by R. Lee Smith
But they did test a man and every now and then, it was either walk away from them and their constant neediness or slap them until either his hand or their heads fell off.
So it was that the end of a very long and trying evening found Uyane Meoraq, twelve years a Sheulek in God’s service and honest victor of hundreds of trials, outside the vague boundary of the humans’ camp, hiding in a tree.
He knew he was hiding. He could even see the humor in it, in a sour sort of way. A Sheulek was the master of his clay. He knew no fear and no hesitation when he stood in the arena in the sight of Sheul, and yet here he was. Not so far away that he could not leap down and defend them if the humans drew some danger into their midst, but hopefully out of sight. The coming winter had caused most of the leaves to brown and a few to drop, so he was not as invisible as he would have liked, but corrokis couldn’t look up and perhaps neither could humans.
It was surprisingly pleasant up here. Meoraq was not a man fond of heights under most circumstances, but today he found the scope of the view soothing to his eye. The evening air was cool but dry for the moment, and there was enough light yet that he could see small herds of saoq moving in the prairie, and the larger dark dots of corrokis grazing among them.
He supposed he had time enough for a short hunt before the sun was gone, but he had brought one meal into this camp already today and that would just have to be enough for the greedy bellies of his humans. He himself had most of two bricks of cuuvash yet and he didn’t mind eating some in front of them. For now, he was content just to feel the edge of his appetite as he meditated with his eyes open, clearing his mind of all thought but open to the will of Sheul on the slim chance that He should speak, and just watching the world while he still had it to himself.
It was peaceful.
But it didn’t last.
It began with one human, the one called Scott, trudging noisily through the trees and yawning against its hand with no apparent purpose to its wanderings until it leaned itself up against the very tree in which Meoraq sought refuge and opened its breeches.
Meoraq had no intention of watching the human undress, but before he could avert his eyes, the human reached into its clothing and drew out a short, thick tube of discolored flesh. The human held this limp and repulsive appendage in its hand as it scratched sleepily at its hair, and after a moment or two, out arced a steaming sluice of bright yellow fluid.
It was pissing. Standing up.
But through what? It hung, finger-length and flopping, beneath a short thatch of dark hair, much darker and curlier than that which grew on Scott’s head, and above a second distended lump of flesh Meoraq presumed to be its bladder, externalized by some quirk of human design. The appendage itself seemed to be boneless and had no real distinguishing characteristics that Meoraq could see at this height, apart from its loose outer skin which could not quite cover the dark, bulbous tip from which its urine endlessly poured. That stream, as well as the coincidental placement of the appendage between the human’s legs, made it seem uncannily like…
By Gann, it was its penis.
It was pissing out of it.
It was pissing out of its soft, blotchy, malformed cock.
Two more humans were coming. The one called Scott glanced in the direction of their noisy approach as his stream slackened, then actually waggled the flabby spout of his organ to shake free the last drops of urine before folding itself back into his breeches. The humans met and grunted greetings. Scott retreated; the other two opened their clothing, muttering to one another, and drew out two more floppy cocks to piss through. They differed somewhat in size and color, but that was all.
So they were uncontestably males. Which meant that there were also females. Amber would be a female. He had suspected that from the first and he felt absolutely nothing at having his suspicions confirmed because it did not matter to him if a human were male or female any more than it mattered if, oh, if a saoq were male or female. Animals were animals, and in a purely animal sense, the only question worth pondering was whether some or all of those human females might at this moment be breeding.
Meoraq forced himself to look down, to study the limp things the human males had and ponder the breeding of humans. He had no experience with the husbandry of animals; if there was a way to look at these creatures and know how quickly it made young or how many it could drop in a litter, Meoraq did not know what it was. He thought he’d ought to know too, because whether or not they were breeding at the moment, if they had opposing gender, there would be offspring eventually. If the swollen teats of their women were anything to measure by, those offspring might already have been recently birthed, but they were not in evidence now, which could mean the females would soon be ready to conceive again.
He had to think of Amber then, much as he had been fighting it. Amber and her silly spear. Amber, who spent so much time sitting at his fire and taking the little bites he fed her (right from his hand) and trying with such spectacular unsuccess to mouth his words. And yes, Amber, who was female, not that this mattered, and who might be breeding (he caught at his snout to stop the hiss that shot insensibly out of him) as she damned well should be (Meoraq swung himself down and out of the tree’s fork, moving fast from branch to branch until he dropped with a curse to the ground) instead of running over the wildlands with pointed sticks!
“Although You have made no law against this,” Meoraq acknowledged, glancing heavenward as he aimed himself for the humans and their camp. “And I admit I like better to see her at her foolish hunt than to see her N’ki doing nothing but waiting to be fed in proper female fashion.”
