The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (6)

All the humans were watching.

Meoraq turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Her temper and the pride that fueled it would cool. She would return and he would take the higher path and allow her to ask his forgiveness for her fit of human petulance.

The wind blew. The morning air was still clear and dry, but not so fresh as it had seemed. The sun had risen higher behind the rolling clouds, yet the world seemed no brighter. Meoraq walked in darkness and he walked alone.

 

4

 

Meoraq’s heart may not have been in the hunt, but his heart was not necessary. His body made an easy kill of two panicked saoqs drinking at a distant ground-spring, which he could have taken at once back to camp for his hungry humans. Instead, he butchered them alone in the plains and he made thorough work of it, not merely fleshing and skinning. There was dried dung enough for a thousand fires, so he built one and sat beside it as he worked. There was bowel to clean, long bones full of precious marrow, and time, plenty of time, to think.

He thought of the spear he had broken. The clumsy, crooked, childish spear which Amber had probably made herself. Over and over, he saw himself breaking it. Over and over, he saw her walking away into the wildlands with the splintered tip he’d left her.

He prayed.

At last, Meoraq buried the meat and moved his fire atop it. He threw the most of the emptied bones into the coals to burn, trusting the foul smoke to ward away any beasts who might otherwise be drawn in by the smell of blood. He bundled his marrow and all the clean fat he’d scraped off to render down if he had the time. Into the last carrying pouch of his possession, he set the edible offal, wrapped in grass to soak in the blood. Then he left it all in Sheul’s hands and walked half a span across the plains to the nearest stand of zuol trees.

Making the spear took all the rest of that day, which was fine, because the saoq had to roast anyway. He hadn’t made one, even for idle amusement, since his boyhood days, but it was one of the lessons Master Takktha had taught and what the body has had beaten into it by Master Takktha, it does not soon forget. This spear might never have had the honor of hanging on the wall in the training yard, but Meoraq was certain it would have earned a turn in Takktha’s hand at least. He’d cut six zuol saplings before he’d found the balance he’d desired in a haft; he did not consider this a waste, since there were ten thousand uses for the fine, straight poles of young zuol and the humans were entirely without them. He then spent easily two hours peeling bark, trimming branches, and smoothing its length with the rough side of a stone—far more work than was strictly necessary, but it did look damned nice when it was done. There was plenty of xuseth around, all gone to seed this late in the year, but he dug up a few roots and split them to rub its oily fibers into the green wood. After some meditation, he took the flared wings of the saoq’s hip-bones (which he had tossed to the coals earlier, but which had fallen aside by Sheul’s grace and gone unburned, though heat-cured and hard as rock) and carved along their outer edges. Then he carefully split the green wood of the spear’s tip—a difficult task made infinitely easier by the xuseth oil—and worked the shards of bone beneath so that they protruded in flaring points along four sides. By this time, the fire had died down to perfect coals and he spent the rest of the day alternately baking the spear over them and applying more xuseth until the spear was as strong as stone. He made a few practice throws just to satisfy his vanity, then swiftly bound his spare poles into a sled and loaded the meat for travel.

It was dark when he finally left, but the shine of the moon behind the clouds was enough to guide him until he could make out the many fires of the humans in his camp.  He was surprised to see meat in several hands as he pulled his sled through their slow-moving bodies, and he saw that they were almost as surprised to see him at all. So. They thought he had abandoned them, and this had been all the motivation they required to see to their own survival. He was now of half a mind to abandon them again tomorrow.

He could not see Amber at a casual glance, so Meoraq turned himself and his sled toward the sound of Scott’s voice, because Scott sounded angry and that usually meant he was talking at Amber. Soon, he saw the man himself at the fore of a loose ring of other humans, all together around a fire where the smell of roasting meat and burning bones was strongest, and yes, Scott stopped his angry words at the first sight of Meoraq and said instead, “He’s back. Get up right now and apologize,” so Amber had to be there somewhere.

Meoraq hissed and humans moved aside for him, revealing her on her knees with the fire turning her hair to red and her back full to him, but she was starting to turn and there was a grudging sort of curl on her mouthparts as she raised her hand to greet—

The poles of the sled fell out of his grip and the world itself seemed to drop away with it.

There was a knife in her hand.

“O my Father, no,” he heard himself say.

She scowled, deciding to be angry. “What the hell is it now?”

He threw the spear down—the spear he’d spent all damned day making—and turned away from her with both hands digging at his scales. He closed his eyes, not daring yet to speak, not daring even to think.

“Meoraq?”

The law was clear.

“What’s wrong with him?” someone asked and Scott said, “If you two are going to fight again, do it somewhere else.”

Was that it? Because he’d shouted at her? ‘Please,’ he prayed. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

His will was nothing. The Word of the Prophet must be upheld.

‘She’s human. She didn’t know.’

But the law was Sheul’s. If the humans were His children, they were subject to His rule and to the judgment of His Swords.

And after all, some evil voice observed, you don’t even like her.

“So this is Your lesson,” he said in the dark. His voice, no louder than a whisper, caught at his ears like hooks.

“Well, Jesus Christ, lizardman, what the hell did I do n—”

He pulled a knife as if it were a bone he pulled from his own body. He used the knife of his fathers. He could do that much. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

“Amber!” Nicci cringed back even as she cried out, but no one else moved. “Someone do something! He’s going to kill her!”

“No, he’s not,” said Amber, frowning uncertainly at the knife he held.

It hurt.

“Do you wish to pray?” he asked hoarsely. “Please. Do not make me send you from this world into darkness.”

There followed a terrible stillness. Amber looked past the gleam of ancient metal to search his face and for a long time, it was only that and the watchful eye of Sheul upon them both.

“Are you really going to kill me?” she asked at last. Her voice trembled, but only once.

“I am a Sword and a true son of Sheul. I am the arbiter of His law, which you have broken. I have no choice in this matter.” And then he said, not thinking, what he had never said with a blade of judgment in his hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Someone stop him!” Nicci begged.

“We can’t interfere with their customs.”

Amber’s baffled stare turned briefly molten. She swung around, snarling, “Fuck you, Scott! Nicci—” Her voice trembled again, then turned harsh. “Don’t look. Someone get her out of here. Dag…or someone…Don’t let her see this.”

Nicci began to wail, but she walked away, she was not carried. Many other humans faded back with her. Scott stayed. Scott meant to watch. His eyes were bright in the firelight.

Amber turned her back on them all. She lifted her chin with a defiance belied by her too-bright eyes. “Do it, if you’re going to do it. I don’t care.”

“Will you not pray?”

“I had nothing to say to God before. I’ve got nothing to say to him now.” Her jaw clenched, biting on the shiver in her words.

“So be it. Human, you have broken the Third Law and taken up a bladed weapon—”

“Wait a minute, what?” Amber looked down at the knife in her hand and then back at Scott.

All the remaining humans were looking at Scott, whose skin had gone a curious greyish color. And as Amber opened her mouth to speak, he lurched forward and shouted, “She’s a fucking liar!”

The temper broke in Meoraq and suddenly his kzung was in his other hand—not his father’s knife, not for this human—and he shouted, “I do His will now, but I will be free to do my own when it is over, so do not provoke me!”

Scott put up his open hands, but his eyes stayed on Amber, hissing, “There’s nothing anyone can do about this and you know it, so don’t you even think about getting anyone else in trouble!”

“You fucking yellow bastard.” Amber put her hands on the knife, folding the blade into its own haft, then threw it to the ground between Scott’s feet. “It was my knife,” she said loudly. And turned to face Meoraq. “But I didn’t know that was your law.”

“It is Sheul’s law and not mine to forgive.” Meoraq took resolute hold of her shoulder and put the blade against her neck. “I will be quick.”

“Wait, just…What is the law exactly?” she asked. “The actual words.”

He frowned.

“Humor me,” she said. “As my final request.”

He could feel the heat of her shoulder through his hand. Living warmth. He could feel the tremble of her mortal fear, but she stood and she faced him.

“No man may raise his judgment higher than the true Word of Sheul,” he said, reminding himself as much as her. “I am Sheulek. I have no mercy to show you.”

But he did not make the killing cut and after another long moment, he eased the edge of his blade away from her thin skin. Red blood, red as dye-berries, welled up where it had rested.

“‘And the third law writ was this,’” he said in something like surrender. “‘Let no man who is not born of the warrior’s caste and raised under its sign take up the bladed weapon, for the age of the Ancients is ended and wrath belongs to Sheul alone. For he who is born under the Blade, all liberty is given, but for all other men of this world, this sin shall be unforgiveable.’” The last word fell like a hammer on his heart, briefly silencing him. “No allowance can be made,” he told her, as soon as he felt he could. “The Prophet writes plainly that whatever man touches the bladed weapon, even if he has taken it up in defense of his life or that of his son or even of his abbot, if he is not born to that caste, he must be judged unforgiveable. He…You must die.”

Amber’s eyes had narrowed. “Are these laws open to any interpretation?”

“None.”

“Not even from you?”

“I would spare you if I could.” He raised the knife. “But I am Sheulek and His law is mine. I will be quick.”

“You said no man can hold a knife,” she said, and reached up to catch the bone-hilt of his. “But I’m a woman.”

The world dropped away for a second time.

“Is there a law against women holding knives?” Amber asked. Her eyes were intent. Elsewhere, at some unknown distance, human voices began to whisper.

Meoraq bent his head. He breathed.

The First Law: Sheul is master over all His children. There is no mortal being or beast born of clay who does not bend before Him and none whose judgment can be raised higher than His sacred Word.

The Second Law: The Age of the Ancients is ended. Let their cities fall to ruins. Let their time pass out of memory. Let no one seek to master or remake the machines with which they poisoned Gann, lest they be corrupted in return.

The Third Law: Let no man take up the bladed weapon…no man…

Meoraq opened his eyes and found them already gazing into Amber’s. He sheathed his father’s knife. Then he bent, as a man in a fever, without conscious thought or plan, and licked the blood from her neck. It tasted coppery and bitter and he drank it in like wine and pressed his brow to her warm shoulder.

“I take it that’s a no,” said Amber. Her air fell out of her in a shaky rush. “You scared the piss out of me, lizardman.”

“Sheul instructs with a burning hand,” he replied, still somewhat light-headed. “I have to pray.” He turned around, but caught her arm as she first moved away, no doubt to find her weeping Nicci.

She waited, tense, while he tried to puzzle out his reason for stopping her. He only knew that he wanted to say something, but whatever it was would have to be witnessed by all these damned staring humans.

Nicci was coming. He could hear her sobbing through the crowd, as hysterical with joy as she’d been with grief. Amber’s gaze wavered; she looked behind her.

Meoraq released his hold and stepped back. “I have meat,” he said, and rather unnecessarily plucked up his travel-pack to thrust into Amber’s arms. “See that your people are fed.”

Then Nicci was there and Meoraq retreated so he wouldn’t have to watch them embrace and feel…whatever the hell he was feeling.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq was sleeping when Amber finally nerved herself up to try and talk to him, or at least, he was lying down with his eyes closed and his arms tucked beneath his head. He was outside though, and fully dressed, boots and all, so Amber waffled for a second or two, and maybe he could feel her stare, because he said, without opening his eyes, “What do you want?”

“Nothing. I brought your, uh, entrails. Thanks for the food. Go back to sleep.” Amber set the leather pack down by his mat, trying to get in and out of his space fast to disturb him as little as possible, but he was faster.

His scaly hand locked around her arm. He sat up, frowning at her, then beyond her, and then let go. He grunted, pointed at the ground and picked up his pack.

“I don’t want to keep you awa—”

“Sit down.”

She sat.

He rummaged through the organs, pulling out this or that disgusting lump of bloody grossness and occasionally grunting to himself. One of them he set on the ground, hesitated, then picked it up and gave it to her.

“What is it?” she asked dubiously, eyeing the pile of blood-streaked yellow mush and hoping it was not edible.

It was marrow, as he eventually managed to explain, and he wanted her to eat it.

“How do I cook it?” she asked.

He looked at her. “I have roasted it already. Eat.”

“I’ll just save it for later,” she hedged, easing it toward the ground behind her.

“Eat it!” he snapped.

