by R. Lee Smith
He did not, but after a long, frustrating silence, he slowly raised his hand.
“Hand,” said Amber, rubbing her eyes.
He splayed it.
She straightened up a little. “Fingers.”
He made a fist and brought them up one at a time, listening as she counted them off. He began to point—at the fire, his tent, the trees, the grass, the sky—stopping only once, when one of the Manifestors broke the boundary-line of his camp. Other than that warning hiss, he never made a sound. He made no attempt to repeat the words she said for him.
But this was progress. This could work. She would make it work.
Amber talked, breaking things down into smaller and smaller words, talking until her throat went dry. Meoraq watched, listened, and was silent.
7
The longer he listened, the more certain Meoraq became that the strange chatter of the creatures who called themselves humans was indeed a true language, entirely separate from his own. This troubled him. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word. This was the first law of Sheul, repeated no less than twenty-three times throughout the book of His Word, and apart from the obvious, it had been interpreted to mean that there must be a single language so that all men might hear and understand the wisdoms of Sheul. Where once there had been countless tongues spoken over Gann, there was now only one: Dumaqi, the speech of men.
So. That the humans neither spoke nor even seemed to understand dumaqi was therefore an ominous sign of their true nature, but Meoraq had to admit that he had not emerged from his mother’s womb speaking it either. He would have to meditate on the matter. In the meantime, this left him struggling to make sense of a creature who thought all she had to do to talk was move her mouthparts around. And really, what else could they do? A human’s flat face had no snout, which meant no resonance chamber, and Sheul alone knew how hard it must be to make those wriggly little mouthparts shape the sounds those deformed tongues could not. Given their limitations, their absurdly simplistic language was no more than sounds strung together, entirely lacking the subtle nuance and precision of dumaqi. By the end of that first day, Meoraq was already beginning to glean some understanding from the creatures’ jabber. Not much. A word here. A sound there. A name.
Amber. Her name was Amber.
She sat with him throughout the grey hours of the day when all the other creatures came, stared awhile, then left again. Her hands moved as she spoke, gesturing here or there to add emphasis to her simple sounds, often returning to indicate just her, just him. Her gaze remained disturbingly direct; her eyes were so damned green.
When darkness fell, they lit more fires—heaps of wood that gave out more smoke than heat—and sat around them to mutter and stare. They had no meat after their one failed hunt, but the one called Scott eventually brought out a satchel of something in small, wrapped portions for his people to eat. Meoraq was himself overlooked, but as the stuff appeared quite disgusting, he was happy to make do with cuuvash. And since Amber was sitting with him and had not been offered anything, he snapped her off a square too.
She took it. Not immediately and not without a glance back at her people, but she took it. And after watching him bite into his, she gnawed off a piece of hers and sat, frowning with her entire malleable face, chewing it like cattle.
Scott came back over, also frowning. He spoke at some short length, gesturing. Amber answered. Scott spoke again, louder. Amber took another bite of cuuvash and appeared to ignore him. Scott aimed his next roll of gibberish at Meoraq. Now Amber said something, but Meoraq pointed two fingers at her and she quieted. “No one speaks for a Sheulek,” he told her. To Scott, he said, “Go away,” making shooing sweeps of his arm so that his meaning could not be misinterpreted.
Scott talked, not louder but much, much longer, before finally pointing aggressively at Meoraq’s cuuvash.
“Get your own,” said Meoraq, contentedly grinding his cuuvash against the roof of his mouth until it was soft enough to swallow.
Scott waited, moving his angry eyes back and forth between him and Amber, but eventually walked away. Meoraq watched him at the largest fire, speaking tirelessly and looking like nothing so much as a city governor holding court. He could see that Amber was listening, although she did not watch, and she did not appear easy with what she heard. She looked at the remaining portion of cuuvash in her hand and, after only one small bite, tried to give it back to him.
Meoraq turned his head to watch the clouds roll over the moon and pretended not to see. Eventually, she put the cuuvash in a fold of her clothes and he looked at her again. That freakish little nub of a nose. Those fat, purplish folds around her mouth. The rounded shells of her ears.
And her eyes. The living green fire of her eyes.
“No one man can ever comprehend all the wonders of Sheul’s making,” he said, speaking to himself more than to her. “So it says in the Word and I always thought that I believed it. But how could I believe it when I never truly understood until now how much further the wonders of His making could surpass a man’s comprehension?”
“Mee’orakk,” she replied and reached to touch his chest.
This time, he allowed it, frowning down at her hand where it pressed on his bare flesh. “No man could have imagined a hand like that,” he mused. “Five fingers and those round, flat, useless little claws. Scaleless. Hairless. Soft. And yet what have you done with that hand but touch a Sheulek?”
“Amber.” She patted herself just above the twinned swellings of her chest.
“I hear you,” he said, studying them. “Are those really teats or do I just think so because I suspect you to be female and am looking for proof? If they are teats, where is the baby? It would have to be a suckling to swell you so. Or babies, I suppose; you have two teats, you must bear two babies.”
Amber said her name. Meoraq replied with his. He watched her slap her hands to her face and hide behind them, rubbing just as though she had brow-ridges to rub.