Nicci did everything in proper female fashion, come to think of it. She sat quietly, kept herself largely invisible and showed obedience to male command, since now he knew Scott to be male. Amber did none of these things, really. She talked almost constantly when she was with him, even reaching out to touch him if she did not think she had enough of his attention, and she let her frustrations show plainly on her ugly face. She kept apart from the rest of her kind, but was quick enough to argue with them if she thought they gave her cause. As for obedience, ha! He tried to imagine Amber as a proper female, to picture her in her father’s House (it greatly resembled his own in Xeqor) kneeling meekly, her neck bent and hands turned to heaven…
He couldn’t do it. Perhaps she had been feminine once, but no longer.
He liked her better like this anyway.
There had to be something wrong with him.
It was not far into the evening, and yet the humans were bedding themselves down in broad rings around the fires when he returned. Amber was still sitting up, wrapped in the shiny skin of her blanket, watching the other humans gnaw on saoq bones and talk at each other while she sat alone. She did not look at him until he had been standing over her for quite some time and she did not smile when she finally did.
She. So he had been thinking of her all this time, but he wanted to be sure. He needed to be sure. Just why he needed to be sure this instant, he didn’t know and did not explore. He simply hunkered down and started drawing in the dirt.
She watched listlessly until he had made two images, featureless blobs with arms and legs and hairy heads. She knew they were human and said so, tapping at them without enthusiasm even as her attention wandered back to the fire.
He caught her chin and made her look at the drawings as he, not without an internal wince, carefully added twin curves to one image and a short line to the other.
She studied the pictures in silence, her mouthparts slowly turning up at the corners. “Yeh. I ges we ki’indaskipt tht’biht. Man,” she said, pointing at the male figure. And at the female: “Woman.” And then she patted herself on the chest, right above the swellings of her—yes, her—teats. “Woman.”
‘If they are people, it is not a sin,’ he thought vaguely, and his belly warmed at once. ‘If they are people, she is a woman in your camp, under your protection, and she owes you every obedience.’
&
nbsp; Even so, it would still be one of the unforgiveable sins and he knew it. The Word forbade all men, even Sheulek, to lie with a girl not yet in her woman’s years, or with any woman in her sickbed, or with a milking mother, unless she was his wife. Amber may indeed be female, but the proof of it was as good as a warning.
He made himself the master of his clay and put aside sexual thoughts—mostly—to add a third drawing to the first two. He wasn’t happy with it. He’d made it very small, armless and legless, as if wrapped in a blanket, but the effect was disturbingly grub-like instead. He scowled, started to rub it out and try again, then just looked at her and gestured around the camp. “Where are your children?” he asked boldly.
She tapped the grub. “Ba’bee. Orkid I ges. Ch’iild. You no litelpursen.”
“Where are they?” he asked again, determined to keep her focused. “Where is your child?”
She actually seemed to understand some of that, enough to draw back and crease up her brows at him. “Mine? Dijju’just say werz my ba’bee?”
He started to point at her teats, then changed his mind and pointed at those of the dirt-woman instead.
“Oh.” She chuffed and looked down at her chest anyway. “Yeh. Theh’alwez luklyk’thss. D’ssnt alwez meen therza ba’bee. We don’t hev enee ba’bees heer’rytnow.”
It took some time to break that apart and bring it together in a way that made sense and once he had, he did not quite trust the meaning he took away. Hesitantly, he tapped the dirt-woman directly on one of the teats, then tapped the dirt-child.
“Nope,” said Amber, a clear and definitive negation. “Jsst big’buubs.”
He leaned back, trying very hard not to stare at them. It was grotesque to think her teats were always swollen, but if there was no suckling, then there was no sin in mating with her.
And that was where his mind went, yet again. Right there. Like a lodestone clamping on to steel. There was something really wrong with him.
As he grappled with this, one of the figures at the fire rose and came back to join them. Amber’s friend, Nicci. She sat—he knew it was a she by the teats—and gave Meoraq a wary nod.
“Wutz he duun’eer?” Nicci asked, eyeing the pictures in the dirt as if she thought they might be poisonous.
“Nuthnn,” said Amber, showing her teeth in a smile. “Litel’lengwij lessn thatzal. Sex’ehd lzzrdstyl.”
Nicci frowned, slowly drawing up her knees and hugging them to put the barrier of her skinny arms and legs between them. This act pulled the fabric of her breeches very tight across her loins, forming folds that made it appear as if she had a slit. Meoraq looked at the sky.
“Itz nuthnn,” Amber said again, no longer smiling. “Luk itwuz bountoo cummup.”
“Why? Wutz he wantwthuz?” Nicci whispered, her eyes still fixed on Meoraq.
“Nothing! Fr’Cryzzakes, eeza lzzrd! Eez jst nevrseen buubz b’for!”
“Thn wutabout tht?”
Silence. Meoraq risked a glance to see why and found the two of them studying the diminutive dirt-penis on his dirt-man.
“Peepel tokabout yutu,” said Nicci.
“O fuktht!” Amber spat with startling venom. “Thziz my j’b Nicci! You wanna givmeeshit about’ow I doit, doit yorgod dam slf!”
She threw off her shiny blanket, punched it down into her pack, and stomped away.