She scooped a jiggly blob of it up in two fingers and sucked it squeamishly down. It tasted pretty much just like bland, vaguely blood-flavored jelly, which made it easily the most disgusting thing she’d ever had in her mouth and that included the time Bobby Wykes up the street knocked her down and made her eat a slug.

Meoraq reached over and helped himself to a heaping palmful, licked his fingers, then went back to untangling intestines.

“I saw the spear,” said Amber after a while. “It’s nice.”

He grunted. “It belongs to you.”

“I figured.” And, inanely: “I’m glad you didn’t have to kill me.”

“So am I.” He glanced at her. “Where did you get the knife?”

It wasn’t an unexpected question. “I’m not going to answer that.”

“So be it.” He took more marrow. “He would be well-advised to be rid of it. If I see it in his hand or the fold of his clothes, I will kill him. That is not a threat, mark me. That is the vow of Uyane Meoraq and God hears me. I will kill him and I will not burn his body. It can lie there and rot. And I hope ghets scatter his fucking bones.”

“Hypothetically speaking, if someone did give me the knife, he wouldn’t have done it to get me killed.”

“Only because he didn’t know the law. If he had, he would have urged the knife on you the first day of our meeting because he is an evil little clay-born smear of shit.” He said this without inflection or any sign of interest, yet long patches of scales on either side of Meoraq’s throat were turning yellow. He was doing that a lot lately.

The yellowing intrigued her, especially as it seemed to go hand in hand with high emotion. Maybe she’d been wrong about the ‘he’ thing this whole time. Maybe he really was a girl, and he was PMS-ing. It was something hormonal, plainly.

“Can I ask you a question?”

He grunted, put his empty pack aside and pulled out one of his many knives.

The knife gave her some pause, but now she felt more or less obligated to finish. “You are a man, right?”

He stared at her. Then the double-row of spines on his head kind of flicked forward and he looked at the knife in his hand. “Ah,” he said. And looked at her again. “I am a man. I am also Sheulek, born of the warrior’s caste to serve God as his Sword and his Striding Foot. Blades are not forbidden to me.”

“Oh.” Amber waited, choking down marrow and watching the yellow patches on his throat fade back to black as he sliced the saoq’s intestines into long strips. She didn’t say anything until he was done, but once he had, she said, “So…what did I do to piss you off this morning?”

He frowned, glanced at her, and kept working.

“I thought we had an agreement and yeah, okay, I didn’t wake you up, but is that really a good enough reason to go at me like that?”

He ignored her.

Amber picked at the marrow, then put it aside. “Do I bother you?” she asked bluntly.

He made a few half-hearted passes at the stripped bowel, then leaned the blade of his knife against his boot and rubbed at his brow-ridges. He didn’t answer.

“That’s a yes,” said Amber. She made an effort to sound cheerful, or at least, the sarcasm-laden sort of cheer she usually dished out when she was in a good mood and her feelings weren’t hurt. “It’s okay, Meoraq. Believe it or not, I understand.”

“No,” he said quietly, still rubbing. “You do not.”

“Yeah, I do. I wouldn’t want to be stuck with us either. For what it’s worth, I appreciate everything you’ve done for us. I’ll try to give you your space. I know I’m in the way and I’m not the easiest person to live with even when I haven’t been stranded on an alien planet, that’s for damn s—”

“Enough.” He moved his hand and looked at her with eyes that pierced but were impossible to read. His voice had not risen, but there was something new about it that she did not imagine because she could see people looking their way and wearing pretty much the same expressions they’d worn when they’d thought he was about to cut her head off.

It bothered her even more now that no one was doing anything to interrupt than it had then.

Meoraq tipped his head back and looked at the sky. He stayed that way as Amber picked at her bootlaces and rubbed traces of marrow off on her pants. She’d never been good at social stuff. She got the feeling he wasn’t, either. The silence sat between them like a cancer, squeezing everything else out as it grew.

“I don’t—” he said, and then just sat there, watching the clouds roll by.

There were too many ways that sentence could end to walk away from it.

“You don’t what?”

Silence. And just when she’d decided he wasn’t going to answer, he said, quietly and without a shred of emotion either in his voice or anywhere on his body, “I don’t know what to do with you.”

“I thought…I thought you were taking us to this temple place.”

He grunted. It could have meant anything. Then he finally looked directly at her, if only for a second. It seemed to her that he flinched a little before he went back to staring at the sky. “I know you want to learn things. It may even be that this is God’s will as well. But I don’t…I don’t think I can teach you. You…upset me.”

Her heart sank. She could actually feel it sinking.

“Meoraq, I know I haven’t given you a lot of reasons to believe me, but I swear I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I’ve just been in the city all my life. I can figure this out. Please, just give me a chance.”

“You do not mark me,” he said, but he didn’t say how and after another long stretch of cloud-watching, he abruptly changed the subject. “Did you kill the saoq I saw you roasting?”

She huffed out a little laughter. “Yeah. With my broken spear. Like the stubborn bitch that I am. And then I had to drag it all the way home. I was trying to be careful, but it still looked like I’d rolled it off a cliff by the time I got it back. Plus, it tasted like shit because all the blood was clotted inside. Some of the guys told me I should have drained it, but how the hell was I supposed to do that?”

He frowned, but didn’t answer.

“Then you show up with two of them, already skinned and roasted, on a friggin’ sled…” She tried to smile, but the bitterness in her tone made the effort somewhat wasted and Meoraq was just looking at her, so she let it drop. “And I felt like a fool.”

He stared into the sky.

“For about three seconds. And then I felt like a walking dead woman. You are one scary son of a bitch when you want to be.”

“I know.”

He wasn’t in the mood to talk, clearly, and she was all out of things to say, except for the stuff she’d had seething through her head all day—you made me run out of here like a fucking little girl you yelled at me for no good goddamn reason you broke my spear you made me cry no one’s begging you to stick around and I don’t like you either so there—and the stuff she’d never say even if he stuck another knife to her throat—I thought we were friends—so she guessed they were done. Amber managed another wan smile for the road and started to get up again.

“Take the marrow.”

She hunted around for a tactful way to say what came next, then just said it: “It’s gross, Meoraq.”

“I don’t care what you think of it, human. Eat it.” He rubbed at his brow-ridges, scowling, then crossly added, “Share it out with your N’ki if you must, but eat it.”

“Well okay, but she’s going to think it’s gross too.” She bent over to get it.

He reached up and brushed the back of his knuckles across her forehead.

It was the third time he’d done something like that and she never seemed to see it coming. She looked up, startled.

He looked back at her, frowning, silent.

She straightened up haltingly, fussing with the marrow until she had it folded again in the wide square of leather he’d used for its wrapping. ‘That was a weird touch,’ she thought, tossing the words out defiantly into the recesses of her brain just like it was all there was.

And the thought came back, like some distorted echo: ‘He’s going to ask me to sleep with him.’

Her stomach flipped over, but not in a scared and pukey way. She wrapped up the marrow some more, thinking (no he’s not don’t be stupid that’s just his half-assed way of saying he’s sorry for picking a fight this morning or even heck trying to kill you tonight except that was more of his god stuff and he probably doesn’t feel sorry about it but whatever he doesn’t want to sleep with you he’s a lizard) nothing in particular.

“I’ll do what I can with you,” he said finally. “For as long as I can stand it.”

“You won’t be sorry.”

He grunted in a way that suggested he already was, and rubbed at his knobby forehead again. “Go. Now. I…I need to pray.”

She backed away, clutching the leather with its jiggly blobs of marrow to her churning stomach and watching as he bent over and put his hands flat against the ground. His eyes closed. His breathing evened out.

He did not ask her to sleep with him.

‘Jesus Christ, you really are a fool,’ she thought disgustedly and picked her way back to Nicci, peppering herself with silent and scathing recriminations until she excused herself on the pretext of visiting the bushes, where she threw up and had a record-breaking second crying jag in one day and then went back and fell miserably asleep.

 

5

 

Things changed after that, but Amber found it difficult to say whether they were good changes or not. They should have been good. Sitting up for a few extra hours at night didn’t win her any prizes with Scott and his loyal Manifestors (although sometimes the Fleetmen might come over to sit with her for a while if they were awake. Crandall, mostly, whose profanity-thick banter was surprisingly welcome provided he kept his hands to himself, or Mr. Yao, who rarely said or did anything at all, but was still oddly good company), but she seemed to have come back from her near-execution with a smidgeon more of Meoraq’s respect.

He still hadn’t taken her hunting with him, but every morning, as soon as dawn and his footsteps woke her, he took her out into the world beyond their camp and tried to do something with her. Finding water always came first, because “water is life in the wildlands.” He could spend hours hunkered down over a mudbank, trying to make her see animal tracks in what her city-bred eyes stubbornly kept telling her was just a tore-up mess. If it was dry, which wasn’t often, he might attempt to teach her to crawl, which she would never have thought was a skill anyone over the age of two would need to have. Belly-down in the grass, she kicked and elbowed her way through thornbreaks and over rocks, while Meoraq snaked silently over the ground beside her to prove it could be done, hissing at her when she got too noisy or smacking her butt whenever it popped up too high. If it rained, crawling lessons were cancelled and he instead stood over her and made her throw the spear and fetch it back several billion times, so that she inevitably started the day’s hike exhausted. He never gave her so much as a “Nice try,” not even on those rare occasions when she thought she’d actually done pretty good, and on the really bad days, he wouldn’t even look at her when he grunted out his commands. Those were the days she was likeliest to find herself trudging back to camp just a few minutes after leaving it, with nothing to do except wonder what she’d done wrong until Meoraq came back and ordered everyone to start walking.

And then he ignored her. Throughout the day, he circled them, freely doling out cuffs and hisses if he thought people were talking too loud or straying too far from the group, but he never so much as glanced her way when he chanced to stalk by and wouldn’t offer even a grunt in return if she spoke. The only time he ever interacted with her was to use her to yell at Scott and those moments were mercifully few. He kept his distance, and the miserable planet they’d crashed on made sure there was plenty of cold whistling wind to fill it.

Once he gave up for the day and let them set up camp, she seemed to be worth noticing again, but only to work. The very first night after he’d put a knife to her throat, before she’d even had the chance to dig the rocks out of her boots, he was standing over her with his empty and almost-empty flasks. “Fill these,” he’d said, dumping them unceremoniously in her lap. “And start a fire.”

And off he’d gone to hunt.

She’d filled them, although it meant another meandering hike back and forth between promising greenbelts before she found an actual creek, but there weren’t more than a handful of trees around her, and all the dead branches she’d been able to drag back to camp burned up in less than an hour. There she’d sat, beside a clumsy ring of stones and a heap of cold ash, until Meoraq returned with an enormous, crab-mouthed eel-thing and nothing to cook it over. He let her get just three words into her excuse—“There’s no wood”—and then threw down his eel, grabbed her by the scruff of her shirt and dragged her out into the plains with him.

According to Meoraq, wood was an extravagance. The real fuel of the wildlands was dried poop.

Saoq poop was common and burned well when bundled with dried grass, but corroki poop was the best, he told her, if the beasts themselves were not around. If they were, she was not to approach. They had poor sight and hearing and were very aggressive when they believed themselves surprised. When he described them further, she quickly realized that corrokis were the giant armadillos she’d stumbled across the day Scott made her take her walk.

“I don’t see any corrokis around here,” she said, scanning the plains. “So why are you telling me all this?”

He sighed, gripping at his brow-ridges. Then he caught her head in both hands and aimed her eyes like a cannon. She stared, feeling hot and sick and frustrated, but saw nothing except grass, pale on the slopes and dark in the valleys. At last, hissing into the back of her hair, he let go and pointed.

But at what? Amber searched all the way to the horizon and back, wind stinging at her eyes (yeah right, the wind), but it was just…grass.

“Sheul, my Father, give me patience,” he muttered, and gripped hard at the back of Amber’s neck. “Tell me what you see, human.”

“Grass.”

“What color is the grass?”

“I don’t…brown. Just brown!”

“All over?”

“Light brown, dark brown! It’s all brown!”

“What makes it dark?” he asked, sounding very testy.

“How the hell should I know? It’s a shadow!”

“A shadow?” He spun her around to stare at her directly. “Cast by what?”

She looked up at the cloud-shrouded sun and felt herself blushing. Of course it wasn’t a shadow. “It’s mud, then,” she mumbled.

