by R. Lee Smith
The awl was starting to hurt her hand. She put it down and ate her cuuvash, taking small bites, making it last. Eric and Maria passed close by on their way to his tent. Amber raised a hand and said good night. Eric nodded at her or maybe at Meoraq, it was hard to tell. Then they were gone.
She ran out of cuuvash and had to pick up the awl again. Her hand still hurt. Meoraq watched her make one hole and then went back to staring at nothing. Everyone else was in bed. They were alone.
“Are you still mad at me?” she asked finally.
He thought about it. “No.”
“I wish you’d talk to me.”
He ran his red eyes over the camp, over every blanket-wrapped lump, every tent and bivy, every person. Except her.
“Say something, then,” he said suddenly. He was frowning.
“About what?”
“I don’t care. Talk to me.”
Amber opened her mouth without any idea of what she was going to say and out popped, “My mom had to go to rehab when I was six and I had to go to state-care. They had a yard with a big hill that had a few big trees and a chain fence at the bottom and the game all us kids used to play was to climb up that hill and roll down it with your eyes closed. There were trees and broken bricks and stuff. You mostly didn’t hit them, but you could have. That was part of the game. I only did it once. Because I loved it so much. If it had been scary, I’d have done it every day.”
He said nothing. What the hell was there to say to that even if he knew what she was saying? God, she was an idiot.
“It’s your turn,” she said, thinking he wouldn’t say anything.
And he didn’t, at first. She had enough time to punch the last hole through her boot and stitch the new sole on, making it whole again, and then he said, “In my ninth year at Tilev, I had trouble with one of the brunts. I had trouble with most of the brunts until I became one. That’s what brunts do. But it was my first year in the middle classes and I wasn’t used to it. I tried fighting back and he beat me. I tried avoiding him and he hunted me down and beat me. So one night, I threw a blanket over him from behind as he came back from the pisser and I went at him with a practice sword. I beat him until I broke, oh, seventeen bones all together, I think they said.”
She looked up from her work, frowning. “Good God, Meoraq.”
He grunted and rubbed at his throat, then at his knobby brows. “I didn’t know how badly I’d hurt him at the time. I just hit him until he quit moving and moaning and I ran back to the billets. I didn’t even take the blanket off him. They found him in the morning on the way to watch, but by then there wasn’t much they could do. He slept six days and died.”
“Jesus!”
“The masters called us to assembly and commanded the guilty boy to come forward. I did. They had a trial and God moved for me, so that was all right, but I still think about it sometimes. I shouldn’t, but I do.”
“God moved…? You didn’t get in trouble?”
“No.”
“Not at all? Not even detention?”
He shrugged his spines.
“Jesus,” she said again, because there was just nothing else to say. She knew Meoraq had killed people, in the same indisputable yet off-screen way she knew her mom had fucked men for money, but this was different. “How many—” she began, but faltered to a stop. She didn’t really want to know, just like she didn’t want to know how many men there had been.
“Three hundred and some. I don’t keep an exact count anymore.” He was quiet for a while, staring straight ahead and thinking his own thoughts. When he spoke again, it was in a low, almost halting manner utterly unlike him. “The Word tells us that there is no sin in the lives we take as Sheulek, but I was not Sheulek for that one and I think about it. God moved for me when it came to trial, but in my heart I know He was not proud of me. Not then.” He paused, his spines flexing and flattening. “And not today.”
She dropped her eyes back to her boot and resumed sewing. “I was fine.”
“You walked in our Father’s sight.”
“Nicci said I walked in yours too.”
He glanced at her and away into the night. “You are determined to stand a watch?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”
“You look tired.”
“You hear me whining about it, lizardman? I’m not falling-over tired. I’m fine.”
“Please yourself,” he said, almost exactly the same way he’d said it before he left her out in the plains. He reached into his belt and took out a small, cloth-wrapped bundle. He peeled it partway open to show her a grayish, thoroughly unpleasant-looking blob she naturally assumed was some sort of food until he said, “If you want to bathe.”
