by R. Lee Smith
“I got…practically none of that.”
“It means I am Sheulek,” he replied, patting her companionably but safely on the unfeeling swell of her pack. “And I don’t need friends.”
* * *
Which was just as well, since he made none that day.
Meoraq knew it was no easy thing he asked of them. He had waded through the hip-deep bog of reeking water that the lowlands became in the rainy season, crossed the middle plains under the sweltering wet heat of summertime, and climbed the highland steppes when the icestorms raged so violently that his clothes were frozen to his body. He had walked both by day and by dark of night, upon whole roads and fallen roads and no roads at all, and he had done all these things with no company apart from the ravening beasts of the wild and the equally ravening men who had gone to Gann. He had suffered and survived the consequences of his ignorance, recklessness and, yes, outright stupidity, and knowing the humans were strangers to this land and its hardships, he was resolved to forgive much.
In forming this resolution, Meoraq had perhaps failed to recognize that he was not the most forgiving of men.
No matter how many times he ordered them to stay together and be quiet, they soon drifted apart, shouting back and forth whenever they had something they wanted to say. When his words were not enough to bring them under control, Meoraq dealt out a few cuffs. Mindful of human fragility, they had been the most glancing of blows, hardly more than two-knuckle taps, and yet they yelped (and occasionally bled) and whined about it so much that he soon cried surrender and let them do what they wanted.
Before the first hour was ended, they had stretched themselves out so thinly, half of them were no longer in sight. The ones with the least to carry left the rest so entirely behind that when they came to an obstacle—which was often in this roadless wilderness—they had time to set up their camp so they could whine at each other in comfort while they waited for the others to catch up.
The whining! Great Sheul grant him patience against their constant whining! It was muddy. It was cold. They were hungry. They were tired. The only thing worse than having to hear it was knowing that tomorrow, he’d also have to hear them whine about how sore they were.
And they were going to be sore, judging from the difficulty they were having carrying their supplies. Meoraq had no sympathy. If they’d had the resources to construct crates, they should have made carts as well, but no, they built these enormous, ungainly casings and then heaved them up by their edges, since they didn’t even have grips or pole-holds or anything. Most of the day—not even half but most—was therefore spent either waiting for the crates, arguing over whose turn it was to carry them, or struggling to move them out of the mud, through the thorns, or up over some tumbled stone ridge.
And what could he do about it? Not a Gann-damned thing. The humans couldn’t mark half of what Meoraq told them and wouldn’t listen to the other half. He worked with them until his patience was gone—scouting ahead for the least arduous route while they rested, sharing out his water, even striking fires for them during their many lengthy rests—and told himself it would all be worth it when he stood in Xi’Matezh.
If he ever got there.
“Meoraq!” Scott called from the bottom of a steep rise which was giving considerable trouble to the exhausted men trying to carry a crate up it. “Come here!”
Meoraq, who had been waiting at the top of that rise for some time now, lowered his spines and did not move.
Scott was not deterred. He pointed imperiously at the crate and said, “Come get under this end.”
“Fuck your fist,” Meoraq replied, making sure to speak clearly and evenly.
“Right here,” said Scott, patting the crate-top. “Come on, you haven’t helped out once all day. Meoraq? I’m saying that right, aren’t I? Why is he just staring at me?”
And he whistled, like a cattleman after calves, with his soft little mouthparts puckered up like an anus. He was farting out of his face. Meoraq was rarely one for that sort of crude humor, but he laughed.
Scott threw up his hand and slapped it down on the crate-top, turning to his men. “I never know what the hell he’s thinking. Where’s Bierce?”
“Look, man.” This was Eric, who was not as objectionable as Scott, but as one of his servants, was still never going to be one of Meoraq’s favorite humans. “I keep telling you, it doesn’t matter how many people get under it.”
“He’s stronger than we are,” Scott said indifferently, trying once again to lure Meoraq down from the top of the rise. “He could probably carry this end by himself if he ever gets it through his thick head that’s what he’s supposed to do.”
Supposed to, no less.
“The ground is way too loose,” Eric argued. “We’d have to build some kind of support—”
Meoraq clapped a hand to the end of his snout and rubbed. Building anything to lift that crate to the top of this rise would take at least to the end of the day, if they knew what they were doing as they built it, which was doubtful, and if they bothered themselves to do anything about it today, which was even less likely.
“—and we don’t have a hammer or rope or even duct tape!” Eric finished. “We’re going to have to find another way up.”
Scott considered this, then turned back to Meoraq. “Do you have any rope?”
“Yes,” said Meoraq, thinking himself wonderfully patient. “However, there are no trees up here to act as anchor.”
“What?”
“Trees, idiot.” Meoraq mimed the tying of a knot, then opened his arms in a broad gesture of futility. “Rope does you no good without something to tie it to.”
Scott patted the crate even louder. “We’re going to tie it to this,” he explained, and rolled his eyes at his generals. “Not the sharpest pencil on the planet, is he?”