“It is mud,” he agreed. “Made by?”

“Water?”

“Water would grow a greenbelt,” he told her, and she blushed hotter because she knew that, damn it. He’d lectured her most of the morning about what water looked like. “What else makes a path of mud so wide and so long as to be seen at this distance?”

She looked back at it helplessly, but there were no magic clues hovering in the air above it.

“A herd,” said Meoraq, biting off each word very clearly, “of corrokis. They have passed through. They have moved on. Go down and fetch dung.”

She went. Fetched. It took six trips there and back, lugging armloads of dry, crumbling, shit-patties as high as her chin before he told her to stop and start the fire.

Back she went to Scott’s side of the camp for the second time that evening to beg for his lighter. This time, grinning, he refused.

“Don’t fuck with me tonight,” she snapped. “You know you’re going to want to eat, so just give me the stupid lighter and let me get started.”

“I really don’t think I want to eat anything you’ve touched tonight, Miss Bierce. Ask me sometime when you haven’t been wallowing in manure for several hours first.”

And back she had to go, empty-handed, to tell Meoraq she couldn’t get a lighter.

He was not sympathetic.

“If I wanted you to use tools, human, I would have given you mine.”

“Meoraq, for crying out loud, I can’t start a fire without a lighter!”

His head cocked, not in the way that meant he was teasing, but on the side and a little forward—the annoyed way. “Fire is one of those things which mean life and death in the wildlands and by God and Gann, you are going to learn to make one. You won’t always have strikers, will you? No. So stop whining at me and pay attention.”

He wanted her to start with sticks, which meant walking all the way to the nearest tree to break a branch down so that she could hunch over on her aching knees trying to spin one stick between her hands fast enough into the notch of another stick to make a fire. She couldn’t do it, and meanwhile the eel-thing was lying there, only getting deader, and the sun had finally stopped screwing around and was going down. She got a blister and a little smoke and a tiny red glint that went out as soon as she took the spinner away and that was it.

She stared into the fireless pit, breathing too hard and too fast, until she threw the sticks away in a swearing, furious fit. Scott and everyone else watching erupted in applause and laughter. Meoraq didn’t look at them. He simply sat there and waited until the threat of tears had passed and she was back to feeling useless and exhausted. Then he stood up, recovered the sticks, knelt down, and built a fire almost as fast as she could have said, “He built a fire,” and he did not say one word to her.

Amber left him cutting up the eel and staggered over to where she’d left her pack. She wrapped herself in her blanket, trapping the distinctly unlovely smells of sweat and animal shit in with her, hid her face in her aching arms, and cried herself to sleep as discreetly as possible. He’d left the eel’s head, roasted and grinning, by the fire when he woke her for her watch; she ate what she could off it and threw the rest in the fire. She wanted to throw up just to feel better, but she was still so hungry and there were no guarantees she’d eat again tomorrow. So she sat, fighting her stomach until the urge to purge had passed, and held her watch.

That was the first night. The next day, it began all over. And the day after that. And the day after that. Lying under her blanket at night, she often found herself revisiting that moment right after he took the knife from her neck: the feel of his arm like iron as he gripped her waist and pulled her roughly to him, his weirdly hard tongue licking at her, and the weight of his head when it had rested, just for a moment, on her shoulder. How could that moment, with all of its implied emotion, possibly lead to this string of hellish days in which he punished her over and over and over?

On the fifth night, she actually got the fire lit before Meoraq came back from his hunting trip and had to do it himself. He did not remark, just cut his dead thing up and started roasting the strips, but the next day, he stood over her at each of their rest stops long enough to watch her spin out a fire. When evening rolled around and he called an end to the day, he dumped two new objects in her lap along with the flasks. His strikers.

“Set them on my pack when you’ve finished with them,” he said, turning away.

“Wait!” She struggled to her feet, clutching the strikers in her fist. “I want to come with you!”

He kept walking and didn’t look at her. “When I judge you ready.”

“I’m ready!”

“But you are not the judge.”

“Oh, come on!” She lunged out and caught his arm.

He stopped cold, but didn’t look at her, not even at her hand. She let go, stepping in front of him instead. He tipped his head back to look stone-faced at the sky. People were watching, snickering.

“Damn it, Meoraq, there’s supposed to be some give and take here!” she exploded. “Would it kill you to throw me a bone?”

Bad choice of words. Someone, Crandall by the sound of it, let out a whoop of delighted laughter and quite a few others joined in. Blushing, flustered, she retreated a step and Meoraq immediately started walking.

The last thread of her pride trembled…but didn’t snap. She didn’t run after him, didn’t beg, didn’t stand there and bawl. She was tougher than that, and regardless of what that scaly son of a bitch might think, she was plenty tough enough.

He didn’t look back. Didn’t slow down. Didn’t care.

She would have given anything to have had a room she could have stormed off into or even just a door she could slam. Instead, she filled the flasks. Rolled saoq poop and grass into bundles for burning. Started a fire. And put herself defiantly to bed before he could come home and ignore her after she’d spent the whole day being his bitch.

Meoraq’s boots tromping up beside her woke her that night well after dark. She ignored them, pretending to be asleep while he paced around her in a full circle and finally came to a stop in front of her head.

Sadistic goddamn alien lizard. He could stand there all night for all she cared.

He sat down.

She could actually feel his stare, like two fingers pressing down on her head. Her body began to ache in the joints from holding so still, especially her clenched jaw. Real sleeping people were never this quiet or this still, she thought. She could hear them all around her: snoring, muttering, rolling over.

All but Meoraq, motionless, silent. Waiting.

“Go away,” she said, keeping her eyes stubbornly shut tight.

“I am the sword and the striding foot of God and I don’t take orders from the refugees I allow to stay in my camp,” he replied. “Come stand your watch.”

“No.”

After a very long pause, he said, quite calmly, “You did not just defy me.”

“The hell I didn’t.” She rolled over, turning her back on him to prove it. “You want me to say I quit? Fine. I quit. I don’t need to bust my ass for you all day so you can treat me like shit. I get enough of that from Scott.”

She heard the low rasp of scales on scales as he rubbed either his knobby brows or his snout. “Please yourself,” he said after another long pause. He got up and started to walk away.

Started to.

Then he stopped.

She’d been able to feel his stare. Now she could hear him think.

He came back. Then he said something so baffling she simply could not believe she’d heard it right.

She fought the urge as long as her confusion let her, and then she had to sit up and stare at him. “Did…Did you just ask…if I was ever a baby?”

“You mark. Now answer.”

“Y-Yes…?”

He crouched down until their eyes were more or less on level. “Did you leap whole from your mother’s belly and stride out into the world?”

She waited, but he seemed to be serious. Pissed off, but serious. “No.”

“No,” he agreed. “You learned to stand before you walked. You learned to crawl before you stood. You learned to roll onto your belly before you crawled. You learned which way was up before you rolled. So. You want to learn how to survive here, you say, but to teach you those things, I have to begin at the beginning. I am teaching you exactly how I was taught, with far, far less slapping than either I received or you deserve.”

“It doesn’t feel like you’re teaching me anything. It just feels like you’re mad at me.” She rolled her eyes, hating herself for the stupid goddamn girly thing she was about to say, and said it anyway. “We never just talk anymore.”

He didn’t say anything at first, only frowned. Then he stood up, very suddenly, as if throwing his height like a wedge between them. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. Don’t get up!” he snapped, and she settled back into her blanket and stared at the ground. “I’m not angry with you, damn it! I just…can’t have you around me all the time!”

A little ways off, Nicci rolled noisily over and mumbled, “Come on, it’s the middle of the night!” and a few other voices sleepily agreed.

Meoraq hissed at them and rubbed his snout. “Stand your watch,” he said finally, walking away.

He was gone. Amber got up, carrying her blanket with her, and trudged over to sit by what was left of the fire. There was a scrap of leather there, folded around an unappetizing lump of marrow and a few charred roots. She wrapped them up again and set them aside. Later, if her stomach settled, she’d have to try and eat them. She was going to need her strength for tomorrow. When she had to do it all again.

 

6

 

It was on a chill, gray morning, early enough that everyone was still in a line (a thick line, since people tended to group up on these walks), when it occurred to Amber to wonder if Scott just might be crazy. Not in the hearing-voices sense, or the kill-people-and-keep-body-parts-in-a-jelly-jar sense, but in some real and tangibly crazy way beyond the mere what-is-wrong-with-this-guy sense.

She didn’t think she was wondering just because she was feeling bitchy, although she supposed she might be. She knew she didn’t like him. It had been another cold, wet, miserable night and she wasn’t in the best mood. And she also knew he really wasn’t doing anything different today as opposed to every other day, so objectively, she had no reason to suddenly call his sanity into question.

But once that question popped out there, it couldn’t be ignored. You couldn’t put toothpaste back in the tube; once you’d seen Waldo, you might as well throw the book away. So if it couldn’t be unseen, it had to be answered: Was she or was she not looking at a crazy man?

It started benignly enough, with everyone hiking up a rocky, thorn-covered hill in what was almost rain, and when Scott, who was in the lead just behind Meoraq, reached the top, he turned around and started his speech. She was used to that. He liked to begin every day with a speech, and since Meoraq wouldn’t wait for him to make them at camp, he had to find the time and the breath to make them on the trail, and it was a rare day that he didn’t make at least three of them in his constant effort to keep morale up. The fact that it actually did keep morale up instead of piss people off continued to surprise and annoy her, but it took his, “This is just like the westward expansion of the 1850s,” to finally put the word ‘crazy’ in Amber’s head, because for the first time it occurred to her that he might not just be talking them up. He might really believe it.

She understood that not everybody had a Bo Peep in their lives conditioning them since birth to suck it up or blow it out, and that was fine. She understood that not everyone could look at being marooned for life on an alien planet unless they had some kind of happy lie they could tell themselves (for example: I’ll be fine once the lizard shows me what to do), and that was also fine. In the beginning, Scott’s fixation with having authority and proving it with speeches had certainly seemed harmless enough. It made it easy for everyone else to avoid responsibility and he was actually pretty good at keeping the larger crowd calm in the face of overwhelming horror. But like a cheap pair of boots—such as the boots she wore now as she slogged through the mud that was made when fifty people walked ahead of her in the early morning drizzle—even the smallest defects got bigger with wear. In fact, if Scott’s ability to bullshit his fellow Manifestors could be likened to the sole of her boot, the talent, like the tread, could stay more or less intact even as the glue behind it failed. Now, although it left a fairly solid-looking print behind in the mud and no one looking at that print would ever suspect the boot that made it of damage, it sure didn’t keep the mud out, and every step that Amber took came with the slap-slap sound of a loose sole tearing itself further and further open.

What all this meant to Amber was that, even though Scott still sounded sane enough as he went enthusiastically on comparing the survivors of the Pioneer to the true pioneers, who had also gone on foot over the endless American wilderness with their savage (and not entirely trustworthy) native guides, and seemed to have no trouble convincing his fellow colonists that their trail, like that of the Oregon-bound pioneers of old, would end in the eventual comforts of home, all Amber could hear was that slap-slapping sound. Scott may not be foaming at the mouth and wearing panties on his head, but ultimately she decided that, yes, if he believed what was coming out of his mouth, he was a little bit crazy. Also, her boots were falling apart.

“Let me ask you something,” she said, turning to Nicci. “Hypothetically. When somebody consistently refuses to accept reality, when does that stop being optimistic and start being dangerous?”

She thought that was vague enough, but Nicci gave her a look of immediate and undisguised horror, and the two ladies who’d been chatting with Nicci closed ranks and sped up like the conversation was catching.

“Nothing’s wrong with him!” Nicci hissed. “Nothing!”

“He’s still calling this a colony. We’re his pioneers!”

“So? What’s wrong with that? What do you want him to call us, his victims? Why do you have to think that if no one is freaking out and terrified all the time, we’re not taking it seriously enough? God, this is so like you!”

That gave her a twinge. “Okay, okay. Whatever. Calm down.”

“Stop telling me what to do! I don’t have to listen to you anymore!”

“I said, okay,” said Amber, more harshly than she meant to. People were watching and now they were whispering too. “Forget I said anything. Jesus, Nicci.”