That was kind of cute.
“I have to pray,” Meoraq told her, told them both, really. He retreated to his tent to do it and meditated there for some time, fruitlessly, before commending himself to his Father’s divine hands, here in the camp of these creatures, and lying down upon his mat to sleep. He did not undress. He kept his kzung drawn beside him. He feared no creature-assassins but was ready for them. He breathed the way he had been taught, counting six steps over and over, and stopping to listen each time the creatures approached his tent.
As he waited for Sheul’s peace to overtake his restless mind, he found himself wondering what the young of these creatures might look like. He could almost imagine them—twin monsters in miniature—small hands and greedy mouths at work at the fullness of their mother’s teats (Amber’s, for no other reason than that she was the human he’d been sitting with all day), perhaps one at each.
Outside, the wind gusted, moaning like a woman lost to fire. Scott’s voice briefly overtook it and Amber answered, her tone as fearless as her hand had been upon his body. Meoraq listened, smiling, then rolled onto his side and closed his eyes to sleep.
* * *
He dreamt.
Dreams, by their very nature, frequently touched at strangeness and he was not a man who attached much importance to them, even when he recalled them upon waking, which was not often. But this…
When he became aware of it (he could not say ‘at its beginning’ for, like so many dreams, it seemed to have much more history than he could recall upon waking), he found himself seated in the lessons room at the training hall in Tilev. Many others were with him, paying rapt attention to Master Tsazr at the head of the hall, who was going on in his terse, impatient way about something. None of this yet seemed odd. It had been twelve years and some since his ascension, but Meoraq still dreamed of his training days upon occasion. At least he was wearing clothes in this one.
But when he turned his head, he saw that half the students around him were humans. Amber sat at his side, a lesson
s slate in her lap and a stylus in her five-fingered hand, scratching out notes in alien markings. At his other side sat a dumaq, a stranger, wearing the garments of an exarch with the hood pulled so low over his face that Meoraq could see nothing but his painted snout. His was rather a plain robe, sparsely trimmed and not entirely clean, nothing at all like the fine dress of Exarch Ylsathoc.
Without looking at him, this stranger said, “What is it you seek in Xi’Matezh?”
Wasn’t that just like an exarch, to involve himself in someone else’s personal business?
But Meoraq found himself answering, and answering with both honesty and respect: “I seek communion with Sheul.”
“A man need not travel to the end of the world to seek what can be found upon his knees in his own courtyard. Your House is empty,” the hooded figure said before Meoraq could reply, not that any reply came to his dreaming mind. “Should not a son see to the continuance of his physical father’s honor rather than undergoing lengthy journeys in his spiritual Father’s name?”
Meoraq rarely felt emotion in dreams, but shame stung at him now. Shame, oddly, and not annoyance at the presumption of this stranger. “I never said that I would not take stewardship of Uyane!”
“You certainly seem eager to postpone it.”
“No!”
“No? Then why—” The exarch’s head cocked, still revealing nothing but paint and shadow and now the pinpoint gleam of one eye. “—do you seek Xi’Matezh? What would you ask of Sheul that requires so arduous a journey?”
And rather than tell this man his prayers were for Sheul alone, Meoraq said, “If it is Sheul’s will that I am retired to Uyane, so I will serve Him.”
The exarch dipped his head once, acknowledging, expectant.
“But I do not wish to spend all the years of my remaining life bound to stewardship if it is not His will!”
“Is the House so hateful?”
“The House?” Meoraq looked over his shoulder where, as only seemed right and natural, the lessons room had opened into the rooftop courtyard at the fore of House Uyane. He could see the stone couch his father favored beneath the drooping branches of a ribbonleaf tree, and the wide steps where he himself used to sit when he was at lessons (or when he was hoping to steal a glance at the servant girl who scrubbed the courtyard tiles). “No,” he said now, puzzled. “It is my father’s House and has all my love.”
“Not all, it would seem, if you would travel to the end of the very world to escape it.”
“It is not the House I wish to escape.”
“No?”
Meoraq looked again, but now the courtyard had become his father’s innermost chamber, as seen through the eyes of the young boy he had been on the only occasion he had seen it. And just why he had gone to such a forbidden room, he could not recall, but he could perfectly remember how it had been: the light of lamps behind the screen casting shadows on every wall, the scent of some flowery incense heavy in the air, and the cupboard of his father’s bed standing open so that he could see the broad, scarred field of his father’s back as it bunched and heaved and arched.
Meoraq averted his eyes fast, but the sounds persisted. His father’s deep, steady breaths. His mother’s feeble, mewling cries. The stealthy rasp of scales moving together. The wet pull and suck of sex in its second round.
The stranger was watching, his long hands steepled beneath his chin. “This embarrassed you.”
Meoraq did not reply and did not look again.
“Is it not a lord’s responsibility to preserve his bloodline? To sire sons of his loyal woman?”
His loyal woman. Meoraq’s jaws clenched.
“Surely you do not question Yecedi’s loyalty?”
“I am sure she was ever faithful to my father,” Meoraq said curtly. And he was. Yecedi had passed directly from her father’s own House to Rasozul’s and did not leave it until the day she died.
