and grant him the strength to endure it, because without Your hand upon me, O great Sheul, I do not know how I am going to survive this.”

Footsteps.

Meoraq glanced around, but it was Scott coming toward him, not Amber. He grunted dismissively and flattened the spines which had been flaring forward in greeting. “What do you want?”

“What were you two talking about?” the human asked, making a very poor effort to sound merely curious.

“If you wished to know, you should have come closer and joined us.”

A lengthy pause led Meoraq to silently congratulate himself on a scathingly civil retort, right up until Scott’s hesitant, “What?”

Meoraq sighed. He gave the tent-fasten under his hand a particularly vicious yank as he tied it to the pole and turned around. “I told her,” he said, speaking slowly, “to stand a watch.”

Scott stared at him and, after Meoraq had ample time to prepare a defense of this admittedly outrageous order, said, “What?”

“Go away!” snapped Meoraq and stomped past him to fetch up his pack and bedroll. “Why do you throw questions around when you cannot catch the answers? Swaggering idiot,” he muttered, ducking into his tent. “Sheul, my Father, grant me Your divine patience, and if You cannot grant me that, grant me the strength to knock his head off with one blow so that I don’t have to listen to him squeal.”

“What did he say?” called Scott, retreating.

Meoraq tied his tent shut and spread out his mat. He had the liberty to undress now, if he wished; if he opened his loin-plate the smallest degree, he would be out of it. He took his boots off, but left his clothes on and lay down. Eventually, Scott went away. The night was quiet. The wind was low. Amber was close and impossibly fierce with her pointed stick in her little hand. Meoraq prayed drowsily, indulged a few lustful thoughts of Gann’s devising, prayed some more, and slept.

 

* * *

 

He woke in his father’s room and did not, for some reason, think this was at all strange. He could smell breakfast in the making—bread baking, nai brewing, and something being fried in salty fat—which made the notion of going back to sleep considerably less attractive than it ordinarily might. His father’s cupboard-bed abutted the interior window, so he could see even without flicking the curtain aside that it was still early, not yet dawn.

He rolled over, rubbing the sleep out of his scales, and nudged the door open with his foot. The daughter of House Saluuk was there, her slender body broken into strange new alignment, but this was not strange to him either. She was pouring him a bath and she did it well, despite holding her silent, bloodied baby in one arm. Meoraq dismissed her with a wave and she went without speaking.

After washing, Meoraq opened his bedroom door and brought the first servant he saw to him. It was Shuiv, Sheulteb to House Arug in Tothax, dressed now in livery rather than a warrior’s harness, immaculate save for the small stain over his heart where his mortal wound yet bled. Meoraq gave the order for his morning meal to be brought and closed the door again, taking his father’s private stair to the roof.

His father was there already, seated on the ground with his back propped on a bench and a book balanced on one bent knee, reading. They raised hands to one another in the distracted, comfortable way they always had, but Meoraq kept walking. There were lamps lit behind the latticed wall that separated his father’s personal garden from that of his mother, and the sound of humming on the other side. Meoraq opened the connecting door without any sense of impropriety and went on in.

His mother was painting. He’d never seen her do that. She gave him an embarrassed sort of smile when he came to get a better look, turning the board so he could see the garden she had painted—a garden at night, mere suggestions of growth and blossom rendered in midnight shades of blue and black and silver, with three columns of brilliant orange fire rising at varying distance behind it. “I call it Blooms,” she said shyly.

Someone was watching him. Meoraq glanced around, not particularly troubled, to find a hooded man standing in the corner of the garden. He was dressed at first glance as an exarch, but his white robes were plainly made and worn about the hems. A priest of some sort, though. A familiar stranger.

“Do I know you?” Meoraq asked after a moment.

“I know you.”

The voice was also familiar, but only a little, as if he’d heard it in a dream.

“Where have we met?”

“We haven’t.”

“You’re in my house,” Meoraq said, but did not, oddly, draw a blade and cut him down for the invasion.

The stranger’s hood bulged as the exarch shrugged his spines beneath it. “You’re in mine. Am I not welcome?”

“I suppose so.” Meoraq returned his gaze to his mother’s painting. She was adding tiny points of white light to the dark sky there. “I think I’m dreaming.”