“He’s right about everything he says about you,” Nicci said. She sniffed and gave her head a little snap, tossing her hair just like their mom used to do when she’d drunk enough to get pouty, not quite enough to get mean. “You’re trying to turn me against him.”

That managed to be ludicrous and infuriating both at the same time.

“You know what?” said Amber. “Right at this moment, I don’t give a rat’s ass what either one of you think about me.”

Nicci tossed her hair again, this time with their mother’s mean little snigger. “He says you only say stuff like that because you already know nobody likes you. He says you have a psychological need to push people around because you don’t have any self-esteem because you’re fat.”

“I bet he’d say lots of things to get in your pants,” said Amber, but before she could add something even nastier (not a bitch i’m not and i’m not even that fucking fat anymore so there), another dried creeper hiding in the trampled mud caught in the toe of Amber’s slap-slapping boot for the umpteenth time. She gave it the same little shake she always gave it to free herself, but when she tried to keep walking, she found that it hadn’t let go. There was a swift ripping sound, a flare of pain across her toes and down the bottom of her foot, and then the monotony of another day-long hike in the rain abruptly interrupted itself by pitching her onto the ground in this world’s first belly-flop. Without a pool, no less.

She landed boobs-first, which as painful as that was, probably was the best way to land, and her duffel bag came up behind her and whacked her solidly in the back of her head, slamming her face-down into the muddy footprints of everyone who’d walked up this hill ahead of her.

“Ha,” sniffed Nicci, and kept right on walking.

There was a wet sucking sound when Amber pulled her head up—shhhhlup—followed by a brief flurry of giggles, the startled playground kind that weren’t really mean as much as just surprised, and then Mr. Yao asked if she was okay. Just Mr. Yao. Nicci was already gone.

“Yeah.” Dragging her sleeve across her face, she tried to get up, but her stupid foot was still caught. She rolled over instead.

Her first shocked thought when she saw her boot hanging backwards on the end of her leg was that she’d broken her ankle so spectacularly she hadn’t even felt it. Then she saw her naked pink foot lying in the mud beneath her boot and realized she’d just torn the sole off. Not entirely. A few centimeters of rubber still connected the sagging tongue of the bottom of her boot to the rest of it, but it didn’t put up much of a fight when she grabbed it and ripped it away.

“Motherfuck!” she snarled, and threw it into the grass.

No one giggled that time.

A second later, as she was struggling to untie her stupid laces so she could throw the rest of the fucking thing after the sole, the dark weight of a lizardman’s bad mood dropped over her. Meoraq hunkered, moved her hands curtly out of his way, and looked at her foot sticking out of her boot. His spines, already pretty damn low, went flat.

‘Oh sure, like I did it on purpose,’ Amber thought, but didn’t say. She wiped some more mud off her face and tried to ignore him.

He picked up her other foot and inspected the sole on that boot too, grunting to himself as he touched each of the cracks and holes he found. He put it down again. He clasped his hands. He looked at her.

“What?” she said, and hated herself because it was such a sulky sound.

“This was inevitable,” he replied. “What have you done to prepare for it?”

Meoraq did not ask rhetorical questions and he didn’t like it when she treated them that way. Amber tried to wait him out, but after just a few seconds of watching that piss him off, she gave up and looked away. “Nothing,” she said. She tried to say it, anyway. It was more of a whisper. If she’d said it any louder, her stupid voice probably would have cracked. “I didn’t know what to do.”

He caught her hard by the chin and yanked her head back to face him. He leaned in close, red eyes burning. “I did. Why didn’t you ask me?”

And without any warning at all, all the poison of this miserable day bloomed hot in her chest. Her stomach flipped over. She had a split-second when she thought she was going to throw up right on his boots, but what came out was even worse: “Because you hate me!” she shouted, and everybody shuffled back, except Meoraq of course. His eyes narrowed, but that was all. “Why the hell would I ask you for help when you’ve made it so fucking clear that all I do is whine at you? Leave me alone!”

He stared at her without blinking, without moving. Even his spines, the usual barometer of his lizardly emotions, were perfectly still. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet, very calm: “Please yourself.”

Then he stood up.

“We are not stopping!” he snapped at the people who were sitting on their packs and waiting for them. “Move on, all of you!”

Amber finished taking her bottomless boot off and held it limply in her hands, watching them walk away. “What—” Damn it. Her voice did crack. She took a few breaths to toughen up and tried again. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Walk in one boot!” Meoraq snapped over his shoulder. “As that was your plan before this hour, I see no reason you should change it, but when you come to my camp tonight, insufferable human, perhaps you will be ready to ask my advice!”

That was all he said to her, although she could see him continuing the conversation with his god until he reached the top of the hill and passed from sight. No one else waited for her; she didn’t really expect them to. Nicci did linger, and Amber almost called out to her, but then one of the other girls plucked at her arm and Nicci gave her hair that drunken Bo Peep toss and walked away. Just as well. Amber didn’t feel like keeping anyone’s company right now. She was fat and had low self-esteem.

Amber tossed her broken boot to the side of the muddy trail and started walking, but came back after just a few steps to collect it again. She really didn’t want to have to make a whole other boot if all it needed was a new sole. And a few more awkward, lurching steps after that, she took her other boot off too. She tied the laces together, slung them over her shoulder, put her head down, and just walked.

 

* * *

 

It made for a very bad day, like the mud and the cold and the rain and the whole crashed-on-an-alien-planet thing weren’t doing enough of that already. She tried to keep up, but her feet were cold and she just fell further and further behind. Soon, she couldn’t see them at all anymore, just their footsteps in the muddy trail she was walking in.

Why hadn’t she said something about her boots? What had she been waiting for, really? Did she think she was going to cross over one of these hills and see a strip mall with a Shoe Outlet and a McDonald’s all lit up and waiting for her? Talk about people who consistently refuse to accept reality. Amber Bierce did not ignore problems and hope they’d go away! She wasn’t Scott and she sure as hell wasn’t Nicci! She was different! She was tough!

Yeah. And now she was barefoot.

Stupid cheap Manifestors’ boots. Weren’t they the ones that were supposed to last for five whole years of colony work? But hell, the ship didn’t work, why should she expect better out of the boots? The Director with his billions and billions of dollars probably outsourced that too. She hoped someone, somewhere, was suing the holy fuck out of him, just like Maria had threatened to do. Class-action lawsuit, you bet.

Everyone gets what they deserve.

The wind slackened off some. The rain fell harder. The trail got slippery, so Amber and her frozen feet moved off into the grass, stumbling now and then over dead vines and picking her way around thorns, but staying upright at least. The grey smudge in the sky began to sink about the same time as the rain finally stopped. She trudged over the top of yet another rolling hill and found the others at the top of the next one, setting up their tents under a half-dozen knobby-armed trees. It probably wasn’t even another hour after that before she was there with them. No one said anything to her as she made her way to the fire and sat, pushing out her aching feet to warm them. She watched the mud dry and crack and drop off in little flakes.

She had no idea how long Meoraq had been sitting beside her. She only found out for herself when she turned to see if there was some water in easy reach that she could maybe wash up in, and there he was.

They looked at each other. His head wasn’t tipped. His spines were relaxed, neither high nor low. He could have been thinking anything.

The fire spat and hissed around the wet braids of grass and dung it burned. The other people did the camping thing, watching them maybe, but keeping their distance. Amber waited, thinking that if he wanted an apology to go with her lonely barefoot hike in the rain, they were in for a long night.

His gaze shifted at last to her shoulder. He picked her boots up by their laces and looked at the broken one. He grunted. It was one of his good ones. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it approving, but it was better than another ‘insufferable human’ comment.

He untied the laces and set the boots down, then turned to his other side and brought out some flattish pieces of bark. He drew a knife, pointing it absently toward one of the nearest trees. “Mganz,” he said, setting her boot down on top of some bark and tracing around it with his knife. “Good for very few things, but this is one of them.”

“I can do that.”

“You will. For now, be quiet and learn something.”

So she watched, silent, as he carved out the new sole from the inflexible chunk of bark, somewhat bigger than it needed to be. From his pack, he took a small wooden case and opened it, selecting a long metal spike from the various needles and skeins of cord it contained. Using the hilt of his knife and this awl, he bored holes all around the sole and then passed it all to her.

“Score the soft side,” he ordered, rummaging through his pack some more. “To cushion it.”

Using the tip of the awl, Amber scraped awkwardly at the wood and the torn fibers fluffed out a little. She scraped some more, trying to get it as plush as possible all over without digging too deeply through the wood, and just sort of hoped it didn’t have bugs. If there was any way at all this day could get worse, it would be with a screaming case of boot-bugs.

Meoraq had found a thin roll of leather, just scraps apparently, and was waiting for her to finish. At her lackluster nod, he covered the sole and held out that small wooden case. “Find a strong needle and a thick thread,” he said, or at least that was how she filled in the blanks.

She’d never sewed anything in her life. She didn’t wear clothes with buttons and if she ripped a shirt, she threw it away.

She got one of the thickest needles and picked out some cord to thread it with. He took it from her once she had and began to stitch, pinching and tucking the leather as he worked around the sole to make a kind of crease. It looked pretty rustic, but at the same time, she knew hers was going to look like a total shit-cake, so she tried to pay attention to exactly how he was doing it.

“Keep it tight,” he muttered, sewing. “Do not allow folds or pockets to form. If you discover one, take it out, regardless of the effort it requires. There is no hurry. Just keep a strong pull and take whatever time you need.”

“Thanks.”

He sewed, silent, until he had finished the sole. He handed it and her broken boot to her. “You will need to use the awl. Keep them at least a finger’s width up from the edging. The holes needn’t line up exactly. Keep the stitching even and tight. The seam will draw up this way, and form an overlap. Mend them both. I will have something to seal them in the morning.”

She nodded and got to work.

He sat and watched her. Not her hands, not the boot, not the tools she was borrowing. Her.

She struggled with the awl and kept her head down, her eyes stubbornly on her work. She ignored him.

“Pride,” said Meoraq, very quietly, “has no place in this camp.”

The wind blasted its freezing breath into her face, and still she felt the blush heating up her cheeks. She kept her eyes fixed and her hands busy and did not answer.

“You have asked me for training. You have demanded it. I have agreed to give it, because you have shown me the necessity and I judge you fit enough to learn, but there is no place—” He caught her chin and made her look at him. “—for pride in this camp.”

I know. I’m sorry. Please stop. Please.

His eyes shifted to a point beyond her. He stood up and walked off without another word. Shortly afterwards, Nicci crept up and sat down.

And for a second, Amber was disappointed. She hunched over her boot again, forcing the awl the rest of the way through the leather. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” said Nicci. “I really am, Amber. I’m sorry we fought.”

“I know. I’m sorry too.”

So that was okay. Almost.

Nicci turned her head to watch Meoraq move around the camp. “He went back a few times. To check on you, I guess.”

“Yeah.” She hadn’t seen him, but she hadn’t done much looking at anything but the trail in front of her. And in all honesty, Meoraq probably could have been in arm’s reach of her the whole way and if he didn’t want to be seen, she wouldn’t have seen him.

“I’d have gone back too,” said Nicci after a moment.

“I know.”

“I just thought it was best if we were all together.”

Amber looked at her and although she was okay and she really wasn’t even angry, it was right on the tip of her tongue to say that she’d have never left Nicci behind like that, never. But her sister’s eyes were the same anxious, lost and pleading eyes that they’d been pretty much since they got here and Amber couldn’t stand to see them wet again, not after the day she’d just had.

“I’m fine,” she said. She even smiled a little, for Nicci. “It was nothing. I was acting like a bitch and I got a little spanking, that’s all. I’m fine.”

Nicci nodded and picked at her laces. “Can you do my boots for me? They’ve got, um, holes.”

Amber kept smiling. “Yeah, sure.”

Nicci took her boots off and got up. One of the ladies sitting around the fire outside the women’s tent called her name, waving, then saw Amber and hesitated. Nicci waved back and stood there, looking awkward.

“Go on,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Beats sitting around and watching me do this all night. Go on,” Amber said again, just like she didn’t even care. “Have fun.”

Nicci left and sat down with the other women, disappearing into their laughing, talking circle. Amber sewed.

The sun went down, and as the grey light dimmed rapidly to black, people began to shake out their blankets and clump up around the fires to sleep. As it got later and more people went down, Nicci finally wandered back. Amber set her boots aside, but Nicci just put herself to bed. And that was okay. They were all tired.