“She was a good woman.”
“I suppose so.” Meoraq shrugged his spines, wishing the sounds of sex would stop or at least that his mother’s urgent moaning would. “She was a perfect high-born wife, obedient and invisible and able to produce three strong sons upon command.”
The exarch looked at him. “Do you think your father gave it as his command?”
The sounds died away suddenly, swallowed up by the lessons room wall. Meoraq glanced that way, saw dark stone and students, and shrugged again.
“Of course, when you bore that night your reluctant witness, your father had already done his siring,” the exarch mused. “What embarrasses you most, I wonder? That you saw your father in Sheul’s fires, or that you saw him with your pregnant mother instead of some pretty young servant?”
“My father had no business taking her to his bed!” Meoraq burst out.
“Is it not the duty of a loyal woman to answer all her man’s desires?” said the exarch with the faintest hint of sarcasm.
“No, it is the duty of a loyal woman to sit in her damned room and grow her son! What was she even doing in that part of the house that he saw her?”
“Perhaps she was invited,” the exarch murmured, steepling his fingers again.
“He could not have passed fewer than three other women if he went to fetch her out. Any one of whom would have been honored to receive his fires!”
“Do you think so?”
“But, no! He had to have gone all the way to her room and back and for what? Sheul does not give a man sexual urges so that he can spend them with a woman already carrying his child!”
“The bond between man and woman is sacred even in the eye of Sheul. Nothing they took as their pleasure together offended Him.”
Meoraq snorted.
“When you take up the stewardship of House Uyane, will you not want a woman such as Yecedi?”
Meoraq tried to snort again but it came out as a hiss. He rubbed at his snout, then his brow-ridges, and finally his throat, where he could feel anger throbbing.
“A good woman. A loyal woman.”
A mewling little breed-pot, forever shackled to Meoraq’s wrist. He would have to live with her each and every day, unless he were away defending his House or his city’s honor, and he would not be permitted to send her out until after he had at least two grown sons to guarantee his continuance. Or unless she were barren, in which case he would have to replace her immediately with an entirely new mewling little breed-pot.
“Is it so impossible to imagine you could be happy with a woman?”
“I am frequently happy with women,” Meoraq snapped.
“With one woman.”
He rubbed his brow-ridges. “If that is Sheul’s will.”
“And so you travel to Xi’Matezh.”
“Yes.”
“To pray for Sheul’s guidance.”
“Yes.”
“That He may lead you to a good woman to take into your House.”
Meoraq hissed again and shook his head. “Yes.”
“Perhaps you could find one here.”
“Here?” Meoraq looked around the lessons room, at dumaqs and humans side at side, all the way to Master Tsazr, indiscriminately lecturing all. “There are no women allowed in the training halls!”
It was a dream, and his voice, which had gone unnoticed all this time, suddenly rang out like tribunal bells. Every head turned.
“Uyane!”
He snapped to his feet at once, dream or no dream, and Master Tsazr came swiftly forward to slap him deservedly across his snout. It did not hurt in the dream, but it still staggered him some. Master Tsazr had a wicked hand.
“No women in the training halls, eh? Have you come to work your mind?” Tsazr inquired caustically. “Or your clay?”
“My mind, sir.”
“I have my doubts. Amber.” The human name fell perfectly from Tsazr’s mouth.
“Yes, sir.” The dumaqi words came perfectly from Amber’s.
“What is the day’s lesson? Remind Uyane.”
“We speak of the
Ancients, sir.”
“Tell Uyane your lesson.”
Amber turned her soft, flat face toward him. The bad light of the lessons room made her pale skin seem wholly white, her dun-colored hair seem grey as ashes, and her nondescript training garments as black as the Abyss, but her eyes were still green as new leaves and deep as wells. She said, “Our numbers swelled until our cities covered all the earth. When we had no more land to cover, we built our cities on top of themselves and milled in them all together, like yifu. We took the holy gifts of medicine and science and used them in frivolous and dangerous ways. We made machines to give us comfort and used them until we poisoned all our earth and water and air. We made trade of sex and suffering and war. We mocked Sheul and we corrupted Gann.”
“The Ancients corrupted Gann,” agreed Master Tsazr, striding along the rows of silent students and pausing often to run a speculative (and largely dismissive) eye over each face. “And Gann in turn corrupted them. The Ancients turned from Sheul, devastating the land to fuel their wickedness and making constant war upon themselves until at last Sheul rose up and smote them with His judgment. Uyane!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Name the three acts of the Fall of the Ancients.”
Thank Sheul in His heaven for an easy question. “The first act was the punishment of wrath, when every man was consumed by rage and war enveloped all of Gann.”
“For how long?”
Meoraq stared for a moment, utterly thrown. Back came Master Tsazr’s hand, but it could not knock answers into him when there were none.
“Amber,” said Tsazr, turning around. “How long did the act of wrath last?”
“It is still among us,” she replied, which was the most nonsensical thing she could have said here, in Sheul’s world of peace.
But Master Tsazr grunted approvingly and walked away. “Speak on, Uyane. What was the second act?”