by R. Lee Smith
* * *
He woke in his father’s room and did not, for some reason, think this was at all strange. He could smell breakfast in the making—bread baking, nai brewing, and something being fried in salty fat—which made the notion of going back to sleep considerably less attractive than it ordinarily might. His father’s cupboard-bed abutted the interior window, so he could see even without flicking the curtain aside that it was still early, not yet dawn.
He rolled over, rubbing the sleep out of his scales, and nudged the door open with his foot. The daughter of House Saluuk was there, her slender body broken into strange new alignment, but this was not strange to him either. She was pouring him a bath and she did it well, despite holding her silent, bloodied baby in one arm. Meoraq dismissed her with a wave and she went without speaking.
After washing, Meoraq opened his bedroom door and brought the first servant he saw to him. It was Shuiv, Sheulteb to House Arug in Tothax, dressed now in livery rather than a warrior’s harness, immaculate save for the small stain over his heart where his mortal wound yet bled. Meoraq gave the order for his morning meal to be brought and closed the door again, taking his father’s private stair to the roof.
His father was there already, seated on the ground with his back propped on a bench and a book balanced on one bent knee, reading. They raised hands to one another in the distracted, comfortable way they always had, but Meoraq kept walking. There were lamps lit behind the latticed wall that separated his father’s personal garden from that of his mother, and the sound of humming on the other side. Meoraq opened the connecting door without any sense of impropriety and went on in.
His mother was painting. He’d never seen her do that. She gave him an embarrassed sort of smile when he came to get a better look, turning the board so he could see the garden she had painted—a garden at night, mere suggestions of growth and blossom rendered in midnight shades of blue and black and silver, with three columns of brilliant orange fire rising at varying distance behind it. “I call it Blooms,” she said shyly.
Someone was watching him. Meoraq glanced around, not particularly troubled, to find a hooded man standing in the corner of the garden. He was dressed at first glance as an exarch, but his white robes were plainly made and worn about the hems. A priest of some sort, though. A familiar stranger.
“Do I know you?” Meoraq asked after a moment.
“I know you.”
The voice was also familiar, but only a little, as if he’d heard it in a dream.
“Where have we met?”
“We haven’t.”
“You’re in my house,” Meoraq said, but did not, oddly, draw a blade and cut him down for the invasion.
The stranger’s hood bulged as the exarch shrugged his spines beneath it. “You’re in mine. Am I not welcome?”
“I suppose so.” Meoraq returned his gaze to his mother’s painting. She was adding tiny points of white light to the dark sky there. “I think I’m dreaming.”
“Do you?” The stranger’s head tipped, curious. “Why?”
Meoraq looked down at his mother, then at the unnamed exarch. “My mother is dead,” he explained.
“So?”
“So she couldn’t really be here. This—” Meoraq waved at the garden. A few leaves fell. “—isn’t really my father’s House.”
“No,” the stranger agreed. “It is yours. Each man builds his own House and it will always be haunted.”
Most of that was nonsense, of course, but one thing did stab in deep enough to raise Meoraq from his mother’s paint-board. “Uyane is mine?” he asked, looking back at the stranger in surprise. “Am I back? Am I married?”
“Would you like to be?”
Behind him, footsteps, absurdly soft and light against the stone tiles. Meoraq straightened and turned as Amber came into his mother’s garden with Nicci trailing in her shadow. Surprised, he raised a hand in welcome. Amber smiled back at him, that grotesque human smile, and took her wristlet off. She held it out to him, saying, “I am a virgin of my father’s House.”
Nicci offered hers as well, silent, unsmiling.
Meoraq started to reach, then dropped his arm and looked back, scowling, at the exarch. “Must it be both of them?”
“It is her House also,” the exarch replied, a little sadly he thought. “And she brings her own ghosts.”