Meoraq’s scaly knuckle tapped at her shoulder. He crouched down and gestured vaguely at her duffel bag while staring over his shoulder at nothing. “Sleep.”

“I’m not done yet.”

“Finish in the morning.”

“I’ll finish now. I always have the first watch, don’t I?”

He kept his head turned, his eyes moving as if he could see some hungry thing pacing back and forth beyond the edge of camp. And for all she knew, he could. At length, and without further argument, he simply stood up and walked away.

Amber resumed boring holes through her boots, but had managed only one more stitch before he was tapping at her shoulder again. He gave her a piece of cuuvash, acknowledged her thanks with a grunt, and moved to the other side of the fire where he crouched and watched people. The firelight threw orange stripes over his scales, broken by scars. They shifted as he breathed, as mesmerizing as the embers themselves could be. He did not respond at all to her stares, perhaps didn’t even notice them.

The awl was starting to hurt her hand. She put it down and ate her cuuvash, taking small bites, making it last. Eric and Maria passed close by on their way to his tent. Amber raised a hand and said good night. Eric nodded at her or maybe at Meoraq, it was hard to tell. Then they were gone.

She ran out of cuuvash and had to pick up the awl again. Her hand still hurt. Meoraq watched her make one hole and then went back to staring at nothing. Everyone else was in bed. They were alone.

“Are you still mad at me?” she asked finally.

He thought about it. “No.”

“I wish you’d talk to me.”

He ran his red eyes over the camp, over every blanket-wrapped lump, every tent and bivy, every person. Except her.

“Say something, then,” he said suddenly. He was frowning.

“About what?”

“I don’t care. Talk to me.”

Amber opened her mouth without any idea of what she was going to say and out popped, “My mom had to go to rehab when I was six and I had to go to state-care. They had a yard with a big hill that had a few big trees and a chain fence at the bottom and the game all us kids used to play was to climb up that hill and roll down it with your eyes closed. There were trees and broken bricks and stuff. You mostly didn’t hit them, but you could have. That was part of the game. I only did it once. Because I loved it so much. If it had been scary, I’d have done it every day.”

He said nothing. What the hell was there to say to that even if he knew what she was saying? God, she was an idiot.

“It’s your turn,” she said, thinking he wouldn’t say anything.

And he didn’t, at first. She had enough time to punch the last hole through her boot and stitch the new sole on, making it whole again, and then he said, “In my ninth year at Tilev, I had trouble with one of the brunts. I had trouble with most of the brunts until I became one. That’s what brunts do. But it was my first year in the middle classes and I wasn’t used to it. I tried fighting back and he beat me. I tried avoiding him and he hunted me down and beat me. So one night, I threw a blanket over him from behind as he came back from the pisser and I went at him with a practice sword. I beat him until I broke, oh, seventeen bones all together, I think they said.”

She looked up from her work, frowning. “Good God, Meoraq.”

He grunted and rubbed at his throat, then at his knobby brows. “I didn’t know how badly I’d hurt him at the time. I just hit him until he quit moving and moaning and I ran back to the billets. I didn’t even take the blanket off him. They found him in the morning on the way to watch, but by then there wasn’t much they could do. He slept six days and died.”

“Jesus!”

“The masters called us to assembly and commanded the guilty boy to come forward. I did. They had a trial and God moved for me, so that was all right, but I still think about it sometimes. I shouldn’t, but I do.”

“God moved…? You didn’t get in trouble?”

“No.”

“Not at all? Not even detention?”

He shrugged his spines.

“Jesus,” she said again, because there was just nothing else to say. She knew Meoraq had killed people, in the same indisputable yet off-screen way she knew her mom had fucked men for money, but this was different. “How many—” she began, but faltered to a stop. She didn’t really want to know, just like she didn’t want to know how many men there had been.

“Three hundred and some. I don’t keep an exact count anymore.” He was quiet for a while, staring straight ahead and thinking his own thoughts. When he spoke again, it was in a low, almost halting manner utterly unlike him. “The Word tells us that there is no sin in the lives we take as Sheulek, but I was not Sheulek for that one and I think about it. God moved for me when it came to trial, but in my heart I know He was not proud of me. Not then.” He paused, his spines flexing and flattening. “And not today.”

She dropped her eyes back to her boot and resumed sewing. “I was fine.”

“You walked in our Father’s sight.”

“Nicci said I walked in yours too.”

He glanced at her and away into the night. “You are determined to stand a watch?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

“You look tired.”

“You hear me whining about it, lizardman? I’m not falling-over tired. I’m fine.”

“Please yourself,” he said, almost exactly the same way he’d said it before he left her out in the plains. He reached into his belt and took out a small, cloth-wrapped bundle. He peeled it partway open to show her a grayish, thoroughly unpleasant-looking blob she naturally assumed was some sort of food until he said, “If you want to bathe.”

Soap? She stared at it and him, the awl poked halfway through the side of her new sole, in the kind of astonishment that she had only ever known as a child, when Bo Peep might occasionally announce a trip out for ice cream. Half the time (more than half, to be honest), it was really just an excuse to pick up her fucking drugs and little Amber would end up sitting on one side of a booth, watching her mom nod off and finally just shoveling melted ice cream into her mouth as fast as she could so they could go home. But sometimes she really meant it, so there was always that first cautious swoop of hope that something good might really happen.

He covered up the lump again and set it down in front of her. “Return it to me,” he told her. “And don’t allow S’kot to claim it for his own.” He stood up and went to his tent, resting his hand briefly on the top of her head as he passed her.

Alone again. Amber picked up the awl and the first of Nicci’s boots, then put them down again. She’d told Nicci she’d fix her boots and she would, but having honest-to-God soap in front of her made thinking about anything else impossible. Hearing about some kid getting beaten to death by the man sleeping in the tent just a few meters away should have ranked a little higher, but it didn’t. For the moment, the only thing that mattered was that everyone else appeared to be asleep, so if she wanted to clean up at all beyond just changing her clothes, this was the perfect opportunity. On the other hand, no matter how quietly she tried to go about it, taking a bath in a bag was easily awkward enough to wake someone up and it wasn’t like she had a wall to put between her and anyone else.

She pretended to debate the matter, but pretending was all it was. Even as she weighed risk against reward in her mind, her hands were busy building up the fire around Meoraq’s heat-stones. While they got hot, she found the leather sack he used for cooking, still with a little cold tea in it. She drank it off—bitter as it was, she hated to waste it—then filled it with fresh water from one of his big flasks and hung it from its tripod.

All of this moving back and forth was bound to catch some attention and it did, but only Nicci roused herself enough to actually lift her head and look at her.

“Go back to sleep,” Amber told her.

“But what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Just…Just thought I’d try and do some laundry, that’s all.”

“Oh.” Nicci pushed her pack out from under her head. “Can you do mine?” she mumbled, already rolling over and wiggling herself comfortable.

Amber went and got her sister’s clothes. It was no big deal. She really didn’t mind. It was kind of wasteful to wash just her own stuff anyway.

Heating up the water felt like it took forever, which meant in reality it probably took about twenty minutes. She kept her hands busy when she wasn’t trading hot stones for wet ones and vice versa by making grass bundles for fuel. When she had enough, she took them behind Meoraq’s tent and lit another fire, not so much to keep the water warm (although she brought the heating rocks with her) as to see by. She was careful to keep the fire small, as careful as she was to keep Meoraq’s tent between her and the rest of the camp. It wasn’t much cover, but it was all she had and she wanted to make the most of it. She took it on faith that she had privacy as she undressed, and she did for the most part. While several people woke up during Amber’s bath, the wind covered her furtive splashing and the intermittent chattering of her teeth, and Meoraq’s tent blocked both her and her little fire from sight. The only one who saw her was Meoraq himself.

One word was all it took to catch his attention. One word, her hissy little “Shit!” when she thought she’d put her live coal out, just before it caught and grew into the fire that splashed her shadow onto the wall of his tent. There was no reason to watch her once he’d identified what she was doing…but he did. He watched, first from the corner of his drowsing eye, then brazenly rolling onto his side to face her.

Amber, believing herself entirely invisible but knowing that someone could come yawning into sight to take a piss any second now, stripped herself naked and got down to business. The hard lump of what Meoraq called soap did not lather when she rolled it between her wet hands, but its pungent aroma grew immediately strong enough to fight against the wind and sting her sinuses with its sharp, green smell. Rubbing at her arm was not quite as abrasive as attacking herself with one of those green kitchen scouring pads, but it wasn’t too far from it. On the other hand, whether the dried mud got washed off or scraped off, at least it was off.

Amber started scrubbing at her face and worked her way down. The water was nice and warm at first, but it didn’t stay that way. She felt each blush of warmth as she splashed hurried handfuls over her neck and breasts and shoulders, but the wind was always there, turning blessed heat to icy pins and needles in seconds. She wanted to stop almost as soon as she’d started, but she made herself keep going and didn’t let herself half-ass it. Who knew when she’d get another chance at a bar of soap?

So she got it all, even the spots she’d never given much attention before: her belly, her hips, her thighs. It was like washing a stranger’s body. Gone were the soft curves and smoothness of her old self. In its place, the new Amber’s body was all rough-chapped skin, bony joints, hard muscle. She had lost all the weight she’d ever been teased for, but it hadn’t made her thin and pretty the way she used to tell herself she didn’t care if she ever was. It just made her uglier. Haggard. Hungry. She closed her eyes and refused to look.

In the tent, Meoraq watched her bend herself in half and bounce with the vigor of her scrubbing motions. Silently, he sat up, drew in his legs and rested his palms lightly on his knees, unthinkingly adopting the relaxed yet intent posture of any child at lectures. He studied every line of the silhouette she showed him and yes, he knew she was only cleaning herself, and no, there ought not to be anything remotely sensual in such a process, and yes, he supposed it said something about his character that there was this fire in his belly as he sat in the dark and watched her, but no, he felt no pressing urge to meditate until he had resolved it. Not yet.

When she reached her knees, Amber stopped. She was freezing, but that was only part of it. Half her hot water was gone and her fire was getting low. She straightened up to stretch her aching back, then bent over again to dip her hair clumsily in the stewing pouch. Rubbing the soap over her head did not appear to do anything except rough up the knots in her hair, but she rubbed anyway, then poured what was left of the hot water over the matted results in a slow trickle. Even if the soap wasn’t doing anything for her, the hot water might loosen the grime enough to rinse…well…clean-er. Clean was probably one of those things, like pizza or television, that had made the eternal transition from reality to memory. But cleaner was better than nothing and when she was done, she thought the effort had been worth it, assuming she ever warmed up.

Shivering, Amber crouched down by her pack and rifled through it for almost an entire ass-freezing minute before she realized she didn’t have any more clean colonists’ pants, just her old blue jeans, the ones she still thought of as her ‘skinny jeans’. It was darkly hilarious to think that they still weren’t going to fit. They were her ‘fat jeans’ now.

The fire was only getting lower and colder and she doubted like hell the clothes fairy was coming tonight. Amber fished out some panties, put them on, straightened up to shake out her jeans…and her panties fell off. Somehow the prospect of being caught with her underwear around her ankles was more mortifying than being caught bare-naked. Amber yanked them up again, held them uselessly at her hip while she looked in vain for a WalMart lingerie department to spring up behind her on this alien planet, then gave up and tied them on with handfuls of her panties’ own excess fabric. She stepped into her jeans fast, as if to hide evidence of a particularly ugly crime, but as she bent over to fish out a fresh shirt, those fell off too.

“Motherfuck!” Amber hissed, hugely embarrassed. She looked around again, this time for the women’s wear section of that WalMart. What was she supposed to do now? She couldn’t tie the jeans on, for Chrissakes!

‘Suck it up, little girl,’ she told herself in Bo Peep’s dry, half-drunk voice. ‘You’ve got bigger problems out here, so quit whining about your clothes and just put them on.’

“I am not whining,” she whispered fiercely, and put a shirt on. It was another of the Manifestor-white ones, one of only two clean ones she had left, and there was no kidding herself that it was just loose. She couldn’t walk around in this damn thing. She needed a belt.

Motherfuck.

