by R. Lee Smith
It would have been a simple thing to kill the creature. It certainly seemed like the most prudent thing to do, particularly since allowing it to live would alert all the others to his presence. And yet, Meoraq found himself strangely disinclined to strike.
There never should have been a reason for this encounter. The thicket where he had settled in to watch the creatures hunt was well out of the way, and yet the injured saoq had aimed itself directly at him. The will of Sheul could make itself known in many things, perhaps even this.
So then, what was Sheul’s will? Meoraq looked at the creature’s weapon again. Weapon, ha. A young tree, its branches torn away, made sharp at one end and tempered over a campfire. And what had the creature done with its fine pointed weapon? What, but swing at the saoq as if it held instead a club.
Meoraq had indeed watched the hunt, from its disastrous commencement to this unforeseen ending. It would have been easy to laugh at what he saw, except that, no matter how stupidly played out, it was still a coordinated attack. But as the hunt limped on, Meoraq’s derisive humor faded. It was trying. And no matter that it hadn’t a hope of success, it kept right on trying, until Meoraq actually thought it might take the saoq after all. He had, in fact, been sorely tempted while the saoq stood gasping before him in the thicket to put an end to the chase himself. One swift cut across the right tendon…it wouldn’t even bleed that much…the creature might think it had done it all itself.
But he never had the chance. The spear was thrown. The saoq fled. And now here he stood with the creature’s eyes wide open and full upon him.
“Sheul, my Father, I feel Your hand,” mused Meoraq, studying the burnt point of the creature’s weapon. “But I do not hear Your voice. Speak, I pray, and tell me what I am to do.”
The creature spoke.
Meoraq looked at it. It was watching him closely, its hand still clutched around the torn edges of its caught clothing, yet it had ceased its attempts to free itself. Its eyes, so curiously like that of a dumaq, shone with intelligence in its flat, ugly face.
More than animal intelligence, perhaps.
Meoraq regarded it with growing unease as it became inescapably clear that he was not merely being seen by this creature, he was being measured.
The thought of killing it came back, stronger than before. Meoraq’s hand tightened on the creature’s spear—
‘If it is a man,’ thought Meoraq suddenly, ‘that would be murder.’
Ridiculous. A Sheulek, by very definition, could not commit a murder. A Sheulek was the Sword of God and the arbiter of His true Word. He could kill anyone or anything he wanted and he did not necessarily need a reason.
But he really ought to have one. Meoraq hissed, annoyed (the creature immediately renewed its struggles to escape the thorns), and looked again at the spear. Just a pointed stick, without an open blade to stand in defiance of Sheul’s laws.
Never mind, there had to be some other law it had broken.
There was a fine thought for a Sheulek to have. Just kill it; everyone is guilty of something. If that was what his years of service had done, perhaps it was time he retired.
Scowling, Meoraq picked his way forward out of the thicket. With every step, the creature fought the brambles harder, tearing its hands and arms and even its face, until Meoraq drew a sabk and knelt beside it.
Then, shockingly, it lunged and caught his wrist.
And Meoraq found himself trapped, not by its grip, which was a flimsy shackle indeed, but by its eyes. They were frightened but not wild, and in them was all the strength and fire its feeble hand could not possess.
‘This is a person,’ thought Meoraq, motionless as a man in thrall to phesok smoke. ‘This is a person with a soul hammered at Sheul’s forge just the same as mine.’
“Easy,” he heard himself say—speaking to it!—just before he did something even more incomprehensible.
He gave it its spear.
It looked at it, then released Meoraq’s arm to take it, but it did not raise it again as a weapon. It merely held the thing limply in its grasp, now staring at him with its queasily soft-looking fur-striped brows drawn together. It made sounds at him. Words.
“I do not know Your will, my Father,” said Meoraq, cutting the thorns that held the creature. “But as it seems You have gone to some effort to put us in one another’s path, I will walk with them awhile and see if I can learn what You wish for me to know.”