“Do you?” The stranger’s head tipped, curious. “Why?”

Meoraq looked down at his mother, then at the unnamed exarch. “My mother is dead,” he explained.

“So?”

“So she couldn’t really be here. This—” Meoraq waved at the garden. A few leaves fell. “—isn’t really my father’s House.”

“No,” the stranger agreed. “It is yours. Each man builds his own House and it will always be haunted.”

Most of that was nonsense, of course, but one thing did stab in deep enough to raise Meoraq from his mother’s paint-board. “Uyane is mine?” he asked, looking back at the stranger in surprise. “Am I back? Am I married?”

“Would you like to be?”

Behind him, footsteps, absurdly soft and light against the stone tiles. Meoraq straightened and turned as Amber came into his mother’s garden with Nicci trailing in her shadow. Surprised, he raised a hand in welcome. Amber smiled back at him, that grotesque human smile, and took her wristlet off. She held it out to him, saying, “I am a virgin of my father’s House.”

Nicci offered hers as well, silent, unsmiling.

Meoraq started to reach, then dropped his arm and looked back, scowling, at the exarch. “Must it be both of them?”

“It is her House also,” the exarch replied, a little sadly he thought. “And she brings her own ghosts.”

Meoraq took the wristlets, drew a sabk, pinned them both together to the flowering ribbonleaf tree that overhung his mother’s bench. A little blood welled up from the bark, trickled down the blade, let just one pregnant drop fall from the shivering hook of Amber’s wristlet onto Nicci’s.

“Now you are mine,” Meoraq told her—well, told both of them, but it was Amber he reached for.

She came, putting her hands on him in that fearless way, and there was no pretending he took her in his arms this time to bite her in some insane dream-way. He wanted exactly what he did and he wanted it with all the heat and surety that was in Amber’s bold embrace as well. Then they were naked—with his mother and Nicci and the white-robed exarch right there—and Meoraq leaned her up against the tree beneath the blade of conquest and he supposed he was inside her, although that didn’t seem important. They were face to face, and he could feel well enough her arms around him and her twinned teats pressed flat to his chest, but if there was sex going on below that, it happened without him. It was enough for him to just be with her, to see her, feel her, to need her and be needed by her, and everything that should have been wrong about that feeling—not the least of which was indulging it in this fashion while his mother sat right there on her bench and painted—was instead so overwhelmingly right that it broke the whole of the dream in two and woke him back into the world.

He lay with his heart pounding in his chest, staring without comprehension at the top of his tent until he had calmed down enough to realize two things: First, that the reason he could see the top of his tent was because he had overslept and it was a good hour after dawn, and second, his belly was wet.

Cursing, Meoraq yanked his blanket back, fought his belt open, ripped away his loin-plate, and stared in disbelief at the thin veneer of semen glistening over his scales.

He hadn’t done that in years.

He hadn’t done that in years and he’d just done it with his loin-plate on. Who did that? Who came in his sleep, fully constrained, dreaming of a…of a fucking creature?

What was wrong with him?

Meoraq fumbled angrily with his pack until he found his flask, using what little water it still held to wipe himself off. His slit felt very tender.

Outside, footsteps. The humans were awake, some of them at least, and Amber was surely among them. If he listened (he did not want to listen), he would no doubt be able to hear her particular voice among those rumbles and barks that made up the crude human speech. If he looked out, he would see her.

Meoraq buckled his belt back on, cinching it biting-tight, and dressed in furious silence. He strapped his blades on, all of them, like a Sheulek. He untied the tent’s fastens, threw back the flap, and stepped boldly out among the humans who were his trial upon this pilgrimage, and not a damned thing more.

Amber was there. She saw him. Smiled.

He felt again what he had never felt—the warm crush of her body naked against his—and felt with it some ghost of that lying emotion that was nothing but a part of this ordeal.

“Hey,” said Amber, picking up her spear as she climbed to her feet. She came toward him, smiling. “Are you ready?”

He froze, just for an instant, and suddenly remembered their talk of the previous night. Hunting. She thought he was going to teach her the ways of hunting.

He put his back to her. It helped, but not much. He started walking. “Not today. Stay here.”