Meoraq watched her go, frowning. He’d embarrassed her—and he could hardly claim innocence after drawing a penis and showing it to her—but he himself felt no shame. In truth, he felt nothing as she fled him except a simmer of resentment at this Nicci, who had turned an awkward but promising conversation into a big puddle of piss.
They sat there, and after a time, he went ahead and looked at her.
She flinched and ducked her head, so exactly like a dumaq woman that he expected her to mewl at him. Gann’s unreasoning lust both leapt and curdled to nauseating effect. He got up at once and stalked away to his tent.
Safely shut away from human eyes, he tore off his tunic and boots, threw himself on his mat and gave the loin-plate girding him a vicious slap. It stung his palm a little. It hurt his stubbornly extruding cock a lot, but he doubted that would teach it any lasting lessons. Even now, in this storm of furious reproach, he knew that if it had been Amber who bent her neck to him, he would be on her, in her, right this instant.
Six breaths, Uyane. A slow-count of six. One for the Prophet, two for his brunt, and onward, as many times as it takes to remember that you are the master of your clay.
Six breaths. Six more. Six again.
Of course, Amber never would bend her neck.
Six breaths. Lashraq. His brunt. Uyane, father of his own line. Mykrm. Oyan. Thaliszr. And back to the Prophet.
Unless she were looking at her boots. Then she might, but then she wouldn’t care what he thought about seeing the back of her neck. And she certainly would never make that sound. She didn’t know anything about how to be a real woman, and that more than anything bothered him, because what did it say about him that he still wanted to have sex with her?
This was part of the ordeal. It had to be. Sheul had made the humans to test his resolve, his patience and his resourcefulness, and He had made Amber specifically to test his self-control. He needed to stare that down, own it, conquer it, and get on with his damned life.
Six breaths, like rising stairs. Meoraq climbed them over and over, determined to find peace at the top. He had almost done so—almost—when out of the pure black nothing, he suddenly thought, ‘You don’t like her in spite of the way she acts, you know. You like her because of it.’
‘I don’t like her at all,’ he thought back defiantly. At once he felt the Sheulek in him judge that for the lie it was. He may hate the feelings he had—they felt dangerous and deviant, even when they were not wholly anchored to his loins—but he couldn’t pretend he didn’t have them.
And sometimes…he wasn’t even sure he hated them.
10
And that was how the time passed for Amber. Days that had seemed hellishly interminable when there was nothing to fill them but wind and rain, hunger and cold, now flew by. Even when Meoraq wasn’t there to give her his blank, silent stares as she pleaded with him to say her name, say hello, say fuck off, say anything, the time slipped away from her. If it wasn’t for Scott’s regular reminders that she’d wasted six days trying to teach a lizard how to talk…ten days…twelve…she would have lost track of them completely.
Which wasn’t to say that they hadn’t made any progress. Meoraq still had not said one word of English, but he responded to it. Of course, his responses were all in lizardish, which stubbornly resisted all of Amber’s attempts to decipher. Oh, she thought she was picking some up. She thought that every day until she actually tried to talk and inevitably insulted him. She didn’t even know how half the time. She’d just be there, clumsily coughing up lizard-words, and suddenly he’d stiffen and glare at her. If he felt like giving her another chance at that point, he might correct her (invariably with the same exact word she’d just said). More often, he just told her to be quiet and went on with what he was saying. Sometimes, he got up and left, muttering to himself and to his god on high, which was an open invitation for Scott to come over and illustrate all the ways in which she was a failure.
She tried not to let it worry her. Whether or not Meoraq ever learned to talk, Amber didn’t really think Scott would throw him out (and only partly because she didn’t think he could). She hadn’t seen a ration bar since Meoraq had started feeding them; she thought the last of them had probably been eaten in a celebratory binge during an extra-long, extra-quiet debriefing several days ago. Scott may not like the lizard, but he had no trouble recognizing the benefits of having him around.
He was off hunting at the moment, Meoraq. She’d heard him leave a little before dawn and even though the sun was now well up over the horizon, he might be gone for hours yet. Regular meals had done wonders for the morale here at camp, but steady predation
had definitely made the saoqs skittish. They were nowhere to be seen anymore, not even from the top of the ridge. Meoraq never came back without one, but whatever secret tracking technique he used to find them, he kept it to himself.
And that bothered her. A lot. Amber knew her first hunt hadn’t exactly been the sort of thing to inspire confidence, but she sure wasn’t going to get any better at it without practice. She couldn’t understand how everyone could just sit around, day after day, waiting for Meoraq to come back and feed them, and sometimes even bitching to each other about how much time he took to do it, like he was a waiter slow-poking himself out of a tip.
And Meoraq, who should have been the first person to insist on some effort, was no help at all. The first time Amber had snatched up her spear and tried to go with him on his morning hunt, he’d actually laughed at her (she was pretty sure that gargling hiss was a laugh). Now he just said no, or occasionally, “No, damn it! Sit down!”
She refused to quit trying to go with him, though. Which was probably why he snuck out today before dawn. Big scaly jerk.