Meoraq started to speak, then abruptly flexed his spines forward and shrugged off his pack. He opened it up, dug out the coil of strong braid he kept at the bottom, and tossed it down to them. He watched while Scott instructed his servants in how to bind up the crate (it both amused and disgusted him to see that Eric followed the man’s directions only until Scott moved on, then quickly untied it and did it right), then moved aside so that they could ascend to the crown of the rise and see for themselves there was nothing to tie it to. Undaunted, Scott ordered his men in a line, like boys playing Heave-To with the crate acting as the opposing team.
Meoraq glanced at the tumble of rock at the bottom of the rise and moved a little further back. He waited.
“Everybody pull together!” Scott called, coming over to stand next to Meoraq. “One! Two! Pull!”
They obeyed. Grunting, straining, with Scott calling officious encouragement at them, the humans dragged the crate out of the mud and onto the slope, where they managed to drag it about halfway up before the first man’s feet slid a little too close to the edge. The ground gave, not much, but enough to throw a start into the heaving humans. Men tumbled over each other with cries of alarm and the one man who did not let go of the rope let himself be yanked painfully down the slope to land head-first against the crate, once more resting in the mud at the bottom.
Meoraq leaned out and watched until he saw enough movement to satisfy him that there were no real injuries, then turned and looked at Scott. “I want my rope back. And I want it cleaned before it’s coiled.”
Scott glared at him with color in his face and complete incomprehension in his eyes. He turned to his men. “We’re going to try that again,” he announced.
Meoraq bent his neck for a few deep breaths, rubbing at his brow-ridges.
“But first we’re going to get some branches or something to use as poles. Some people can stand at the bottom and push with the poles—”
“I cry,” Meoraq said.
Scott looked at him. “What?”
Meoraq dropped his hand and shrugged his tight spines. “I cry,” he said again, simply and without anger. “I have stood for truth in three hundr
ed trials and surely struck down two hundred more of Gann’s corrupted in my time, and I have faced and defeated every wild beast left to this land from a denning she-ghet to a rutting bull corroki, but Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul and Sword of Sheul, cries surrender to you and your fucking crate. We stop here for the night.”
“What the hell is he saying?” Scott asked, puckering up his flat, ugly face in an expression of annoyance. “Where’s Bierce?”
“You had best find her,” Meoraq ordered, pointing right into Scott’s face with the whole of his hand. “Because I have a few thoughts and if I cannot express them in words, I mean to do it with the beating of your miserable, misshapen life.”
Scott moved unhurriedly back, saying, “I don’t know what the hell he’s saying. Go ahead and let’s make camp. We’re done for the day. Someone find Bierce before I forget how useful this thing can occasionally be.”
Meoraq grunted and went to gather up his emptied flasks, reminding himself at every step that this was a pilgrimage, there were supposed to be ordeals, and they were called ordeals because they were not endured easily.
Even without a sandglass or bells rung at every hour, Meoraq had always had a good sense of time. A man who spent so much of his life with nothing to look at except the sun (or the light of the sun, according to Master Tsazr), learned to read it almost unawares. Meoraq knew that they had left the fast-flowing stream behind perhaps two hours ago, and although he also knew it would not take nearly so long to reach it again, he was not prepared to find himself standing at its edge as quickly as he did.
Two hours…and here was the stream.
Meoraq did not fill his flasks. He shouldered them instead and, in a fouler mood than ten days’ rain outside of Tothax had been able to inspire in him, kept walking. He marked the sun as he went. By his judgment, he reached his destination and returned in just a little more than an hour, stopping only once to fill his flasks at last.
He came back into the humans’ camp, ignoring those brave few who dared to express their disappointment that he had no meat with him. He set his water down beside his pack—calmly, a Sheulek was the master of his impulses—but kept the one object he had taken from his walk tight in his fist and went in search of Amber.
He found her sprawled on her back on a heap of the wrapped cushions, which, judging from her flushed face and rough breath, she had only just finished hauling up to the top of the rise where Scott had put this camp—the first show of common sense the man had demonstrated. Her clothes lay over her in damp, rumpled folds that emphasized, rather than hid, the wasted hills and valleys of her exhausted body. Her eyes were shut; the flesh around them, dark and hollow-looking, like sockets in an empty skull. There was still a stain of blood in her hair.
Anger he had struggled all day long to contain faded somewhat. He opened his mouth, grappled with and was defeated by the sinful nonsense of her name, and turned instead to Nicci, who sat on the cushions close by, wrapped in one of their metal blankets, watching him.
He gestured uncomfortably at Amber. “Is she sleeping?”
Nicci spared the prone human beside her a glance. “Looks like it.”
Meoraq grunted and beckoned to her. “Leave her. You mark me well enough. I require my words carried to your abbot. Come.”
Nicci reached out to nudge at Amber. “Wake up.”
Amber’s eyes opened, but the impossible green of them was dulled into something greyish. Dead. She looked at Nicci, who was wrapping herself up again, then at Meoraq, who was battling the urge to slap Nicci right out of her shiny metal blanket.
“Hey,” Amber muttered. She visibly gathered her strength, then rolled onto her side before pushing herself into a seated position. Her arm trembled as she raised it to rub at her face. “I can’t believe I actually crashed like that.”