Freed, the creature gained its feet and immediately adjusted its torn clothing, as if Meoraq had any inclination to ogle its repulsive body. But it looked at him…studying him…and so, almost against his will, Meoraq examined it in return.
Being this close to one of them made him somehow stop seeing all the obvious differences there were between their kinds and see instead the very few similarities: not just its eyes (which were the green of new leaves), but the basic lines of its body, the shape of its slender arms and legs, and every subtle thing that marked it as a child of Sheul’s design. He had no idea what horrific sin of its bloodline could have bred such malformation into its face, its skin, its very bones, but when he stood this close and saw it looking back at him with such eyes, he could not be repulsed.
Like a man in a dream, Meoraq watched his hand rise and brush the backs of his curled fingers across its high, smooth brow. The creature flinched, tearing its eyes off his boots (which it had been staring at so raptly, one wouldn’t ever imagine the thing was wearing a pair of its own) to look at him. And Meoraq, who could hardly believe he’d done that much, now found himself stroking his fingertips along the flat plane of the creature’s cheek. The thing’s skin dimpled even at the lightest touch, like drawing his hand across water. Meoraq followed the curve of its face down its jaw to its pointed chin, and then, as if he hadn’t done enough, moved to touch the ridiculous nub of a nose it wore above its flat mouth.
Its brow furrowed, but it let him touch. And then it raised its own hand and touched his face in return.
Meoraq stiffened and withdrew his hand as a fist, fighting the urge to knock the creature back into the brambles only with the aid of many long years’ training. A Sheulek is the master of his impulses, always.
Truth, but then, no man may freely touch a Sheulek. If Meoraq sought just cause to cut his blades across the soft throat offered to him, there it was.
Meoraq did nothing. He stood, tense and oversensitive to the slight feel of weight and warmth as the creature rubbed its fingerpads along his snout, up to his brow-ridges and right to the base of his first spine (he felt it twitch, not slapping flatter to his skull but actually relaxing outward, pressing into the creature’s touch), before slipping down over the side of his face toward his neck.
That was too much. Meoraq swiftly stepped back, catching the creature by the wrist before it could touch the sensitive scales over his throat. He should have pushed it away; he should have, but instead he turned its hand over. His thumb moved, tracing a circle against its palm. He looked up and saw its eyes fixed on his hand and its own, joined.
Joined.
A bolt of something hot and bright and not as deeply unpleasant as it probably ought to be struck Meoraq right in the soul. He released the creature and took a step back for good measure.
“I know Your ways are many and mysterious,” said Meoraq to Sheul, his heart racing, “but that cannot be what You intended.”
Sheul gave him no answer.
But the creature did.
It spoke, waggling its mouthparts to make its sounds. Then it waited, watching him, and said the same sounds again, this time patting itself on the chest. Mmbr. Mmbrrrbrs.
It had a name.
Meoraq recoiled, but the creature was adamant. It came a half-step closer, canting its head to an angle Meoraq could not help but see as intrigued and tinged with humor, saying its sounds over again, but with such impossible variation that he could not begin to imitate them.
Instead, and not without a faint sense of surrender, he gave his chest
a half-hearted knock and said his own name in return. Not the whole thing, of course. He may or may not be killing the creature later; he wasn’t getting too informal with it now. “Uyane Meoraq.”
The creature’s mouthparts flattened and opened around jaws tightly clenched, exposing its teeth, which were small and white and largely blunt, and which filled its mouth with no space at all between them. Yet it wasn’t snapping or growling or anything beast-like.
He thought it was smiling.
“Uyane Meoraq,” it said, or rather, those were the sounds it chewed up and regurgitated in ways that rendered the name itself only just discernible and deeply insulting. Oo’yanee, with no effort at all made to match the honorifics in pitch or tone. No, it was just Oo’yanee, meaningless sound, and Mee’orrak, which was actually worse because the creature put all the stress on the first syllable and bit off the rest in a such a way that it came uncomfortably close to making his name a derivative of male genitalia. He hadn’t heard his name spoken quite that way since he’d been twelve.