Soap? She stared at it and him, the awl poked halfway through the side of her new sole, in the kind of astonishment that she had only ever known as a child, when Bo Peep might occasionally announce a trip out for ice cream. Half the time (more than half, to be honest), it was really just an excuse to pick up her fucking drugs and little Amber would end up sitting on one side of a booth, watching her mom nod off and finally just shoveling melted ice cream into her mouth as fast as she could so they could go home. But sometimes she really meant it, so there was always that first cautious swoop of hope that something good might really happen.
He covered up the lump again and set it down in front of her. “Return it to me,” he told her. “And don’t allow S’kot to claim it for his own.” He stood up and went to his tent, resting his hand briefly on the top of her head as he passed her.
Alone again. Amber picked up the awl and the first of Nicci’s boots, then put them down again. She’d told Nicci she’d fix her boots and she would, but having honest-to-God soap in front of her made thinking about anything else impossible. Hearing about some kid getting beaten to death by the man sleeping in the tent just a few meters away should have ranked a little higher, but it didn’t. For the moment, the only thing that mattered was that everyone else appeared to be asleep, so if she wanted to clean up at all beyond just changing her clothes, this was the perfect opportunity. On the other hand, no matter how quietly she tried to go about it, taking a bath in a bag was easily awkward enough to wake someone up and it wasn’t like she had a wall to put between her and anyone else.
She pretended to debate the matter, but pretending was all it was. Even as she weighed risk against reward in her mind, her hands were busy building up the fire around Meoraq’s heat-stones. While they got hot, she found the leather sack he used for cooking, still with a little cold tea in it. She drank it off—bitter as it was, she hated to waste it—then filled it with fresh water from one of his big flasks and hung it from its tripod.
All of this moving back and forth was bound to catch some attention and it did, but only Nicci roused herself enough to actually lift her head and look at her.
“Go back to sleep,” Amber told her.
“But what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Just…Just thought I’d try and do some laundry, that’s all.”
“Oh.” Nicci pushed her pack out from under her head. “Can you do mine?” she mumbled, already rolling over and wiggling herself comfortable.
Amber went and got her sister’s clothes. It was no big deal. She really didn’t mind. It was kind of wasteful to wash just her own stuff anyway.
Heating up the water felt like it took forever, which meant in reality it probably took about twenty minutes. She kept her hands busy when she wasn’t trading hot stones for wet ones and vice versa by making grass bundles for fuel. When she had enough, she took them behind Meoraq’s tent and lit another fire, not so much to keep the water warm (although she brought the heating rocks with her) as to see by. She was careful to keep the fire small, as careful as she was to keep Meoraq’s tent between her and the rest of the camp. It wasn’t much cover, but it was all she had and she wanted to make the most of it. She took it on faith that she had privacy as she undressed, and she did for the most part. While se
veral people woke up during Amber’s bath, the wind covered her furtive splashing and the intermittent chattering of her teeth, and Meoraq’s tent blocked both her and her little fire from sight. The only one who saw her was Meoraq himself.
One word was all it took to catch his attention. One word, her hissy little “Shit!” when she thought she’d put her live coal out, just before it caught and grew into the fire that splashed her shadow onto the wall of his tent. There was no reason to watch her once he’d identified what she was doing…but he did. He watched, first from the corner of his drowsing eye, then brazenly rolling onto his side to face her.
Amber, believing herself entirely invisible but knowing that someone could come yawning into sight to take a piss any second now, stripped herself naked and got down to business. The hard lump of what Meoraq called soap did not lather when she rolled it between her wet hands, but its pungent aroma grew immediately strong enough to fight against the wind and sting her sinuses with its sharp, green smell. Rubbing at her arm was not quite as abrasive as attacking herself with one of those green kitchen scouring pads, but it wasn’t too far from it. On the other hand, whether the dried mud got washed off or scraped off, at least it was off.
