by R. Lee Smith
He caught her by the chin and pinched, not hard enough to hurt (although it was impossible not to feel the tremendous strength in that grip), but enough to shut her up. He pointed his knife down at the dead thing. He spoke again, just one word.
Did he want her to repeat him? Amber tried. “Soo—”
He pinched harder. Spoke.
“Saw…ow. Ak. Saw-owk.”
“Saoq,” he corrected, but released her. With the tip of his finger, he quickly drew a deer-shape in the wet dirt. “Saoq,” he said again, and stabbed his knife into its muddy heart. He said something else, pointed at the dead animal and said it again.
“What does that mean?” Amber asked. “Is it ‘dead’ or ‘meat’ or ‘hunt’ or—”
He caught her chin and pinched. He said his word.
“You know, I realize we’re the aliens here, but Scott wants you to learn English, not for us to learn lizardish.”
Pinch. He leaned close. He spoke once.
She repeated him., then crossly added, “Meat. Meat.”
He grunted, released her, and went back to butchering the animal…the saoq. He cut away a chunk of meat and held it up. He said a word.
“You should also know that I took Spanish from the second grade on up to the seventh and I flunked every single year.”
Meoraq cocked his head. He reached for her chin.
She pulled back out of his reach and said the stupid word.
The corners of his hard mouth turned up. He grunted, pulled the meat off the blade of his knife and skewered it on a thin bit of branch instead. He propped that over the fire beside him and said a new word, pointing at it.
Cook? Fire? Whatever it was, she parroted it back obediently.
His mouth opened in a hissing grimace. He took one of the gut-kabobs off the fire and held it up, steaming and dripping juices down its skewer, still partly raw and a little black around the edges, but enough to flood Amber’s mouth with eager water. He gestured at it, his spines flaring in what she could only hope was an encouraging manner.
She said the word she thought meant meat and then strung it all together into what she hoped was almost a real sentence: “Meoraq cook saoq meat.”
He winced. Sighed. Put the kabob back over the fire and looked at her.
“If you don’t like it, learn English. At least I’m making an effort here. Listen!” She reached out to pat the corpse. “Meat—oh yuck, it’s still warm. Oh God, and sticky!” She started to wipe her hand off on her pants, then changed her mind and dragged it over the ground instead. She only had so many clothes. “Meat! Say it with me! Meat!”
He frowned at her, silent.
“Any progress, Miss Bierce?”
Meoraq’s gaze shifted past her to watch Scott join them. His spines flattened. He bent over the saoq, ripping it out of the rest of its hide and muttering under his breath.
“What do you want?” Amber asked.
“Nothing. I’m just not comfortable leaving the heavily-armed alien unsupervised.”
“I’m here.”
“Also unsupervised.”
Scott probably had more to say, but whatever scathing insult he was cooking up turned into a gagging cry as Meoraq shoved a skinless, disemboweled, dead deer against his chest. He tried to back away, but Meoraq only shoved harder, more or less forcing Scott to embrace the corpse.
“What does he want?” Scott demanded shrilly.
Meoraq spat out some suggestions, then looked at Amber and cocked his head.
She replayed his words and realized there were a few in there she knew. “He wants you to eat it.”
Meoraq gave the corpse a last push and pointed firmly back at the other fire. He hissed through his teeth, his flat spines scraping at the top of his scaly head.
“And he wants us to leave him alone,” Amber translated. She started to get up.
Meoraq’s hand slammed down on her shoulder and seated her with a squishy thump back on the ground. He hissed at her next, exactly the same way. On his throat, faint lines of yellow color were coming into his scales. He pivoted at the hip and pointed at the other fire, spitting out lizard-words faster than she could follow. The message, however, was clear: Go back to your side of the camp and stay there.
Scott backed up, holding the carcass clumsily before him like a shield. “If that thing attacks me again, I’m holding you responsible,” he warned.
“He’s not attacking you, he’s feeding you,” said Amber, rubbing her shoulder. “Am I responsible for that? Seriously, Meoraq, that hurt.”