Holding her jeans in one fist, Amber kicked the fire out and picked up her dirty clothes and her greatly depleted pack. She trudged around to the front of Meoraq’s tent and half-knelt to work the flap open. “If you’re awake, don’t stab me,” she whispered. “It’s just me. Amber.”

No response. She peeked inside. The light of the fire out where Nicci slept turned one wall of his tent a hazy orange, letting in just enough light to suggest Meoraq’s body beneath his blanket.

“Are you still awake?” she whispered.

A lizardish grunt was her only answer. Hearing it, she felt her stomach knot inside her. She’d woken him up, obviously. She should have waited. She was going to get him for his turn at standing watch in a few hours anyway. What was she doing here?

“You’re letting the wind in,” he said without moving, not even raising his head.

“Sorry.” She started to let the flap drop, then, not without a nervous glance over her shoulder, she crawled inside. He still didn’t move, but she could feel his stare even if she couldn’t see it. Fidgeting with her handful of denim, Amber awkwardly settled herself in the furthest corner from his mat and whispered, “Do you…Can I…Look, I’m sorry I woke you, but do you have an extra belt I can, um, borrow?”

Wordlessly, the dark lump of a lizardman propped itself up on one elbow to open the pillow of his own pack. Rustling sounds. The shape dropped back down. His arm reached out to her, holding the folded length of a leather strap.

She took it, her cheeks flaming. “Thanks.”

He grunted.

“Sorry I woke you.”

“You didn’t.” A pause. He shifted. “Tie the fastens, woman. You’re letting the wind in.”

“Sorry.” Belt in hand, she crawled back out into the freezing night and tied his tent down. Threading his wide belt through the loops of her jeans was not exactly effortless, and figuring out the buckle took several minutes, but as soon as it was on, she felt a lot better. She guessed she was ready to do the laundry.

The heating stones went back in the coals of the fire next to Nicci. Amber moved the cooking pouch and its tripod back and filled it. Meoraq probably wouldn’t be thrilled to discover how much water she’d gone through in one night, but maybe she could get them filled again before he noticed. Unlikely. He noticed everything. But maybe. And as long as she was imagining things, why not imagine that he’d forget all about being woken up early for her wardrobe malfunction.

And speaking of clothes, how exactly was she supposed to do this? Amber was no stranger to the chore of laundry, but it had always involved pre-measured packets of detergent and a handful of tokens. She doubted rubbing a little soap over her clothes was going to do the job. Still, like her own bath-in-a-bag, it had to be better than nothing.

Amber gathered up all the shirts, pants and underwear she and Nicci owned and waited for the water to heat back up. It wasn’t a very big pile, and for the first time since the crash, Amber made herself think about just what they were going to do for new clothes, because they were going to need some soon. Not in some hazy future sense, when these wore out completely (although that day probably wasn’t as far in the future as she was pinning it), but soon, before it got so cold that people stopped just bitching about the weather and actually froze to death.

She’d have to ask Meoraq. Maybe he could teach her how to make new clothes, although it was difficult to imagine how he could turn the rough, scaly hide of the saoqs into anything like the supple leathers he wore. If it was as much of a process as she suspected, he might not want to take the time. For that matter, he might not know how. In spite of the fact that he dressed in leather, they weren’t all ragged edges and rawhide ties. They were evenly stitched, trimmed and decorated, with metal buckles on his harness and belt. In other words, they were probably store-bought. She could hardly ask Meoraq to take them to the nearest LizardMart and buy everyone new outfits, but she did find herself uneasily wondering why he wasn’t at least taking them to town. The fact that they hadn’t so much as seen one on the horizon meant that he had to be deliberately keeping them away. In spite of how dangerous he insisted the wildlands were, he wanted to keep them here. Where no one else knew about them but him.

Amber thought about this as she did the washing—dunking each article of clothing, rubbing it all over with Meoraq’s latherless soap, dunking it again, wringing and rubbing and dunking some more—and ultimately decided it didn’t really matter. Scott was unlikely to let them go to any lizard-city anyway. It was one thing to pioneer their way east across the alien landscape with their native guide, but it would be something else entirely to be the ones who were outnumbered. To be the aliens, in other words.

And that only brought her around to the even more disquieting matter of just what they were going to do once Meoraq was gone. Not just for food, but for boot repair and heating-stones and stewing bags to dunk their dirty clothes in. Scott could kid himself all he wanted about how this was a colony, but once Meoraq was gone, she had a feeling things were going to fall apart in one hell of a hurry.

She didn’t doubt for a moment that Meoraq would leave them at the end of the road. The only question was whether or not he’d leave them even sooner. She would if she were him, especially after tonight. God, what had she been thinking? Just barge right in, little girl, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, by all means, sit around until he actually has to tell you to get out.

‘He didn’t,’ the half-drunk voice of her mother remarked.

“Didn’t what?” Amber muttered, wringing what looked like pure hot cocoa out of one of Nicci’s shirts. She really ought to dump out what was left in the bag and start over with fresh water.

‘He didn’t tell you to get out.’

“Well, no, not in so many—”

‘He told you to close the door.’

Amber froze, her mouth slightly agape, her arms jutting out stiffly before her with murky water dripping from the rat-tail of Nicci’s shirt, because there was a difference, wasn’t there?

“Bullshit,” she whispered, but she looked furtively back over her shoulder at the leathery peak of Meoraq’s tent.

Tie the fastens, woman. You’re letting the wind in. Not even ‘human,’ but ‘woman.’ Tie the fastens, woman.

And just why the hell was that running circles in her head instead of I beat him until I broke seventeen bones or He slept six days and died? But now the thought was there and her brain ruthlessly showed her how it could have been if she’d done it…if she’d closed herself in and then crawled over to the half-glimpsed shape of him and then what, for God’s sake?

Her hands were freezing. She was still holding that stupid shirt and her wet knuckles were actually throbbing with cold. Quickly, Amber dunked the shirt into the warm water and wrung it out again. She was doing the laundry, damn it, and that was it. He didn’t even like her.

‘You don’t have to like someone to fuck them,’ observed Bo Peep’s sly, smirking voice, and she ought to know. ‘Besides, it was nice in there, wasn’t it? Out of the wind. He had a real blanket, too. And he’s warm.’

“Shut up.”

‘You thought so even way back then, when he took the knife away and licked you. He’s not cold at all, like reptiles are supposed to be. He was so warm.’

She was not going to stand here and argue out loud with her dead mother’s disembodied, imaginary voice. Tight-lipped, Amber gathered up the chilly armload of dripping laundry and carried it over to the nearest tree. She began to tie things to the lowest branches. Double-knots. Extra secure. She wasn’t thinking about it. For God’s sake, he was a lizard!

‘He’s a man. And men are all the same. Go on and tell me you’ve never caught him looking at you when it’s just the two of you up at night and Eric and Maria are shaking the walls of that pissant little tent.’

Sure, she had. She’d seen those looks and, let’s face it, she’d seen them because she’d been looking for it, hadn’t she? Yeah, he was a lizard. Yeah, okay, no getting around that, but he was the lizard who, although he clearly didn’t like her, wouldn’t walk with her, and avoided even looking at her these days, he was the lizard who had touched her. Three times, in fact, his hand had stroked across her forehead in what could only be called a caress, and who could forget that endless moment after he’d decided not to execute her after all, when he’d put his arm around her waist and yanked her hard against him and licked her neck and pressed his scaly forehead against her shoulder?

“It isn’t like that!” she hissed, tying up the last pair of pants with a particularly savage twist. She knew she was talking to herself and she hated herself for doing it, but she had to say it out loud because the silence felt too much like shame-faced agreement.

And it wasn’t like that! It wasn’t! She’d had no trouble at all telling Crandall off when he’d tried to buy a blowjob with a lousy Fleet ration, and she’d done it a few times since on those nights when he decided that the privilege of his company was worth a kiss and a quick cop under her shirt. She had no pangs of conscience when it came to putting herself between Scott and her sister, or speaking up over his persistent efforts to convince everyone that a loyal pioneeress served her colony’s best interests by making babies. She knew some and maybe all of the other women were creeping off with certain guys from time to time and she didn’t blame them, exactly, but she was different. She was tough. Things were bad right now, but she was learning and she wouldn’t need to be taken care of forever. She wasn’t…God damn it, she wasn’t a little girl!

The wind flapping through the wet clothes sounded to her ears like slow, sarcastic applause. Her mother used to do that when she was feeling witty. Amber turned her back on it and went back to the fire, where the stewing bag was waiting to be washed out. After she’d done that, she could cut some more grass and bundle it up for fuel. Then as long as nothing snuck in and ate someone, Meoraq would wake up and think she was doing a good job. And maybe he’d tell her so and maybe he’d even give her one of those friendly knuckle-taps and maybe he’d never put his arm around her that way again, but that was just fine. Amber Bierce did not need a fucking hug and even if he were to open his tent this instant and order her inside, she—

…she…

…she’d go.

Amber sat in the grass with the stewing bag and the bar of soap stupidly clutched to her chest. She pulled her knees up, put her head down, and wept without sound until she thought she was going to pass out. Then she dried her eyes, finished washing out the bag, hung it up on its tripod, and got back to work on Nicci’s boot.

 

7

 

After being wakened for his watch, Moraq brought out the fires, meditated until dawn, then went out and found a saoq to kill. There were no herds nearby, nor was he likely to find any more save by Sheul’s grace, but the young rogues who had been defeated and driven out were still in plentiful number in the plains. His kill was a finer specimen than most, but it had been gored deeply across the face and the infection which made it easy for Meoraq to find and kill had also swelled half its head with poison. Perhaps not all the meat was bad, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Meoraq left the head and the bowels steaming over the cold, dead earth and came back to feed his many whining mouths.

He made certain to walk past Amber on his way through camp, and a short time later, as he was pulling the saoq out of its hide, she came yawning up behind him with her clean, white clothes blown wide around her. She didn’t look like a candle-ward anymore. Neither did she look like a tent or a windmill or any of the other humorous comparisons that might have at one time occurred to him. In the grey light of dawn, she looked like nothing but what she was: a sallow-faced, sunken-eyed starving person.

He frowned and continued to butcher his kill.

“Morning,” she said.

He glanced up at the sky. “So it is.”

“Yeah, so…thanks again.” She lifted the lower edge of her gusting sail of a shirt to show him the top of her breeches and his belt threaded through its loops, but only for an instant. Her smile seemed nervous. “Sorry I woke you up last night. I should have just waited until it was time for your watch.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.” He did not, however, elaborate on just what he had been doing. It did not bother him much to receive an idle glance or three while washing up for a trial—waiting around in the arena hold was boring—but if he had ever found himself the subject of such a stare as he had given Amber’s silhouette, he thought it very likely a knife would be drawn over it. And what had he seen, even? Her human body was just as much a mystery as it had ever been in all save the broadest sense, that of its shape beneath the oversized things she wore.

“So…about last night…”

Meoraq grunted and continued hacking the saoq into manageable pieces, setting meat aside for the hateful human Scott and tossing the bones into the fire, waiting for her to say something. It seemed a long time in coming, but the kind of stench raised by burning bones could make any silence thicker.

“I…I just wanted to say that I…shouldn’t have let myself in like that.”

“You have,” he pointed out. “Twice.”

“And I should have left as soon as I had the belt. You know. Before you had to tell me to leave.”

‘I didn’t,’ thought Meoraq disgustedly, and cut the last stubborn fiber holding the saoq’s heart to its body. Aloud, he said nothing.

“It won’t happen again,” said Amber.

She seemed to be waiting for something and Meoraq had no idea what she wanted to hear. He savaged at the carcass some more, preserving the tastier organs, but burning the majority. It occupied his hands the way that counting breaths occupied his mind, but it was not peace.

“Are we good?” she asked finally, in what seemed for her a rather weak voice.

“I do not mark you.”

“Are we…” She faltered to a short, helpless silence, looking back over her shoulder at the sleeping people of his camp, and when she faced him again at the end of it, it was with obvious strain. “I know what you said about not needing friends and I…I know how you feel about me—”

He frowned.

“—but I need someone around that I can still talk to,” she finished in a shaky rush. “And if I fucked that up last night, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I just need to know that we’re still…the same.”