Amber started scrubbing at her face and worked her way down. The water was nice and warm at first, but it didn’t stay that way. She felt each blush of warmth as she splashed hurried handfuls over her neck and breasts and shoulders, but the wind was always there, turning blessed heat to icy pins and needles in seconds. She wanted to stop almost as soon as she’d started, but she made herself keep going and didn’t let herself half-ass it. Who knew when she’d get another chance at a bar of soap?
So she got it all, even the spots she’d never given much attention before: her belly, her hips, her thighs. It was like washing a stranger’s body. Gone were the soft curves and smoothness of her old self. In its place, the new Amber’s body was all rough-chapped skin, bony joints, hard muscle. She had lost all the weight she’d ever been teased for, but it hadn’t made her thin and pretty the way she used to tell herself she didn’t care if she ever was. It just made her uglier. Haggard. Hungry. She closed her eyes and refused to look.
In the tent, Meoraq watched her bend herself in half and bounce with the vigor of her scrubbing motions. Silently, he sat up, drew in his legs and rested his palms lightly on his knees, unthinkingly adopting the relaxed yet intent posture of any child at lectures. He studied every line of the silhouette she showed him and yes, he knew she was only cleaning herself, and no, there ought not to be anything remotely sensual in such a process, and yes, he supposed it said something about his character that there was this fire in his belly as he sat in the dark and watched her, but no, he felt no pressing urge to meditate until he had resolved it. Not yet.
When she reached her knees, Amber stopped. She was freezing, but that was only part of it. Half her hot water was gone and her fire was getting low. She straightened up to stretch her aching back, then bent over again to dip her hair clumsily in the stewing pouch. Rubbing the soap over her head did not appear to do anything except rough up the knots in her hair, but she rubbed anyway, then poured what was left of the hot water over the matted results in a slow trickle. Even if the soap wasn’t doing anything for her, the hot water might loosen the grime enough to rinse…well…clean-er. Clean was probably one of those things, like pizza or television, that had made the eternal transition from reality to memory. But cleaner was better than nothing and when she was done, she thought the effort had been worth it, assuming she ever warmed up.
Shivering, Amber crouched down by her pack and rifled through it for almost an entire ass-freezing minute before she realized she didn’t have any more clean colonists’ pants, just her old blue jeans, the ones she still thought of as her ‘skinny jeans’. It was darkly hilarious to think that they still weren’t going to fit. They were her ‘fat jeans’ now.
The fire was only getting lower and colder and she doubted like hell the clothes fairy was coming tonight. Amber fished out some panties, put them on, straightened up to shake out her jeans…and her panties fell off. Somehow the prospect of being caught with her underwear around her ankles was more mortifying than being caught bare-naked. Amber yanked them up again, held them uselessly at her hip while she looked in vain for a WalMart lingerie department to spring up behind her on this alien planet, then gave up and tied them on with handfuls of her panties’ own excess fabric. She stepped into her jeans fast, as if to hide evidence of a particularly ugly crime, but as she bent over to fish out a fresh shirt, those fell off too.
“Motherfuck!” Amber hissed, hugely embarrassed. She looked around again, this time for the women’s wear section of that WalMart. What was she supposed to do now? She couldn’t tie the jeans on, for Chrissakes!
‘Suck it up, little girl,’ she told herself in Bo Peep’s dry, half-drunk voice. ‘You’ve got bigger problems out here, so quit whining about your clothes and just put them on.’
“I am not whining,” she whispered fiercely, and put a shirt on. It was another of the Manifestor-white ones, one of only two clean ones she had left, and there was no kidding herself that it was just loose. She couldn’t walk around in this damn thing. She needed a belt.
Motherfuck.
Holding her jeans in one fist, Amber kicked the fire out and picked up her dirty clothes and her greatly depleted pack. She trudged around to the front of Meoraq’s tent and half-knelt to work the flap open. “If you’re awake, don’t stab me,” she whispered. “It’s just me. Amber.”
No response. She peeked inside. The light of the fire out where Nicci slept turned one wall of his tent a hazy orange, letting in just enough light to suggest Meoraq’s body beneath his blanket.
“Are you still awake?” she whispered.