“Meoraq!” spat the lizardman, still glaring at Scott. But then he leaned back on his heels and cupped the end of his snout, taking deep breaths and muttering to himself, and when he looked at her again, the scales on his throat were all black once more. “Meoraq,” he said, and gestured toward her, grudgingly inviting her own name.
“Meat,” she said, using his word and rubbing her shoulder some more.
He flung up his hands, took one stomping step toward the fire and the gut-kabobs roasting there, then pulled himself up with a jerk and really stared at her.
“Yeah. Amber-meat. And if you make some joke about bacon—” she began, rounding on Scott, but he had taken advantage of Meoraq’s distraction to retreat. She could see him at the other fire already, surrounded by worshipful Manifestors, rewarding their loyalty with someone else’s food. And they loved him for it.
Something nudged her arm. Meoraq, impatiently trying to get her attention. He had another gut-kabob in his hand, this one a bit overcooked, and as soon as she was watching him, he plucked the chunk of liver off the top end of the skewer, said a word, and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t chew, but she could see the underside of his jaw moving as he worked his rigid tongue back and forth against the roof of his mouth. He swallowed, said the word again, and pointed at her with two fingers.
Her stomach growled. She clapped a hand over it stupidly, but it was too late. Meoraq looked at it and then at her, frowning.
“Meat,” she said in lizardish, stubbornly adding, “Meoraq’s meat,” just to let him know that she had no expectations.
His frown became a glare, so she knew she’d said it wrong, but he understood enough to pluck a second kabob off the coals and put it in her hand.
“You don’t get it. I don’t want you to take care of me,” she told him, trying to push it back at him. “I want you to show me how to take care of myself. Okay? Because I can’t be…” Her eyes wandered, seeking and finding the wisps of blonde hair flying above the crowd that could only be Nicci’s. “I have to take care of myself,” she said at last. “I have to take care of her.”
Meoraq rolled his eyes and scratched at the side of his snout, scowling at her. He started to speak, and then suddenly leaned out and caught her by the chin again. The scaly pads of his fingers dug in and forced her to face him. Red eyes that could never even pretend to be human stared her down while he talked at her. The word for ‘eat’ was in there. He hissed at the end of it, just a little, like putting an extra-hard dot on an i, then let her go and pointed at her kabob.
She ate it. It was tough as hell and overchewing it brought out all the wrong elements of its flavor, which was vaguely like beef, but darker, earthier, almost bitter with minerals. She was all too aware of how she looked as she struggled with it—the fat chick stuffing her face—but the first bite turned into the last one embarrassingly fast. When she looked up, sucking grease from her empty fingers, Meoraq was still holding on to most of his, his head slightly canted, watching her. So was the saoq’s head in the fire. Both of them with nearly the same expression.
“Thanks,” mumbled Amber, rubbing her mouth.
Meoraq grunted back at her. He took a piece of what might be kidney off his skewer, then paused, his gaze shifting beyond her, and popped it into his own mouth.
She looked back, already knowing she was going to see Scott, and there he was, marching toward them. He wasn’t alone. Since the saoq was cooking and staring at it
couldn’t help it roast faster, quite a few Manifestors were trickling over to Meoraq’s small fire, hungrily eyeing his gut-kabobs, his roasting severed head, even the bloody heap of hide. The lizardman watched them circle without expression, but the hand that did not keep an easy hold on his saoq-kebob drifted down to the hilt of one of his swords.
“You might want to give him some space,” Amber remarked.
Scott took a step back at once, then pinked and glanced behind him at the watching Manifestors. “I can’t believe you say that thing isn’t dangerous. It’s a textbook example of a hostile alien predator. Textbook. Even if we could disarm it, he could still bite someone’s hand off.”
“He’s not hostile and he doesn’t bite.”
Meoraq naturally chose that moment to take a huge bite of liver. His relatively few yet large and apparently very sharp teeth sheared through the tough meat so easily that they snapped audibly when his jaws met. He eyed Scott, contentedly eating in his lizardish way, and drew his hooked sword to tap against the toe of his boot.
“Really?” said Amber, looking at him.
His spines flicked.
“The only reason for anything to have a mouth like that is for biting,” Scott announced in a knockout imitation of a man who knew what he was talking about.
