by R. Lee Smith
Nicci cowered and Scott stepped forward to take her against his side. The man started to speak; Meoraq shoved him away and took Nicci by the chin, leaning in aggressively close.
“Answer me at once,” he ordered. “Where is she?”
“Down by the water, I think,” she whispered, trembling in his grip. “I don’t know. She…She left without me.”
He released her with a grunt of disgust and started away, snapping, “Stay here and be ready to travel on my return,” over his shoulder as he went.
“Hey!”
Meoraq stopped and looked up at the sky. “Why?” he said, conversationally.
“Because I want to talk to you!” Scott answered, coming to face off against him.
“I was not speaking to you.” Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges again, then folded his arms in a warning any dumaq would understand. “But since you’re here, what do you want?”
“I want you to understand that in my camp, it is not acceptable for you to get physical with us.”
Meoraq felt his spines shifting slowly forward and back again. “Go on.”
“I am in charge of these people,” said Scott, oblivious. “I’m responsible for their safety. And while I appreciate your efforts in acting as our guide—”
Meoraq tipped back his head and began another slow-count of six.
“—I am not going to tolerate all this hostility!”
Meoraq opened his eyes and leaned close. “I am going to give you the opportunity to amend those words,” he said mildly. “Because I think even you know that I have not yet been nearly as hostile as I could be.”
“Um…” Scott’s fur-striped forehead wrinkled with something that might have been uncertainty. He glanced behind him at his watching people. “Did, ah, did anyone catch that? Nichole?”
Meoraq gripped his brow-ridges again and this time hissed a little. “Father, I beg You to let me kill just one of them,” he said, then dropped his hand and bellowed, “Stay here!” right in the human’s flat, ugly face.
Scott let out a reedy shriek and threw himself backward, tripping over his own boots and falling on his backside.
“And be quiet!” spat Meoraq and stalked off. This time, he was not followed.
By the water, Nicci had said, and the humans had left a trail broad enough to lead him there even after only a single night. He had almost reached the greenbelt when Amber came out of it, carrying her pack over her shoulder. She’d changed her clothes; her clean ones were so white and loose they made her look like a candle-ward, which almost made him smile even as annoyed as he was. And if she had looked even the least bit repentant, he might have let her apologize and come back with him and have it all over and forgotten. Instead, she saw him and scowled.
So be it.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, advancing on her with two fingers pointed right at her throat. “I told you when I wanted to leave and you run off alone? No, do not dare open that mouth! I gave you an order and unlike the rest of your idiot kind, you understood it! You…” His spines flicked upright. His pointing hand lowered somewhat. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”
She swiped her sleeve across them at once and pushed past him on her way up the trail. “Nothing!”
He caught her by the arm and swung her around, peering closely at her face. Her eyes were indeed swollen and red, as if she’d been sitting in smoke.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, concerned.
“I took a bath!” she snapped, yanking against his grip. “Is that all right with you? Jesus!”
“A bath,” he said, keeping an easy hold on her despite her struggles. “This is the second time you have forced me to chase you down and you know how pressing time is! A bath? Where do you think you are, human?”
“I stank.”
“I don’t care! I care that you disobeyed my spoken will and ran off on your own when all the rest of your herd is waiting on my word to move on! You—”
“I’m hungry, Meoraq!” she shouted. “I’m cold! I’m tired and I’m hurt and I’m…scared…” Some of the fire faded from her eyes. She rubbed at them and backed away, keeping her gaze averted and her arm stiff in his grip. “And I stank. And I thought I could do something about the smell. But I still stink. So…So do what you’re going to do and then leave me alone.”
The wind gusted, sweeping dead leaves out of the trees and over their feet. Meoraq watched them blow away in eddies. He did not release her.
“You are not to leave my camp alone,” he said at last. “Take N’ki with you if you must go. And tell me when you do. I want to know where you are.”
She laughed—a shrill, humorless sound. “I don’t even know where I am.”
“Damn it, stop arguing with me! If you don’t give me your obedience right now, you’ll never bathe again!”
She put her free hand up and covered her eyes. Her body was very stiff. Her breaths were short and shallow…and shook.
She was crying.
‘Oh, well done, Uyane,’ he thought, and looked up at the sky. He let go of her. “Go,” he said gruffly. “I am going to fill my flasks and once I have done that, we are moving whether your people are prepared or not.”
She turned her back on him at once and walked away, her head bent and both hands gripping the strap of her shoulder-pack. Meoraq watched her pick her way through the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. He scratched at the side of his snout, sighed, and started walking down to the water. The first thing he saw coming out of the bracken was the damp heap of her old clothing lying on the bank. Strange that she hadn’t bothered to keep them. They were filthy and not new, but they still had some good days of wear left in them to his eye.
‘Perhaps she didn’t think she had time to wash them,’ he thought to himself, hunkering down to prod at them. ‘And seeing as you came down to whip her back to camp like wandering cattle, perhaps she was right to think so.’
If they weren’t lying in the mud like this, he could take them himself, but he didn’t have a spare satchel to put them in and didn’t want to get everything he owned wet and dirty. He felt a little sorry that Amber had managed to get her feelings bruised, but she could have taken her bath last night and washed her clothes then so they’d be dry and she ready to march this morning. She had instead made the choice to wait and he refused to help her feel like more of a victim because of it. She had other clothes, clearly.