Meoraq started to rub at his brow-ridges, saw the blood on his hands, and settled instead for stabbing his knife into the shoulder of the saoq. He looked up at her, making an effort not to look ferocious. “I don’t talk to people, human. I never learned how and I think I must not be any good at it. If there’s something you expect me to say back at you, you are just going to have to tell me what it is.”

“Are you mad at me?”

His spines flared. “No. Why would you think so?”

“Because I barged in on you and woke you up for a stupid reason.”

“How many times—” Meoraq stopped there with a snort and unbuckled the belt he wore. He stripped it off, looped it over so it hung even, and held it up to her.

Her hand reached out and drew back again. “What’s that one for?”

“So you can whip yourself and be done with it.”

She stepped away at once, actually hiding her hands behind her back for an instant like a child.

“No? You’re certain? Then shut the door, human, it’s done.” He put his belt back on. “I wasn’t sleeping and it wasn’t a foolish request. As for your, ha, invasion of my tent, I forgive you for it. Enough, eh? Enough.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, then said, “Can I do anything to help with that?”

Meoraq followed her nervous gaze to the saoq before him and studied it as if it were new. “What would you do, if you could?”

“I guess I could make some skewers.”

“Well then?”

She wandered off toward a tree. He heard wood crack as she fought a few thin branches down. He heard some of her people protesting the noise as well, although no one seemed to be protesting the thought of roasted saoq when it pleased them to wake up.

Amber returned to sit at his side, mangling meat onto her harvested sticks with considerable difficulty. The bark of the mganz was the hardest thing about it; its wood was soft and wet enough to be useless either for burning or tool-making. He took the opportunity of her distraction as she fought with it to run a critical eye over her boots. Not a bad effort, for her first. Nothing that would earn her any prizes, but not bad. They still needed to be sealed, however.

He got up, gesturing to the rest of the saoq so that she could keep herself occupied, and returned to his tent. The hide flap’s stays were not tied in the knot he’d used on leaving this morning. Just within and to one side, out of danger of some errant stride, his mending kit and his wrapped brick of soap rested together atop his greatly diminished supply of leathers.

She’d come right into his tent. Right inside. He could smell the soap on her skin and the wet smoky smell of her hair and she had been right here.

Enough. Close the door, wasn’t that what he’d just told her? Good advice. It was over. Close the door. He hunted out his bottle of proofing resin, and returned to the fire to find that Amber had finished skewering the meat. She had also taken it upon herself to put the meatier bones into his stewing pouch with his heating stones and just enough water to cover them. She wasted nothing…except the heart, liver, kidney, and bitteret, all of which she had seen him set aside.

She saw him looking and hesitated, holding her skewers of meat awkwardly between her fists and as far away from her clean clothes as possible. That cause was lost, of course. She had already smudged herself with soot, dirt and several good smears of blood. White showed everything, which was why they made the brunts wear white tabards at Tilev. It didn’t stop them from brawling out of the training ring, but it usually made them think before they did it, at least long enough to take their tabards off.

He’d actually told her about that brunt in his middle years. He’d never told anyone—not his father (although Rasozul had surely been informed), not his brothers, not even Nkosa. But he’d told Amber…and she had still come to sit with him this morning.

“Am I doing something wrong?” Amber asked.

Kneeling that way, half his height and draped in too much overshirt, he suddenly found it easier to picture her as a human child on the hilltop she’d spoken of. He could see the crowd of children around her, chanting and jeering the way that children do when injury is imminent, but she would not have hesitated. Fearless Amber. Stubborn Amber. He saw her tumbling, her thin arms hugged close to her chest and eyes squeezed shut, flying blindly past trees and bone-cracking stones until she came to a dizzied stop. Just the once and never again. Just the once, because she had loved it.

“Meoraq?”

He wanted to tell her that he understood. He had spent a lifetime learning it—in Tilev, where he had lived out every year from age three to twenty, never home for more than a two-brace and that during the coldest days of the season; in House Uyane, where his own father was more a name than a man even to his son; on the road that Sheul had set before him, where every journey began and ended in battle and the almost-friend you looked forward to seeing after half a year’s absence could be whipped or worse just for slapping you once on the chest. He knew that joy can be a terrible thing to feel, when you know you can’t have it every day. He wanted to tell her…but the other humans were stirring, and so instead he said, “Give those to S’kot.”

She hesitated again. “All of them?”

“Yes.” Meoraq opened the bottle of resin and set it where it could warm.

“Um…I hate to admit this, but they’re not going to save you one.”

He snorted. “You think I need you to tell me this? Go on.”

She went. He watched her go, and when she was bent (her shadow black against the firelit leather as she bent and stretched and then came crawling in to him) and at work in the coals, he turned his knife back on all that was left of the saoq. Choice meats, they called this in the cities. The food of governors and lords. He remembered without warning being a child at Rasozul’s table—a rare privilege—being served cattle’s heart, and how terribly grown-up it had made him feel. These days, it was just an extra-tough cut of meat and he ate it as little as he could. But that would change when he went home, he supposed. If he was made steward of House Uyane, he would be eating heart nearly every day. Farm-raised, young cattle’s heart, minced with herbs and simmered slow or fried quick and served with roasted riak.

But today, he was still Sheulek, and he was eating wildland stew.

Amber returned. He could hear her bare feet padding over the crushed grass, and he could hear them slow as she saw him drop bits of saoq heart, black and dripping with blood, into the water. Meoraq tipped his head at her and nicked the end of the bitteret so he could squeeze out the crumbling mass of its protected organ, along with the tangy fluid that it floated in.

Amber put the back of her hand against her mouth and watched solemnly as it all went into the stewing pouch. She said, “I don’t even know what that thing was.”

Meoraq glanced at the dangling tube of the empty bitteret before tossing it into the fire. He told her the word, then flexed his spines and said, “It has something to do with digestion, they tell me.”

“Do you have one?”

“Of course not. Only grass-eaters, like saoq and cattle.”

“What does it taste like?”

“It tastes,” said Meoraq, now cutting up the liver, “like the food we are fortunate enough to have.”

“Which means it’s gross.”

“I don’t ask you to enjoy it.” He added the kidney and wiped his knife clean before sheathing it. “But I warn you, I’ve been pressed to eat far worse things in my time than stewed bitteret.”

She laughed, stirring once at the contents of the pouch. “So have I, if it comes to that. Thanks for helping me with my boots, by the way. I know you don’t believe me, but I swear I’m not trying to make things even more difficult.”

He grunted, nudged at the still-warming bottle of glue, and then leaned back and looked at her. “Do you see those trees?”

“Huh?”

“The mganz trees. Do you see them?”

Amber looked over her shoulder at the trees. “Um…yeah?”

“Do you see any others?”

She looked at him again, frowning, but sat up a little taller and searched the plains around their hilltop camp. There were thickets here and there and, in the distance, shadows of what might be zuol copses, but no other trees in sight. “No.”

“Sheul set them in my path.”

She rolled her eyes and settled back down. “Of course he did.”

“Yes. As easily as He set you for me to find.” Meoraq leaned close, lowering his spines. “But even He cannot make you ask for help when you need it.”

Color rose pink in her cheeks. She looked down, picked at the unsealed seams of her boots, said nothing.

He could have said more, perhaps a word comparing a fall in the mud of the prairie to a fall in the mountains they would eventually have to cross, but couldn’t think how to phrase it and it was very distracting to be this close to her. He leaned away instead, letting the matter go, to lift the cap of the sealing glue and show her the brush affixed to it. “This is ready. Just paint a thin skin along the edges where the sole joins the body of the boot. Take care to make a full seal.”

“Okay.” She started to get up. “Guess that means I’d better go get Nicci’s.”

His spines came forward in surprise and then flattened. He waited and true enough, Amber returned to him with a second pair of boots, newly resoled.

“You taught her well,” said Meoraq darkly.

She sat down with the boots in her lap and just looked at him.

Meoraq traded out stones. The bloody water in the stewing pouch was beginning to simmer, sending out tiny bubbles like beads to slide along the lumps of largely unidentifiable chunks of meat. It gave him something to look at while he mastered his rising temper and counted breaths. At last he said, “My mending supplies exist to be used. I do not begrudge their loss if they teach a useful lesson.”

“I think I did okay.”

“Yes. You learned to use a needle and an awl to mend your boots. N’ki learned to use you.” He slammed a wet stone down in the embers and glared at her.

Amber applied resin to a boot. Nicci’s boot. “She’s doing the best she can.”

He had to look at her twice to be certain this absurd statement was not meant as some human joke, but she appeared to be serious. So he snorted at her, and if that were not enough to let her know what he thought, he added, “Sheul provides the raw stuff of our souls, human. The polish is left entirely to us.”

“I didn’t catch much of that.”

“It means we are responsible for our own character. N’ki is helpless because she wants to be helpless, and if that is what she wants, that is what she deserves to be.”

“Lighten up, lizardman. It’s not easy to hike through the damn wilderness when you’re not used to it. If I can make it a little easier for her, why shouldn’t I?”

“What a stupid thing to say!” he said disgustedly. “Do you think it helps your N’ki to be coddled like that? Do you think it helps any of your people, who must all work that much harder to care for her?”

“I’m taking care of her. You don’t get to judge me for that.”

Meoraq leaned in aggressively close to say, quietly but with feeling, “I am Sheulek, human, and I get to judge everyone.” Straightening up, he added, “You were the one to tell me that feeding is not the same as saving, and it is just as true for N’ki as it is for you.”

“She shouldn’t be here,” said Amber, and immediately coughed out a sour laugh. “None of us should, but she really shouldn’t. She didn’t want to. I made her come with me. I made her come here.”

“If you can do that, making her fetch water once in a while should be easy.”

But she didn’t smile and her stiff-backed silence as she sat proofing her Nicci’s boots made the echoes of his own words seem fanged, which of course they had been. Meoraq hissed almost soundlessly through his teeth, rubbed crossly at the end of his snout, and changed out the heating stones. The wet stone hissed; the hot one spat.     

“Who is she, then?” he demanded suddenly. “What is she to you?”

“My sister.” Her mouthparts faintly turned up even though anger was still in every hard line of her. “You honestly can’t tell?”

“Are you saying you’re kin?”

“We’re family. You know. Sisters.” She touched her hand to her chest and moved it rapidly out and back again, tracing an invisible line between hearts.

“You come of the same father?” he guessed, and swiftly sketched two badly-drawn humans in the ash around the fire, on their knees in female fashion. After a moment’s thought, he added the swoop of human hair above them, then drew in the governing figure of a father. “You were sired of one man?”

Her smooth brows knitted. She hesitated, then shook her head. “Our mother,” she said, and leaned forward to draw curves on the father-shape—not head-hair, but an embarrassingly accurate suggestion of twinned teats. He did not look at her when she was done. “But we had different fathers,” she said, indicating them vaguely, one to either side of the mother. “Different men.”

He twitched his spines to show he understood, and if he had successfully translated her words, a great many things had just become clear.

When a Sheulek came to the House of conquest and the steward had no daughters to offer for his fires, the accepted alternative was to give one’s wife. Any sons who came of this union were for the Sheulek to raise, but if a man’s wife bore a daughter, what harm could come of raising it in its mother’s household with the other children of her marriage? So it seemed obvious that Amber was one of these—sired of Sheulek, or whoever took that role in their human cities—while Nicci came of their mother’s wedded man. They were not true sisters, only blood-kin, like he and Nkosa. Blood-kin through the maternal line, but blood-kin all the same.

“Who was he?” Meoraq asked. “Your father.”

“I don’t know. I never knew him.”

“Your mother’s man, then. What man did she marry?”

“What did she…what?”

“Marry.” Meoraq held up his hands and clasped them. “How was she bound?”

“I’m not…sure I’m getting you, but if you’re asking who she lived with, she lived alone. Well, with us, but not with a man.”

“How is that possible?”

“What do you mean?” Her mouthparts were curling up again, as if she found his suspicion humorous. “Why would she have to?”

“Who raised her children?”

Amber’s human smile faded. She went back to work on Nicci’s other boot. “I guess the polite answer is, she did.”

“Say truth. Who raised her children?”

“She did. It was her house. In her name, paid for with her money, filled with her things. Hers. Women don’t have to get married where I’m from if they don’t want to.”