“Olfaction,” said Mr. Yao.
They all looked at him—Amber, Scott, and the lizard.
Mr. Yao rolled one shoulder in a shrug (Meoraq’s spines swept forward; he rolled one of his shoulders too, just a little bit, as if testing its range of motion). “I’m not a doctor of medicine,” he said. “I’m an evolutionary biologist.”
A short silence followed this statement. Mr. Yao seemed to be expecting it.
“Okay,” said Amber at last. “I have no idea what that means.”
“It means that I have studied the way animals evolve. I was assigned to this mission to assess whatever forms of life we might have encountered on Plymouth. There was always a chance, you see, that it might be inhabited, even though the probes never detected any higher signs of intelligent life.”
“Higher signs like what?” Amber asked as Scott said, “This is probably classified and you shouldn’t be discussing it with civilians.”
Mr. Yao chose to answer Amber. “Signs such as city lights, roadways, radio or satellite transmissions. Anything, in other words, that could be detected by a probe. They never found anything, but Plymouth was an Earth-class planet with a wide range of eco-systems. There were plants, it stood to reason there would be animals, and while they would surely be of some alien design, those designs must still serve some logical purpose, such as—” He glanced at Scott. “—the reason why certain animals have a snout-like mouth. Not to hold teeth, but to hold scent receptors.”
“Okay, that’s a great theory,” Scott said dismissively, already waving one hand to try and cut Mr. Yao off. Meoraq’s head tipped; his eyes tracked each movement of that hand. “But you can’t possibly prove it. This is an alien.”
“Nature follows necessity,” said Mr. Yao. “Generally speaking, the more pronounced the nasal area is, the more advanced the animal’s olfactory ability should be. Since our friend does not have many teeth, it can be assumed he uses that space for some other purpose, such as scent reception. In fact, if you look at him closely—”
They all did. Meoraq returned their stares without obvious concern, except that the sword he was playing with lifted ever so slightly.
“—you will see several pit-like pores around his mouth, separate from his nasal openings. Certain animals—particularly reptiles—have two distinct olfactory systems, one of them used mainly to detect pheromones. If I were to hypothesize further—”
“There’s nothing to be gained by discussing any of this,” Scott interrupted. “Regardless of Mr. Yao’s ideas on alien physiology, just the fact that the lizard is armed to his extremely sharp teeth proves that it has the potential to be dangerous.”
“He also has the potential to bring us food,” Amber pointed out. “And I noticed you took it before you started all this bullshit about how dangerous he is. Look, if he’d wanted to sneak out and come back with an army of raging lizardmen, he could have done that. If he’d wanted to slit our throats in the night, he could have done that too. Instead, he brought us breakfast and you’re bitching about it.”
“Thankfully, it’s not your job to concern yourself with the safety of others, Miss Bierce, because you appear to be as bad at that as you are at teaching English. I, on the other hand, can be objective about the benefits and detriments our native friend brings to the colony. So why don’t I do my job and you can try to do yours and everybody will be much happier?”
“Fuck you, Scott.”
Scott nodded as if this were exactly the answer he’d expected. If he’d reached out to pat her on the head as his smirking expression indicated he might, she might have lost it, but he didn’t, so she didn’t. He walked away, taking his Manifestors with him and instructing these to gather wood and those to build more fires so they could all see how commanding he was.
Amber watched them go, confused and pissed off and mostly tired and cold and still hungry. She had always been very good at dealing with life’s little shit-heaps, but she honestly couldn’t see any way out of this one. She could see it getting worse almost by the minute, but she couldn’t see how to stop it. All she could do was get the lizard talking as quickly as possible and hope that once the others saw that someone was with them who actually knew what he was doing, all this Commander crap would just…blow over.
‘Never happen,’ she told herself in the voice of her dead mother. ‘If it all goes right, the lizardman will be Commander Scott’s friendly native guide. If it all turns to shit, he’ll be the mistake you brought into camp. Either way, Commander Scott is here to stay, so you can suck it up, little girl…’
“Or you can blow it out,” Amber finished, then sighed and looked at Meoraq. When he looked back at her, she made herself smile. “We’re going to do this,” she told him. “We just have to start simple, right?”