He straightened up, turned around, gave the two colorful objects perched atop the stone an idle glance, started walking, and then halted and looked back at them. Amber’s bootprints, the only ones fresh enough to hold a little water at the heels, made a clear trail from the water to the stone and onward to the trail. She had to have been sitting there, right where the objects now sat, which meant she’d put them there. She hadn’t dropped them by the bank, as with her discarded clothing, and she hadn’t thrown them into the bushes. She’d set them down carefully. And she’d left crying.
Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges and scratched the side of his snout. He glanced at the trail, which was still clear for now, and then turned away from it with a sigh and went to see what the hell he’d bullied her into giving up.
He realized what they were after just a few steps. It startled him at first, although he didn’t know why it should, really. They wore boots and slept in tents; why shouldn’t they drink from cups?
“Fuck,” muttered Meoraq, picking one up. Two cups, each with single handles sized for human hands and narrow bowls to accommodate human mouths. They were made of fired clay, or something similar, garishly painted and glazed to a high shine, and as ugly as they were, to judge by their symmetry and the craftsmanship of their nonsensical coloring, they had to be tremendously expensive. He had never seen her drinking from them. She’d been saving them. Perhaps treasuring them. And now she was leaving them.
Meoraq sighed, then unbuckled his travel-harness and slid out from under his pack. “This is not my doing,” he announced. “If she wants to crawl o
ff and run water out of her eyes over a pair of cups, that is entirely her decision. I would have let her bring the damned things.”
I will not carry sentiment.
“She didn’t even ask me.”
Why can’t just one of you do what you’re told without whining at me?
“Fuck,” Meoraq said again, wrapping the cups, one in his spare tunic and the other in his spare breeches, and shoving them down deep in his pack. He felt thoroughly disgusted—with himself, with Amber, with the whole of Gann. Cocking an eye at the rolling face of Sheul’s heavens, he said, “Tell me just one thing, my Father, I beg. Is there ever a right answer?”
Sheul listened, but said nothing.
Meoraq filled his damned flasks and sat down on the stone, kicking dourly at Amber’s bootprints until he’d rubbed out all he could reach. He did not hurry back to start the day’s march. When Amber looked back to see if she was clear of him and free to do the rest of her crying, he wanted her to think she was alone. He wasn’t completely insensitive.
3
So followed several days of travel and, with compromise on both sides (Meoraq took a savage pleasure in this, that he was able to compromise with these creatures rather than beat them into obedience, and if that wasn’t proof of his humility and therefore his worthiness to enter Xi’Matezh, nothing was), they forged a tolerable routine. Meoraq allowed the humans to wake in their own time and to eat whatever was left of the previous night’s meal. Then they walked, scattered widely after their habit while Meoraq prowled around them, trying to take point, foot and both flanks along their careless line. They made frequent stops for resting, but managed, he thought, at least three spans each day and that was acceptable. Toward evening, they made their camp and Meoraq hunted. Thus far, Sheul had rewarded his efforts at herding human cattle with fair game and sweet water, gifts he acknowledged each night in his meditations and which the humans seemed to think was only their due.
After three days, they finally came out of the muddy lowlands and began the long, slow trek across the stony fields of middle Yroq. Tempting as it might have been to find a road and lead the humans across it as far east as could be managed, Meoraq forged his own path. There weren’t many roads and there were always eyes upon them; worse than the risk of encountering messengers or merchants or even a Sheulek about his circuit, a caravan of near fifty moving bodies would certainly attract whatever raiders were about. Better by far to keep to the wildlands, keep moving, and keep quiet.
But the first day in the plains was even slower than it had been when the humans insisted on carrying their machines with them. The ground was marginally more level, but riddled with broken rock and thorny overgrowth that made passage difficult even for an experienced Sheulek. The humans tripped and staggered like children just learning to walk, tearing their soft flesh and bruising their soft bodies with shocking ease. When he finally called for camp and took inspection of them, he found himself amazed only that no one had managed to break a bone yet. How he was going to get them over the mountains into Gedai loomed in his mind, more and more of an impossibility the longer he pondered it, but he would just have to trust that Sheul would provide the means when the time came. There were problems enough for him to solve right now.
His hunt that night turned up no meat, but plenty of good wild gruu. He gathered up an armload and took it back to soften in the coals, and once he’d taught the humans how to get it out of its leathery peel, they seemed to find the taste agreeable enough to squabble over. They ate like animals, barking and chuffing through mouthfuls of food, reaching across one another, picking at their teeth with the flimsy claw-like protrusions that tipped their fingers. From what he could see, they didn’t even wash their hands—not before falling on their meal and not afterwards. He left them to fight over the peels and made a lengthy patrol, stopping once to fill his flasks and bathe at a small ground-spring, and once again at a stony ridge to watch the sun set through the clouds and pray.