“Oh come on. I promise I’ll be quiet.”

“I said, no.” He walked faster. “You were supposed to wake me.”

“I wasn’t tired.” She followed him. “I’m totally ready to do this.”

“You are tired, whether you admit it or not. You are useless to me now. Stay.”

“I’m fine, for Christ’s sake. Come on, I won’t even do anything if you don’t want me to. Please, Meoraq, I just need to see how—”

She caught at his arm and nothing else she said mattered. There was no time, only a dark place between one beat of his heart and the next in which he had time to think, completely, that he could be alone with her. Just the two of them in the wildlands, with a tree, perhaps even a ribbonleaf tree, to lean her up against…

“Get away from me!” he roared, and swung around to shout it right in her face. Her ugly face. “Don’t you ever put your hand on me again!”

She drew back and stopped smiling, both so suddenly that he might have reached out and slapped the look right off her face. Around them, human heads turned and human eyes watched. Meoraq’s heart knotted; he gave it a strike with the haft of his hunting blade and snapped, “I told you to wake me and you ignored me! I told you to stay here and you argue with me! So now I see how you obey my orders! Why would you think I would want you with me after that? I don’t like you! We’re not friends! Stop pawing at me and go sit down!”

Someone—Scott, by the smirking look of him—uttered a fluttery sound through his closed mouth. Amber heard it, too. She shot a fiery glance that way, her face darkening either with embarrassment or anger, and then turned all the way around and started to walk away from him. Not deeper into camp. Into the wildlands.

Without him.

She’d be killed.

Meoraq lunged after her and snatched the spear out of her hands.

“Give it back!”

“Stay here, I said!” he roared at her.

“I don’t need your permission! I can go if I want to! Give it back, that’s mi—”

Meoraq snapped it over his knee and threw the pieces at the ground.

Scott let out a, “Whoa!” of happy surprise and laughed again.

Amber stared at the halves of her hunting toy. Her mouth was a thin line, pressed pale, shaking at its edges.

“I shouldn’t have to spend every hour of every damned day looking after you,” said Meoraq brusquely, pushing past her. He felt heavy, as if the hand of Sheul Himself were pressing down on him, body and soul, but the words kept coming, spitting out of him as bitter as bile. “Stay here and stay out of my way.”

A scraping sound.

Meoraq looked, his hand tightening on the hilt of his kzung, knowing she had picked up half of her spear and was coming to knock it against his head.

Only she wasn’t.

She was taking it into the prairie to hunt.

“Go on, then!” he spat after her. “If there’s anything left of you for me to find, I’ll find it when my hunt is done and not before!”

She kept walking.

“O Sheul, my Father, she is Yours,” Meoraq said loudly. “And if feeding the beasts of the wildlands is as much use as she can be to You, so be it!”

Sheul’s answer was a darkening across his heart, a terrible weight of censure in his very soul. Meoraq found he could not hold his eyes to Amber’s stiff back; they went instead to the dull half of her broken spear, and his blood crawled with shame.

‘She smiled when she saw me coming,’ he thought. ‘She had come to greet me.’

He had once seen his mother come to the outer courtyard to greet his father just that way after the battle at Kuaq. Meoraq remembered well his embarrassment that she had let herself be seen so publicly and with such effluence of emotion. And he remembered how Rasozul had reached out his arm to clasp her shoulder in passing, a gentle touch shared just between them in that one moment they had, and how she had bent her neck to brush at the back of his hand with her cheek, as if the touch were all she craved in the world.

Amber was a dark stripe in the distance—a foolish female with half a spear and no strength in the arm that carried it. None of the other humans moved to follow. Not even her Nicci.

Someone came to stand beside him. Scott, of all people. Scott, wholly ignorant of how deeply Meoraq wished to bury his blade in his smirking face, saying, “You better go after her.”

Meoraq looked at him, his spines flat and his pulse surely flashing yellow in his throat. “I do not like you either,” he said quietly.

The human’s happy grimace quickly wiped itself away as Scott retreated.

Meoraq looked again into the prairie, but Amber could no longer be seen. ‘Idiot,’ he thought, and felt the word echoed back at him.

He should go after her.