Meoraq leaned back, staring at her. He tried to picture the land she described, a land of milling humans, like yifu in some great undiscovered nest, but the images his mind presented were those of the ancient ruins, and the people he saw inhabiting them, his own. It had been that way for dumaqs once, before the Fall. Men and women, living together, walking freely about in the streets, open to any man’s eyes; it remained a shocking prospect. Meoraq flexed his spines, then shook that off and frowned at her. “What did she do? Your mother?”

Amber’s thin smile broke and she refocused her attention on Nicci’s boots, although they were entirely sealed. “She died. I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”

Meoraq watched her fuss with the boots. Eventually, she realized she was done with them and set them aside. She took up her own and finally got to work on them.

“Were you married?” he asked, and when she gave him that puzzled frown again, clasped his hands together. “Were you bound to a man?”

Understanding smoothed out her clay-soft features, but she didn’t answer right away. She only looked at him, her thoughts moving like stormclouds behind her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

Why did he want to know? He scratched irritably at his throat, but his scales still felt cool. “I’m trying to understand you,” he said. That much was truth. He wanted very much to understand this creature who crawled into his tent uninvited and left without dismissal, and more than that, he wanted to understand which of the many males in her pack had a claim over her. Because…?

Meoraq hissed suddenly through his teeth and snapped, “I don’t need a reason!” which Amber not-surprisingly believed to be directed at her.

“No,” she said. Her head bent. She dipped out proofing resin and painted her boots. “I was never married.”

“Did you…” He wasn’t even certain how to ask this. “Did you keep your own household?”

“No. We lived with our mother.”

She did not look at him when she answered. Her voice was tight and the silence that followed it, even tighter.

“Did you take labors?” he asked at last.

“Yeah, of course I did. Me and Nicci both.”

“What did you do?”

She slid him a glance and laughed without much humor. “I built machines.”

He recoiled.

“Well, I didn’t build them. I stood next to the machines that built the other machines and made sure they ran smoothly. I couldn’t even fix them if they broke. Just a button-pusher, really.”

He wasn’t sure if that was better or not.

“N’ki did this also?”

“Oh hell no. Nicci was a waitress.” Amber glanced at him, read the confused slant of his head perfectly and said, “Do you have places where people go just to eat?”

“Yes, of course.” Surprised, he sat up straighter. “N’ki kept such a place? She never cooks!”

“No, I know. She showed people where to sit when they came and they’d tell her what they wanted to eat and she’d bring it.” She set her boots down, capped the resin, and held the bottle out.

“Is that all?” He pointed at the ground, away from the fire. “She carried food?”

“Yeah.” Without the business of sealing her boots to occupy herself, Amber returned her attention to the stew. It was bubbling constantly at the sides now, but it would need an hour at least before it stopped looking like chopped offal in water and became food instead, and it did not require constant tending in the meantime.

“For coin?” Meoraq pressed.

“Yeah.”

“Someone gave her coin just to carry food?”

“Not a lot, but yeah.”

Meoraq leaned back to think about that. When he visited a public kitchen, which was often, the cook passed him his meals directly. He could not comprehend why anyone would pay a woman just to touch it for him, and he could tell by the small smile on Amber’s pliant face that his confusion was very evident.

“And I built machines,” she reminded him. Her smile faded. “Do you have to kill me now?”

He thought about it, concerned, but ultimately determined that he did not. “The Word forbids us to master or seek to remake the machines of the Ancients. Your machines were those of humans and not the Ancients. You offend none of His laws. Besides, you are here now.”

“Yeah.” She raised her head, searching the empty plains that surrounded them. “My machine-making days are definitely over.”

“But you must not seek to master the machines you may encounter here or you will be subject to my judgment.”

She stirred the stew and didn’t look at him. “I’ll try to control myself. Making you kill me after you’ve gone through all the trouble of teaching me to light a fire would be pretty ungrateful.”

“It hasn’t been so much trouble,” he said, showing her a careless flick of his spines to hide his irritation. He picked up the nearest of her boots to prove it, inspecting the seal and grunting his approval. “You learn very quickly.” And before he knew it, certainly without planning, he said, “I like teaching you.”

“The hell you say. You can barely stand to look at me.”

“I know.” He shook his head with disgust and stood. “Come, human. Let’s go have a look at this land while your boots dry.”

“What, in my bare feet?”

“Don’t whine at me. We won’t go far and you won’t be walking much once we’re out in the open,” he added with a certain evil humor. “You’ll be crawling.”

She looked down at herself, at her mostly clean clothes and fresh-washed skin. “Great. You’re sure I don’t need to stay here and cook?”

Meoraq glanced over to the far fire where the skewers of saoq roasted, the first of which were already brown and spitting merrily. The scent of food had drawn a handful of humans from their nests. He raised his arm and when one of them raised an arm back at him, he beckoned it over. “Tend to those,” he ordered, pointing at the meat. “How do you mark me?”

The human gave Amber an uncomfortable glance. “Where are you going?”

“With him, apparently.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

The human’s eyes narrowed, which gave it a distinctly suspicious look. “Why?”

Amber’s brows puckered, first in confusion, then in irritation. “I’m going hunting! Why the hell do you think?”

Meoraq raised his hand to catch the other human’s attention, then pointed down to his stewing pouch. “Keep it hot,” he ordered. “And don’t put it over the fire! I only have one water-tight pouch.”

“Then how am I supposed to—”

“Change out the stones,” said Amber, pointing at the one heating in the coals. “Just fish out the old one, drop in the hot one and try not to get too much ash in there.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

The question was directed at Amber, but Meoraq did not allow her to answer it. He snapped his spines flat and leaned in close enough to smell the unwashed, male stink of the human now trying to back away, and hissed, “Because it is not the task I set her. It is the task I set you!”

“Is there a problem over here?”

Meoraq leaned back, rubbing at his warming throat and allowing the human to escape so Scott could take his place. He was calm. A Sheulek is always calm.

“It’s not worth it,” Amber murmured behind him. “I’ll stay.”

“Get your spear and fill the flasks. I’ll find you at the water.”

“Meoraq—”

“Go.”

She went.

Meoraq folded his arms, resting the lengths of his first fingers along the hilts of his sabks, even though if it came to killing, he would never use an honor-blade on the throat of the hateful human Scott.

Scott smiled at him. Like all his smiles, it was a lie. “I’m glad we have this opportunity to speak privately.”

“So it seems,” said Meoraq after a moment’s judgment. “I will hear you then.”

“You’ve been a tremendous help to us in these first difficult days.”

Meoraq snorted. A ‘help’.

“And I appreciate it. We all appreciate it. However…” Scott’s face shaped itself into an expression of grotesque concern. “We are all increasingly uncomfortable with your attempts to assert control over us.”

Meoraq thought that over and took slow breaths and decided he’d better be sure he’d heard that before he lost his temper. “I do not mark you.”

“Control,” Scott said again. “Command might be a better word. Telling people what to do. And trying to intimidate us when you do it.”

“Ah. Go on.”

“I just don’t want there to be any confusion over who’s really in charge here. Now, I’m happy to assign someone to take care of the cooking detail this morning,” Scott said magnanimously. “And I’ll see to it that your…uh…whatever that is, is kept hot while you and Miss Bierce are…” Scott’s eyes rolled and his smile took on a crude sort of slant. “…doing whatever it is that you do, but I don’t want there to be any further incidents. In the future, if you have requests to make, you bring them to me and I’ll see what I can do about meeting them, but you need to stop just barking orders and slapping my people around.”

“I see.” Meoraq’s throat was very hot and tight-feeling now, but he made no attempt to hide its color or breathe it away. He did not draw; he remained calm. “Is that all you have to say?”

Scott considered. Meoraq’s throat throbbed painfully.

“I guess that’s it. But I do want you to know that I don’t hold you responsible. Miss Bierce has always been a disruptive element. I realize now it was a mistake to let her act as my intermediary during our initial contact and I apologize for that.”

“I forgive you.”

The subtlety of dumaqi sarcasm was entirely lost on humans.

“Okay, then.” Scott clapped his hands noisily together and rubbed them. “I’m glad we got that sorted out. Is there anything you’d like to share?”

“Oh yes.”

The answer seemed to catch Scott by surprise. His smile slipped; the one that replaced it had teeth. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Good. Because I am only going to say this once. I don’t know who you were in your homeland or what you think gives you the right to talk at me like an equal—”

“Now wait a minute—”

“Do not interrupt me,” said Meoraq, quietly and distinctly. “This is not your camp and these are not your people. Everything you think you had became mine the moment I set my tent among you and will remain mine until I choose to release you. I am not asking your obedience. I demand it. I have forgiven much and will forgive more, I am certain, but the one thing I will never do is make myself your servant in the camp I have conquered. So here we stand, human, and either you will do as I command and cook the fucking gift of food—” Oh, calmly now. Breathe. A Sheulek is the master of his clay and his emotions, always. “—that I have brought you, or you can let it burn, but you will have no more from me until I see the obedience I am owed.”

Scott looked back over his shoulder at the far fire where the saoq roasted. More of his people had wakened and gathered there, but they stayed close to the food. These words were still private.

When Scott turned back to Meoraq, he was not smiling. “I think there’s a lot of people over there who would object to being thought of as your property.”

“Is that a threat?” Meoraq demanded, more incredulous than angry, although he was very, very angry. “You and all your piss-licking people together couldn’t take me if I were tethered to a tree!”

“It’s not a threat,” Scott mumbled, but his face had gone dark and even uglier.

Meoraq clapped a cooling hand to his throat and rubbed, rubbed. It didn’t help much. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe, and for no reason at all, the memory of Amber crawling into his tent in the dark watches of the night leapt full to the front of his brain. Hissing, he opened his eyes and there was Scott, brazenly scowling at him.

Something in him tore. It did not break, maybe, but it tore and it tore deep. Meoraq’s vision briefly clouded, as it sometimes did in the arena, before the fires took him. His flesh became a stranger’s, throbbing everywhere, every nerve and vein and scale. His thoughts were black.

With all that was left of Uyane Meoraq, he said, “Raise your hand right now and show me your fucking fist, or I swear here in the sight of Sheul that I will end you.”

Scott said nothing, did nothing. Sheul, whose name had been invoked to bear a witness, let neither His voice be heard nor His hand felt. The wind blew at the mganz trees, moving their soft branches in odd gusts, as if it were breathing; six breaths, deep and slow.

‘Amber is waiting,’ Meoraq thought, his first real thought in quite some time. He opened his hands—they ached—and let go his sword. “If you don’t want to tend the food I bring, I’ll stop bringing it.”

Scott mumbled at him, flushed and frowning.

“I did not mark that.”

“I said we’ll do it. I never said we wouldn’t, you know,” he added churlishly. “I was just—”

“I know what you said.”

They stood together, silent. The words they had spoken sat and soured. The words they did not say screamed between them. Meoraq watched the mganz branches blow. Scott watched the fire.

Meoraq said, “We will not walk today.” Amber’s boots—and Nicci’s—would need to dry. It should only take a few hours, but the damp in the air would slow the process and he wanted a good, strong seal.

Scott muttered some kind of acknowledgement Meoraq did not ask him to repeat.

“I am glad we had this talk,” he said instead and he thought he said it sincerely. Something he’d learned from his early days at Tilev and its public toilets: It was always better to open the doors and let the stink out than to try and close it in. “But you would be wise not to approach me again unless the need is very strong.”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll have plenty to talk about with Bierce, won’t you?” Scott snatched up the pair of sticks Amber used to manipulate his heating stones and began to fish savagely through the stew for the stone there. “I bet you just talk each other’s brains out, don’t you? All night, every night.”

There was an insult somewhere in those words, but the more Meoraq tried to puzzle it out, the more he found himself distracted by Amber’s tracks in the wet grass. She would have found the water by now, he knew, having found it himself the previous night. He could see her in his mind’s eye, sitting on the bank with her bare feet tucked up beneath her to keep warm, waiting for him.

“And as far as I’m concerned,” Scott was saying, now struggling to pick up the stone in the coals and move it into the stew, “you can have her.”

“I don’t need your permission,” said Meoraq, thinking of Amber sitting on that bank, Amber tumbling down a hill, Amber crawling into his tent in the dark and whispering his name. “I am Sheulek here and what I want, I take.”

And with that, he turned his back on Scott and the rest of his humans and went to find her.