Meoraq took the wristlets, drew a sabk, pinned them both together to the flowering ribbonleaf tree that overhung his mother’s bench. A little blood welled up from the bark, trickled down the blade, let just one pregnant drop fall from the shivering hook of Amber’s wristlet onto Nicci’s.
“Now you are mine,” Meoraq told her—well, told both of them, but it was Amber he reached for.
She came, putting her hands on him in that fearless way, and there was no pretending he took her in his arms this time to bite her in some insane dream-way. He wanted exactly what he did and he wanted it with all the heat and surety that was in Amber’s bold embrace as well. Then they were naked—with his mother and Nicci and the white-robed exarch right there—and Meoraq leaned her up against the tree beneath the blade of conquest and he supposed he was inside her, although that didn’t seem important. They were face to face, and he could feel well enough her arms around him and her twinned teats pressed flat to his chest, but if there was sex going on below that, it happened without him. It was enough for him to just be with her, to see her, feel her, to need her and be needed by her, and everything that should have been wrong about that feeling—not the least of which was indulging it in this fashion while his mother sat right there on her bench and painted—was instead so overwhelmingly right that it broke the whole of the dream in two and woke him back into the world.
He lay with his heart pounding in his chest, staring without comprehension at the top of his tent until he had calmed down enough to realize two things: First, that the reason he could see the top of his tent was because he had overslept and it was a good hour after dawn, and second, his belly was wet.
Cursing, Meoraq yanked his blanket back, fought his belt open, ripped away his loin-plate, and stared in disbelief at the thin veneer of semen glistening over his scales.
He hadn’t done that in years.
He hadn’t done that in years and he’d just done it with his loin-plate on. Who did that? Who came in his sleep, fully constrained, dreaming of a…of a fucking creature?
What was wrong with him?
Meoraq fumbled angrily with his pack until he found his flask, using what little water it still held to wipe himself off. His slit felt very tender.
Outside, footsteps. The humans were awake, some of them at least, and Amber was surely among them. If he listened (he did not want to listen), he would no doubt be able to hear her particular voice among those rumbles and barks that made up the crude human speech. If he looked out, he would see her.
Meoraq buckled his belt back on, cinching it biting-tight, and dressed in furious silence. He strapped his blades on, all of them, like a Sheulek. He untied the tent’s fastens, threw back the flap, and stepped boldly out among the humans who were his trial upon this pilgrimage, and not a damned thing more.
Amber was there. She saw him. Smiled.
He felt again what he had never felt—the warm crush of her body naked against his—and felt with it some ghost of that lying emotion that was nothing but a part of this ordeal.
“Hey,” said Amber, picking up her spear as she climbed to her feet. She came toward him, smiling. “Are you ready?”
He froze, just for an instant, and suddenly remembered their talk of the previous night. Hunting. She thought he was going to teach her the ways of hunting.
He put his back to her. It helped, but not much. He started walking. “Not today. Stay here.”
“Oh come on. I promise I’ll be quiet.”
“I said, no.” He walked faster. “You were supposed to wake me.”
“I wasn’t tired.” She followed him. “I’m totally ready to do th
is.”
“You are tired, whether you admit it or not. You are useless to me now. Stay.”
“I’m fine, for Christ’s sake. Come on, I won’t even do anything if you don’t want me to. Please, Meoraq, I just need to see how—”
She caught at his arm and nothing else she said mattered. There was no time, only a dark place between one beat of his heart and the next in which he had time to think, completely, that he could be alone with her. Just the two of them in the wildlands, with a tree, perhaps even a ribbonleaf tree, to lean her up against…
“Get away from me!” he roared, and swung around to shout it right in her face. Her ugly face. “Don’t you ever put your hand on me again!”
She drew back and stopped smiling, both so suddenly that he might have reached out and slapped the look right off her face. Around them, human heads turned and human eyes watched. Meoraq’s heart knotted; he gave it a strike with the haft of his hunting blade and snapped, “I told you to wake me and you ignored me! I told you to stay here and you argue with me! So now I see how you obey my orders! Why would you think I would want you with me after that? I don’t like you! We’re not friends! Stop pawing at me and go sit down!”