Crashed. Not a word he’d ever heard for rest, but one almost painfully apt. She had not been sleeping, not lying that way under the open sky with rain pooling over her eyes. She had crashed, like the ship she claimed had carried her here.
He wished briefly and with singular bitterness that he really had gone hunting after all. She looked terrible and what did he have to offer her but—
She saw the object in his hand and her brows pinched together. “What’s that?”
He looked at it himself, just as if he had not been the one to pick it up and carry it here. His anger returned, an ugly shadow of the good, clarifying fire it had been, but just as undeniable.
“I need you,” he said and curtly added, “To speak.”
“Yeah, okay.”
And she took his arm.
Reached right up and took it.
Meoraq held very still as she used him to climb to her feet, unsure where he should be looking. He was excruciatingly aware of everything around him: the wind whispering through the grass, the piercing warble of laughing humans, the smell of wet leaves and earth, Nicci’s silent staring eyes, and above everything, the warm press of all five thin fingers that gripped him.
No woman in all his life had ever…ever touched him like that. In other ways, yes. He tended to be permissive with his women, particularly if they, like the woman in Xheoth, came to his room more than once. Those he took in conquest after trial, like the flat-headed girl in Tothax, were permitted to struggle, but they rarely did and even they did not touch him like that—flesh to flesh, uninvited and unrepentant for it.
Then she let go and moved away, taking the short, limping steps of an old woman. “Oh Scott!” she called in that musical way.
At some short distance, surrounded by his generals, Scott turned around. “Miss Bierce,” he said without welcome.
Amber smiled. “Everly.”
Meoraq stepped between them.
“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, thrusting the object he had collected on his solitary walk—a plain stone, charred along one side—out before him.
Scott looked at it. So did Amber, although she had to come around the side of him to see.
“What did he say?” Scott asked in a tight, impatient way.
“He…wants to know what that is.”
Scott looked at her. She rolled her shoulders and shook her head. He frowned.
Meoraq waited.
“It’s a rock,” said Scott.
“And do you know where I got it?” Meoraq inquired.
Amber asked.
Scott’s brows puckered. “How the hell should I…? This better be what he’s really saying, Bierce, because if you’re just trying to make me look stupid—”
“You don’t need my help to look stupid.”
Meoraq gave the rock a terse shake. “Answer!”
Amber rolled her shoulders again, adding, “I hope to God you don’t want us to walk back and look because I’m done in, lizardman.”
“I took it from your fire-pit!” Meoraq bellowed, so suddenly that both of them—and quite a few of those around them—jumped. “We have been walking all day and for what? We are still in easy distance of your first camp’s fires! I could walk further on two broken legs!”
“What’s he saying?” Scott asked.
Amber ignored him, beginning to scowl up at Meoraq in her fearless, senseless way. “Hey, I think we’re doing pretty goddamn good here!”
“We have not gone half a span, human! Not even half of half! Do you know what a day’s shamefully idle distance is for me?”
“Do I care?”
“Five!”
She looked at him, then down at herself, and up at him again. “Look at me!” she said angrily. “Do I look like I can go any further than I did today? Do any of us?”
“I could,” said a human.
“Shut the fuck up, Crandall!”
“Well, I could. Hey, realistically, we did, what? Two miles?”
“It had to be more than that,” said Scott, looking alarmed.
“Uphill, loose terrain, bad weather, and of course, lugging the heavy stuff. It took us forever to get going and every time we too
k a break, we’d end up sitting around like two hours. I wasn’t going to say anything,” he added, rolling his shoulders. “I mean, I realize you guys aren’t soldiers.”
“But we could have done a lot better,” Eric said quietly.
“Well, you just tell him we need this equipment,” said Scott, turning back to Amber. “And while you’re at it, you might find a nice way of suggesting that he pull the stick out of his scaly ass or someone just might have to kick it for him.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? He understands English just fine!”
Scott frowned at her, then looked at Meoraq.
Meoraq slapped him.
“And we’re not slowing you up for the fun of it,” Amber told him as Scott staggered back. “This stuff is heavy.”
“Then leave it behind! I have never seen you so much as open those crates! How can they be so essential?”
“What is he saying now?” asked Scott, cradling his jaw just as though Meoraq had broken it.
“He wants to know if what we’re dragging around is important,” said Amber.
“What we’re dragging around is none of his business. His only job is to act as our guide.”
“No, human,” said Meoraq, darkly amused by the man’s audacity in spite of himself. “My only true task is to serve Sheul as his Sword and his Striding Foot, and in that pursuit, I am given all liberty. All, S’kot. To defy me is to defy Him, and the cost of that defiance is death.”
Scott continued to glare, although his brows creased above his snapping eyes with a human expression of confusion. “What did he call me?”
“He didn’t call you anything,” Amber replied. “He just said he doesn’t work for you. And…something about God, I’m not sure what. And I think that bit at the end was him telling you to quit arguing with him.”
“I’m not arguing with him! He’s arguing with me! Look, Meoraq,” he said, turning briskly to face him even as he edged out of easy striking reach. “I can appreciate your concern and I share it. If it was within my power to expedite our progress, I would.”