He did not return to camp until well after dark and he returned troubled. He had heard the calls of tachuqis behind the wind and seen the blood-stained and trampled grass that marked the site of one of their recent kills. He could only hope it was recent enough that they would not be actively hunting tonight, because a pack of ungainly, unarmed humans would be a damned easy hunt indeed and Meoraq needed to sleep.
Most of the humans were huddled around the fire he had set for them—at least they hadn’t let it go out this time—and the rest had bedded down already. A few nodded to him, their bobbing heads an unpleasant reminder of the tachuqis who were perhaps nearby, and Scott rather grudgingly raised his hand in some sort of human salute, but that was all. His time with them had taught him well not to expect better tribute than that.
“And why should they pay it?” he muttered, unbinding his tent and assembling the first of his poles. “Who am I but the man who protects and provides for them in their most desperate days? Lazy, useless, machine-worshipping pests.” Meoraq snorted, sending a scathing glance back over his shoulder, only to find Amber almost immediately behind him.
“Hey,” she said and offered him a somewhat mangled-looking hunk of gruu.
He looked at it, then at the starved and half-chilled human who had saved it out for him. The hand of Sheul was heavy upon his shoulder. He grunted and began to put another pole together. “Eat it.”
Her hand slowly lowered, melting out of the air like the grimace melting off her malleable face. She turned around.
Damn it.
“Sit down.” Meoraq kicked the rumpled roll of his tent into a kind of mat and took his own offer, indicating a place beside him and realizing only afterwards that he’d done it with the back of his hand—an intimate gesture—and not the two-finger point that would have been proper for a Sheulek dealing with subordinates, civilians, cattle, and surely humans.
She hesitated, frowning over her shoulder at him.
He said it again, speaking slowly in case it was his language and not his complete lack of tact that held her at bay, gruffly adding, “Eat with me.”
“You don’t have anything.”
He grunted and dug into his pack for his cuuvash, showing it to her before snapping off a square and putting it away again.
She sat down. The tent was still folded and not quite long enough to accommodate them both, especially as he’d dropped himself in the middle of it. Her shoulder bumped his as she settled; he heard the faint slap of her hair on his scales whenever the wind caught it; he felt the warmth emanating from her body all along his side. He thought he should probably move over and give her more room. He didn’t.
“See anything out there tonight?” she asked.
“There is always something to see.” He tore off the first bite of cuuvash and softened it, watching her jaws work as she ate her roasted root. The thought that he had provided the gruu that fed her did not annoy him the way it did to think of feeding the other humans. Instead, it made him wish he’d brought more. He brooded on this, his spines low, while he ate.
“I heard some weird sounds,” said Amber.
He grunted, inviting elaboration.
“A kind of…ooo-wah ooo-wah!”
He was more fascinated by the cupping of her hands around her mouth than the noise she made by doing so. It took a moment or two to regain focus, another moment to make sense of the clumsy human sounds, and yet another few moments to think about what it meant. “When was this?”
She hesitated again, then took an obvious guess at his meaning. “Not right here, but pretty close. I went out to look, but I didn’t see anything.”
“Not where—” he began, and stopped to frown at her. “You went out to look? Alone?”
She only looked at him.
He poked her. “You,” he said and made walking fingers. “Went out.” He moved that hand away from his body. “Alone.” And glared at her. “Against my command.”
Her brows dropped in an infuriating human scowl. “I had my spear!”
“Would I what?”
“You stay here!” he told her, thumping two fingers down (on his tent, but he would not notice this until later). “You do not leave the sight of this camp for any reason and you do not go even one pace away alone! Swear it to me!”
She frowned, but it was not incomprehension that made her do so, only stubborn human defiance. “Why?”
“Because I said so!” he snapped.
“I can take care of myself.”
His spines slapped flat. He stood. “Get up.”
She took that for an order to leave him and started angrily away, so that he was forced to catch her arm and pull her bodily back to him. He turned her around, held her firmly until she stopped trying to shake him off, then released her and said, “I am a tachuqi. A lone tachuqi. One only man-height, with no beak or talons, ha! I am just such a lamed and feeble enemy and you have come this close to me. Take up your spear.”
She looked around, as if thinking it would present itself, then closed her hands hesitantly around empty air and bent her knees in a clumsy warrior’s stance. She eyed him with suspicion and uncertainty in equal parts and then lunged for him.
He kicked as a tachuqi kicks, leaping up and driving his leg outward, even sweeping his foot downward in the slashing motion that would disembowel if he had the beast’s killing talon. She tried to dodge—she also finished her lunge, stabbing her imaginary spear into his side as her dying act in a move that he knew his training masters would roar with delight to see even as they beat her for her suicidal stupidity—but his boot caught her fully on the chest and knocked her hard to the ground. He bent, his hand hooked to make a tachuqi beak, and gripped her firmly by the throat. “You are dead,” he told her. “Get up.”
She did, but wary now. Her hands flexed upon a new nonexistent spear. She braced herself, mud on her chest in the shape of his boot-print, and lunged again.
He leapt back as a tachuqi leaps, arms spread in imitation of their defensive posture, and kicked her in the back as she went by. She staggered, swinging as she fell so that her spear again found its target, and ended on the ground with his hand on her throat. “You are dead,” he said again, letting go. “Get up.”