Someone—Scott, by the smirking look of him—uttered a fluttery sound through his closed mouth. Amber heard it, too. She shot a fiery glance that way, her face darkening either with embarrassment or anger, and then turned all the way around and started to walk away from him. Not deeper into camp. Into the wildlands.
Without him.
She’d be killed.
Meoraq lunged after her and snatched the spear out of her hands.
“Give it back!”
“Stay here, I said!” he roared at her.
“I don’t need your permission! I can go if I want to! Give it back, that’s mi—”
Meoraq snapped it over his knee and threw the pieces at the ground.
Scott let out a, “Whoa!” of happy surprise and laughed again.
Amber stared at the halves of her hunting toy. Her mouth was a thin line, pressed pale, shaking at its edges.
“I shouldn’t have to spend every hour of every damned day looking after you,” said Meoraq brusquely, pushing past her. He felt heavy, as if the hand of Sheul Himself were pressing down on him, body and soul, but the words kept coming, spitting out of him as bitter as bile. “Stay here and stay out of my way.”
A scraping sound.
Meoraq looked, his hand tightening on the hilt of his kzung, knowing she had picked up half of her spear and was coming to knock it against his head.
Only she wasn’t.
She was taking it into the prairie to hunt.
“Go on, then!” he spat after her. “If there’s anything left of you for me to find, I’ll find it when my hunt is done and not before!”
She kept walking.
“O Sheul, my Father, she is Yours,” Meoraq said loudly. “And if feeding the beasts of the wildlands is as much use as she can be to You, so be it!”
Sheul’s answer was a darkening across his heart, a terrible weight of censure in his very soul. Meoraq found he could not hold his eyes to Amber’s stiff back; they went instead to the dull half of her broken spear, and his blood crawled with shame.
‘She smiled when she saw me coming,’ he thought. ‘She had come to greet me.’
He had once seen his mother come to the outer courtyard to greet his father just that way after the battle at Kuaq. Meoraq remembered well his embarrassment that she had let herself be seen so publicly and with such effluence of emotion. And he remembered how Rasozul had reached out his arm to clasp her shoulder in passing, a gentle touch shared just between them in that one moment they had, and how she had bent her neck to brush at the back of his hand with her cheek, as if the touch were all she craved in the world.
Amber was a dark stripe in the distance—a foolish female with half a spear and no strength in the arm that carried it. None of the other humans moved to follow. Not even her Nicci.
Someone came to stand beside him. Scott, of all people. Scott, wholly ignorant of how deeply Meoraq wished to bury his blade in his smirking face, saying, “You better go after her.”
Meoraq looked at him, his spines flat and his pulse surely flashing yellow in his throat. “I do not like you either,” he said quietly.
The human’s happy grimace quickly wiped itself away as Scott retreated.
Meoraq looked again into the prairie, but Amber could no longer be seen. ‘Idiot,’ he thought, and felt the word echoed back at him.
He should go after her.
All the humans were watching.
Meoraq turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Her temper and the pride that fueled it would cool. She would return and he would take the higher path and allow her to ask his forgiveness for her fit of human petulance.
The wind blew. The morning air was still clear and dry, but not so fresh as it had seemed. The sun had risen higher behind the rolling clouds, yet the world seemed no brighter. Meoraq walked in darkness and he walked alone.
4
Meoraq’s heart may not have been in the hunt, but his heart was not necessary. His body made an easy kill of two panicked saoqs drinking at a distant ground-spring, which he could have taken at once back to camp for his hungry humans. Instead, he butchered them alone in the plains and he made thorough work of it, not merely fleshing and skinning. There was dried dung enough for a thousand fires, so he built one and sat beside it as he worked. There was bowel to clean, long bones full of precious marrow, and time, plenty of time, to think.