He frowned.
“Right.” Amber patted herself on the chest. “Human. Say it with me. Human.”
Meoraq’s gaze dropped to her hand. He grunted and handed her what was left of his gut-kebob. He told her to eat it, then got up and went into his tent, leaving her alone with the saoq’s slowly roasting head and its silent, judgmental stare.
9
The first days among the creatures who called themselves humans were a true test of Meoraq’s discipline. Oh, they weren’t wild, or at least, they weren’t aggressive. Although they remained cautious and their leader in particular did a lot of barking from a short distance, they accepted him into their pack without challenge. It was what they did afterwards that wore on a man.
In spite of their clothing, their shelters, and their primitive attempt at language, Meoraq often found himself questioning his conviction that these were intelligent creatures—people—and not constructs of Sheul’s devising made just before their first meeting. They showed no ability or even any interest in taking care of themselves. Except Amber, who made herself positively obnoxious every morning when he set out for the day’s hunt.
Meoraq had no experience with either cattle or children and had to rely upon prayer and his own instincts where the bulk of their care was concerned. At times, he marveled that he had not lost one yet, especially since it seemed that the instant his attention wandered, they were squabbling or wandering out into the plains or falling asleep with their fires unbanked. Some days it seemed his prayers were evenly split between asking Sheul for guidance in keeping them from killing themselves and begging Him to let Meoraq do it himself. And perhaps the humans sensed it, because although they ate what he fed them, none of them dared to come too near.
Well…one of them dared. The fearless little spear-hunter. Amber. She spent more time with him than with her own kind, and far from shooing her off, he shamelessly encouraged her by feeding her and
allowing her and her friend, Nicci, to sleep by his fire. But if he showed a certain proprietary interest in her, it at least served a greater purpose. After all, nothing could be accomplished until they could talk to one another.
Amber had not flagged in her determination to teach him the crude speech of her people, although she seemed amenable to learn dumaqi as well, inasmuch as her physical defects allowed. As the days passed and she continued to mangle the simple words he gave her, he could see her frustration mounting, but he refused to resort to humani. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word; his many meditations on the First Law had brought him no clear answers, only the same vague feeling that these were people, and if so, then Sheul had deliberately made them in this mold, with the deformities that made dumaqi impossible for them to speak, and if that were true, how could he, Meoraq, born of clay, judge them for being as God made them? Nevertheless, it remained true that he must hold to the admonitions of the Prophet and speak only Man’s tongue. He could see that Amber understood his words far less than he did hers, but she had made some progress already and could only make more. With Amber, Meoraq found he could be at least a little patient. With the others…
Yet for all the aggravation of tending them, it was not so terrible an ordeal. He’d never kept a pet before and keeping close to fifty of them all at once in the wildlands was not how any man ought to begin, but he seemed to be having some success at it and he had to admit, he liked having someone to talk to, even if she couldn’t talk back.
Funny. He’d never thought of himself as a personable sort. He spent the greatest share of his life alone. Travel along the empty roads between the cities of his circuit took the bulk of his time and what was left over was rarely passed among company. It was not considered fitting for a Sheulek to socialize with others of his caste. Even the thought felt scandalous and slightly sinful—God’s Striding Foot at the garrison’s recreation hall with common watchmen and gatekeepers. He might pass a few moments before a trial with a man like himself, as he had passed them with Sheulteb Ni’ichok Shuiv in Tothax, but these moments, while pleasant, were few. Home was the one place where he might be allowed to relax in the company of other men, to trade stories, share nai, tell low-humored jokes and laugh at them without embarrassment, but only once a year, only for the cold season, and only with the most immediate members of his family. It was something of a curiosity to discover that he liked looking into Amber’s ugly face and listening to her earnest gibberish. He liked telling her—over and over and over—to put her spear down and go back to sleep and see her sulk as she obeyed him. He liked coming into camp and seeing her stand to greet him, even if it was just because he fed her so often. He liked her company and he supposed it must mean the rest of them had some redeeming quality as well.