“Meoraq,” he said clearly, and knocked his chest again.
“Mee’orrak,” it babbled back. This time, it put the stress on the last syllable.
He tried a third time, leaning forward to put his eyes on a level with its own, as if his stare alone could help the fool thing understand him: “Meoraq.”
“Mee’orrak!”
It had to be trying to mangle his name. How else could it manage to such a spectacular degree?
It was knocking its own chest again: “Mmbr! Thtzmi. Ef’uqantok yu’af t’bi’ablt’sa minam. Mmbrrr!”
“I do not mark,” said Meoraq, openly showing the thing his confusion with the flexing of his spines, even though he had no reason to think the spineless creature would know the gesture’s meaning. “Do you mark me at all? Eh? Do you know speech?”
“Mbr. Imambr! Dam’mt donjst’sterritmi sa’a somthn! Mmbrr!”
“Gtdon!”
Meoraq recoiled for a second time, looking past Mmbr to the second creature who had come boldly across the prairie without him noticing. This creature also had a stick, which it held as if it were nerving itself up to point it at someone and just hadn’t decided yet whether it should be Meoraq or Mmbr.
“Gtdon,” it said again, waving one arm. “Imgnna killit.”
“R’rufukkn ntz?” Mmbr demanded and after that, the words between them were too many and too heated to sort out.
Meoraq’s eyes darted from one to the other, but otherwise he did not move. He knew that he could kill two creatures as easily as one—for that matter, he knew that he could kill all of them, especially now that he had seen the way the creatures hunted—but something stayed his hand, something more than he could fathom. Sheul spoke into his heart…but like Mmbr’s words, it was sound without meaning. He knew only that his fate was tied to them.
The creatures were still barking at each other, neither one bending its neck to the other, and eventually the second creature abandoned words entirely. It shoved Mmbr aside, still barking, and raised its spear—not pointing it, but only wanting to make sure Meoraq saw it.
So Meoraq let him know he’d seen it by plucking it out of the creature’s pink little hand and snapping it over his knee. The creature let out a shrill sort of shout and leapt back, tangling its boots in the same thorns that had caught Mmbr, and fell over.
“Wut’thfuk,” said Mmbr, raising its arms to heaven and dropping them with a slap to its sides. “Skt wut’thfukz rong wth’u?”
The second creature pointed a shaking hand at Meoraq. “Tht’theng trid t’kilmi!”
Mmbr snorted. It was a perfectly recognizable sound, so much so that Meoraq had to look around and see the humor in its eyes for himself. And it was there, by Sheul, of a contemptuous sort, but there.
“F’thatwertru uudbi’ded,” said Mmbr. It looked up at Meoraq and its mouthparts curled, grotesquely pliant. It put its hand on his arm and took a step backwards, into the prairie. “Cm’n Meoraq. Donlzzn to’m. Eezadik.”
It wanted him to follow it, he realized.
And out of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever, thought, ‘She. She wants me to follow her.’
He looked from one creature to the other, stunned and not a little disgusted, and saw that Mmbr’s face indeed had more delicate features and although its clothes obscured much, its body as a whole was both smaller and rounder. Its chest in particular was as full as a milking mother’s, which it could very well be.
‘So then,’ he told himself brusquely. ‘It’s female. What of it?’
Her hand upon his arm felt warmer.
She grimaced at him, then turned around and started walking, picking her way back through the brambles past her sullen companion, trusting Meoraq to follow.
And he did.
6
Amber was never able to put into words just why she brought the lizard back to camp. When asked (and they asked, many times, for days afterwards), she was always able to come up with something plausible-sounding about how useful he might be, but that first impulse remained indefinable. She only knew that she wanted him with them.
So now he was here and he was staring at her. And that was okay, because honestly, she was staring back at him.
She should have been prepared to see something like this. An alien, that was. From the moment she’d first seen the scaly deer if not sooner. But there was a big difference between knowing intellectually that there were forms of animal life on this world and seeing a six-foot tall lizardman come at you out of the bushes with a knife in his hand.