He thought of the spear he had broken. The clumsy, crooked, childish spear which Amber had probably made herself. Over and over, he saw himself breaking it. Over and over, he saw her walking away into the wildlands with the splintered tip he’d left her.
He prayed.
At last, Meoraq buried the meat and moved his fire atop it. He threw the most of the emptied bones into the coals to burn, trusting the foul smoke to ward away any beasts who might otherwise be drawn in by the smell of blood. He bundled his marrow and all the clean fat he’d scraped off to render down if he had the time. Into the last carrying pouch of his possession, he set the edible offal, wrapped in grass to soak in the blood. Then he left it all in Sheul’s hands and walked half a span across the plains to the nearest stand of zuol trees.
Making the spear took all the rest of that day, which was fine, because the saoq had to roast anyway. He hadn’t made one, even for idle amusement, since his boyhood days, but it was one of the lessons Master Takktha had taught and what the body has had beaten into it by Master Takktha, it does not soon forget. This spear might never have had the honor of hanging on the wall in the training yard, but Meoraq was certain it would have earned a turn in Takktha’s hand at least. He’d cut six zuol saplings before he’d found the balance he’d desired in a haft; he did not consider this a waste, since there were ten thousand uses for the fine, straight poles of young zuol and the humans were entirely without them. He then spent easily two hours peeling bark, trimming branches, and smoothing its length with the rough side of a stone—far more work than was strictly necessary, but it did look damned nice when it was done. There was plenty of xuseth around, all gone to seed this late in the year, but he dug up a few roots and split them to rub its oily fibers into the green wood. After some meditation, he took the flared wings of the saoq’s hip-bones (which he had tossed to the coals earlier, but which had fallen aside by Sheul’s grace and gone unburned, though heat-cured and hard as rock) and carved along their outer edges. Then he carefully split the green wood of the spear’s tip—a difficult task made infinitely easier by the xuseth oil—and worked the shards of bone beneath so that they protruded in flaring points along four sides. By this time, the fire had died down to perfect coals and he spent the rest of the day alternately baking the spear over them and applying more xuseth until the spear was as strong as stone. He made a few practice throws just to satisfy his vanity, then swiftly boun
d his spare poles into a sled and loaded the meat for travel.
It was dark when he finally left, but the shine of the moon behind the clouds was enough to guide him until he could make out the many fires of the humans in his camp. He was surprised to see meat in several hands as he pulled his sled through their slow-moving bodies, and he saw that they were almost as surprised to see him at all. So. They thought he had abandoned them, and this had been all the motivation they required to see to their own survival. He was now of half a mind to abandon them again tomorrow.
He could not see Amber at a casual glance, so Meoraq turned himself and his sled toward the sound of Scott’s voice, because Scott sounded angry and that usually meant he was talking at Amber. Soon, he saw the man himself at the fore of a loose ring of other humans, all together around a fire where the smell of roasting meat and burning bones was strongest, and yes, Scott stopped his angry words at the first sight of Meoraq and said instead, “He’s back. Get up right now and apologize,” so Amber had to be there somewhere.
Meoraq hissed and humans moved aside for him, revealing her on her knees with the fire turning her hair to red and her back full to him, but she was starting to turn and there was a grudging sort of curl on her mouthparts as she raised her hand to greet—
The poles of the sled fell out of his grip and the world itself seemed to drop away with it.
There was a knife in her hand.
“O my Father, no,” he heard himself say.
She scowled, deciding to be angry. “What the hell is it now?”
He threw the spear down—the spear he’d spent all damned day making—and turned away from her with both hands digging at his scales. He closed his eyes, not daring yet to speak, not daring even to think.
“Meoraq?”
The law was clear.
“What’s wrong with him?” someone asked and Scott said, “If you two are going to fight again, do it somewhere else.”
Was that it? Because he’d shouted at her? ‘Please,’ he prayed. ‘I didn’t mean it.’