A lizardish grunt was her only answer. Hearing it, she felt her stomach knot inside her. She’d woken him up, obviously. She should have waited. She was going to get him for his turn at standing watch in a few hours anyway. What was she doing here?
“You’re letting the wind in,” he said without moving, not even raising his head.
“Sorry.” She started to let the flap drop, then, not without a nervous glance over her shoulder, she crawled inside. He still didn’t move, but she could feel his stare even if she couldn’t see it. Fidgeting with her handful of denim, Amber awkwardly settled herself in the furthest corner from his mat and whispered, “Do you…Can I…Look, I’m sorry I woke you, but do you have an extra belt I can, um, borrow?”
Wordlessly, the dark lump of a lizardman propped itself up on one elbow to open the pillow of his own pack. Rustling sounds. The shape dropped back down. His arm reached out to her, holding the folded length of a leather strap.
She took it, her cheeks flaming. “Thanks.”
He grunted.
“Sorry I woke you.”
“You didn’t.” A pause. He shifted. “Tie the fastens, woman. You’re letting the wind in.”
“Sorry.” Belt in hand, she crawled back out into the freezing night and tied his tent down. Threading his wide belt through the loops of her jeans was not exactly effortless, and figuring out the buckle took several minutes, but as soon as it was on, she felt a lot better. She guessed she was ready to do the laundry.
The heating stones went back in the coals of the fire next to Nicci. Amber moved the cooking pouch and its tripod back and filled it. Meoraq probably wouldn’t be thrilled to discover how much water she’d gone through in one night, but maybe she could get them filled again before he noticed. Unlikely. He noticed everything. But maybe. And as long as she was imagining things, why not imagine that he’d forget all about being woken up early for her wardrobe malfunction.
And speaking of clothes, how exactly was she supposed to do this? Amber was no stranger to the chore of laundry, but it had always involved pre-measured packets of detergent and a handful of tokens. She doubted rubbing a little soap over her clothes was going to do the job. Still, like her own bath-in-a-bag, i
t had to be better than nothing.
Amber gathered up all the shirts, pants and underwear she and Nicci owned and waited for the water to heat back up. It wasn’t a very big pile, and for the first time since the crash, Amber made herself think about just what they were going to do for new clothes, because they were going to need some soon. Not in some hazy future sense, when these wore out completely (although that day probably wasn’t as far in the future as she was pinning it), but soon, before it got so cold that people stopped just bitching about the weather and actually froze to death.
She’d have to ask Meoraq. Maybe he could teach her how to make new clothes, although it was difficult to imagine how he could turn the rough, scaly hide of the saoqs into anything like the supple leathers he wore. If it was as much of a process as she suspected, he might not want to take the time. For that matter, he might not know how. In spite of the fact that he dressed in leather, they weren’t all ragged edges and rawhide ties. They were evenly stitched, trimmed and decorated, with metal buckles on his harness and belt. In other words, they were probably store-bought. She could hardly ask Meoraq to take them to the nearest LizardMart and buy everyone new outfits, but she did find herself uneasily wondering why he wasn’t at least taking them to town. The fact that they hadn’t so much as seen one on the horizon meant that he had to be deliberately keeping them away. In spite of how dangerous he insisted the wildlands were, he wanted to keep them here. Where no one else knew about them but him.
Amber thought about this as she did the washing—dunking each article of clothing, rubbing it all over with Meoraq’s latherless soap, dunking it again, wringing and rubbing and dunking some more—and ultimately decided it didn’t really matter. Scott was unlikely to let them go to any lizard-city anyway. It was one thing to pioneer their way east across the alien landscape with their native guide, but it would be something else entirely to be the ones who were outnumbered. To be the aliens, in other words.
And that only brought her around to the even more disquieting matter of just what they were going to do once Meoraq was gone. Not just for food, but for boot repair and heating-stones and stewing bags to dunk their dirty clothes in. Scott could kid himself all he wanted about how this was a colony, but once Meoraq was gone, she had a feeling things were going to fall apart in one hell of a hurry.