Lizardman was perhaps a derogatory term. It was also the only one that fit. There was nothing wholly recognizable about his features, nothing she could point at and say with authority that looked like a crocodile or a komodo dragon or an iguana, but lizard summed it all up nicely. It was the ‘man’ bit that bothered her.
She was pretty sure he was a man, anyway, or at least a male. Masculinity was a stamp over the whole of his body: his lean and muscular build, the craggy scars cut into his scales, even the predatory way he had of crouching down and holding perfectly still while he stared at her—none of it was any guarantee of gender on an alien, but all of it screamed male to Amber’s eye.
So he—if he was a he—was a biped and essentially humanoid, with two legs and two arms and no tail. His was a gladiator’s body: a long, V-shaped chest, heavily scarred and ridiculously muscle-wrapped, that tapered into a flat stomach and narrow hips. His skin was the smooth, scaled hide of a snake rather that the rough one of an alligator, but however you looked at them, they were scales, black and shiny. But his hands had only three fingers, and they were fingers, not claws. His legs looked like normal legs, and although he had a habit of walking forward on the balls of his feet, they weren’t all bent backwards and bestial. He was even wearing boots.
The fact that he wore clothes had a way of wanting to boggle in Amber’s mind, as if the toughness of his scales rendered further covering superfluous and never mind the man’s modesty. He had pants stitched out of dun-brown hides with a wide leather belt to hold it on, and a harness over his largely-naked chest that seemed to serve mostly as an anchor for his hammered metal shoulder-guards. Apart from that, and the boots, he wore only weapons: a pair of short knives strapped to his bulging biceps, a hook-shaped sword clipped to his belt so it hung over one equally-bulging thigh, one broad, highly-polished sword carried in a sheath across his back, and a leather cord around his neck from which hung yet another knife, a small one this time, with an ivory handle. It appeared to be his favorite; his hand had a way of straying there when he muttered to himself. He did a lot of that, although he didn’t look crazy when he did it.
Not that she would know crazy when she saw it on a lizard, she supposed, but she was convinced there was a quietness to his expression. Not a calm, maybe, but a quietness. And she would be the first to admit that this was an unreasonable assumption because there was next to nothing that was readable about his face. He had two eyes
aimed forward just like hers (except for being too big and for the color, which was a deep red, flecked with gold), under a heavy brow-ridge lined with pebbly scales that became a tight double-row of flexible spines that swept over the top of his skull to about halfway down his neck. His nose and mouth were combined into a dragonish snout, which was broad, lipless, and immoveable except at the corners; she could see the point of his thick, rigid tongue when he opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t figure how he was shaping his words at all. Like a parrot, he just spilled out sound, then closed his mouth again and looked at her. It was easy to imagine she saw frustration mounting in those reptilian eyes as she tried to repeat him, and eventually he quit talking at all.
He just stared at her.
“I’m telling you for the last time, that thing is not sleeping in this camp tonight,” Scott announced.
The lizard’s eyes shifted to him.
“Good,” said Amber. “If it’s the last time, maybe now you’ll shut up about it.”
The lizard’s eyes came back to her.
“Miss Bierce—”
Back to Scott.
“—that thing is carrying a dozen weapons. It’s dangerous.”
“Wow,” drawled Amber. “Good eye, Commander. I can only count five myself. Where are the rest?”
The lizard’s eyes stayed on Scott. That was weird enough that she glanced around, too.
Scott was glaring at her. She was getting that look out of him a lot these days.
“You may not care what happens to these people, Miss Bierce—”
The lizard reached back and pulled that long, shiny sword out of his back-sheath. He didn’t do it fast, but he did it so smoothly and silently that it still looked like magic (and at the same time, he managed to make it clear that he could have done it fast if he’d wanted to).
“Here’s a thought,” said Amber. “If you’re really all that concerned about how dangerous the lizardman is, why don’t you stop antagonizing him?”