by R. Lee Smith
She didn’t doubt for a moment that Meoraq would leave them at the end of the road. The only question was whether or not he’d leave them even sooner. She would if she were him, especially after tonight. God, what had she been thinking? Just barge right in, little girl, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, by all means, sit around until he actually has to tell you to get out.
‘He didn’t,’ the half-drunk voice of her mother remarked.
“Didn’t what?” Amber muttered, wringing what looked like pure hot cocoa out of one of Nicci’s shirts. She really ought to dump out what was left in the bag and start over with fresh water.
‘He didn’t tell you to get out.’
“Well, no, not in so many—”
‘He told you to close the door.’
Amber froze, her mouth slightly agape, her arms jutting out stiffly before her with murky water dripping from the rat-tail of Nicci’s shirt, because there was a difference, wasn’t there?
“Bullshit,” she whispered, but she looked furtively back over her shoulder at the leathery peak of Meoraq’s tent.
Tie the fastens, woman. You’re letting the wind in. Not even ‘human,’ but ‘woman.’ Tie the fastens, woman.
And just why the hell was that running circles in her head instead of I beat him until I broke seventeen bones or He slept six days and died? But now the thought was there and her brain ruthlessly showed her how it could have been if she’d done it…if she’d closed herself in and then crawled over to the half-glimpsed shape of him and then what, for God’s sake?
Her hands were freezing. She was still holding that stupid shirt and her wet knuckles were actually throbbing with cold. Quickly, Amber dunked the shirt into the warm water and wrung it out again. She was doing the laundry, damn it, and that was it. He didn’t even like her.
‘You don’t have to like someone to fuck them,’ observed Bo Peep’s sly, smirking voice, and she ought to know. ‘Besides, it was nice in there, wasn’t it? Out of the wind. He had a real blanket, too. And he’s warm.’
“Shut up.”
‘You thought so even way back then, when he took the knife away and licked you. He’s not cold at all, like reptiles are supposed to be. He was so warm.’
She was not going to stand here and argue out loud with her dead mother’s disembodied, imaginary voice. Tight-lipped, Amber gathered up the chilly armload of dripping laundry and carried it over to the nearest tree. She began to tie things to the lowest branches. Double-knots. Extra secure. She wasn’t thinking about it. For God’s sake, he was a lizard!
‘He’s a man. And men are all the same. Go on and tell me you’ve never caught him looking at you when it’s just the two of you up at night and Eric and Maria are shaking the walls of that pissant little tent.’
Sure, she had. She’d seen those looks and, let’s face it, she’d seen them because she’d been looking for it, hadn’t she? Yeah, he was a lizard. Yeah, okay, no getting around that, but he was the lizard who, although he clearly didn’t like her, wouldn’t walk with her, and avoided even looking at her these days, he was the lizard who had touched her. Three times, in fact, his hand had stroked across her forehead in what could only be called a caress, and who could forget that endless moment after he’d decided not to execute her after all, when he’d put his arm around her waist and yanked her hard against him and licked her neck and pressed his scaly forehead against her shoulder?
“It isn’t like that!” she hissed, tying up the last pair of pants with a particularly savage twist. She knew she was talking to herself and she hated herself for doing it, but she had to say it out loud because the silence felt too much like shame-faced agreement.
And it wasn’t like that! It wasn’t! She’d had no trouble at all telling Crandall off when he’d tried to buy a blowjob with a lousy Fleet ration, and she’d done it a few times since on those nights when he decided that the privilege of his company was worth a kiss and a quick cop under her shirt. She had no pangs of conscience when it came to putting herself between Scott and her sister, or speaking up over his persistent efforts to convince everyone that a loyal pioneeress served her colony’s best interests by making babies. She knew some and maybe all of the other women were creeping off with certain guys from time to time and she didn’t blame them, exactly, but she was different. She was tough. Things were bad right now, but she was learning and she wouldn’t need to be taken care of forever. She wasn’t…God damn it, she wasn’t a little girl!
The wind flapping through the wet clothes sounded to her ears like slow, sarcastic applause. Her mother used to do that when she was feeling witty. Amber turned her back on it and went back to the fire, where the stewing bag was waiting to be washed out. After she’d done that, she could cut some more grass and bundle it up for fuel. Then as long as nothing snuck in and ate someone, Meoraq would wake up and think she was doing a good job. And maybe he’d tell her so and maybe he’d even give her one of those friendly knuckle-taps and maybe he’d never put his arm around her that way again, but that was just fine. Amber Bierce did not need a fucking hug and even if he were to open his tent this instant and order her inside, she—
…she…
…she’d go.
Amber sat in the grass with the stewing bag and the bar of soap stupidly clutched to her chest. She pulled her knees up, put her head down, and wept without sound until she thought she was going to pass out. Then she dried her eyes, finished washing out the bag, hung it up on its tripod, and got back to work on Nicci’s boot.
7
After being wakened for his watch, Moraq brought out the fires, meditated until dawn, then went out and found a saoq to kill. There were no herds nearby, nor was he likely to find any more save by Sheul’s grace, but the young rogues who had been defeated and driven out were still in plentiful number in the plains. His kill was a finer specimen than most, but it had been gored deeply across the face and the infection which made it easy for Meoraq to find and kill had also swelled half its head with poison. Perhaps not all the meat was bad, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Meoraq left the head and the bowels steaming over the cold, dead earth and came back to feed his many whining mouths.
He made certain to walk past Amber on his way through camp, and a short time later, as he was pulling the saoq out of its hide, she came yawning up behind him with her clean, white clothes blown wide around her. She didn’t look like a candle-ward anymore. Neither did she look like a tent or a windmill or any of the other humorous comparisons that might have at one time occurred to him. In the grey light of dawn, she looked like nothing but what she was: a sallow-faced, sunken-eyed starving person.
He frowned and continued to butcher his kill.
“Morning,” she said.
He glanced up at the sky. “So it is.”
“Yeah, so…thanks again.” She lifted the lower edge of her gusting sail of a shirt to show him the top of her breeches and his belt threaded through its loops, but only for an instant. Her smile seemed nervous. “Sorry I woke you up last night. I should have just waited until it was time for your watch.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” He did not, however, elaborate on just what he had been doing. It did not bother him much to receive an idle glance or three while washing up for a trial—waiting around in the arena hold was boring—but if he had ever found himself the subject of such a stare as he had given Amber’s silhouette, he thought it very likely a knife would be drawn over it. And what had he seen, even? Her human body was just as much a mystery as it had ever been in all save the broadest sense, that of its shape beneath the oversized things she wore.
“So…about last night…”
Meoraq grunted and continued hacking the saoq into manageable pieces, setting meat aside for the hateful human Scott and tossing the bones into the fire, waiting for her to say something. It seemed a long time in coming, but the kind of stench raised by burning bones could make any silence thicker.
“I…I just wanted to say that I…shouldn’t have let myself
in like that.”
“You have,” he pointed out. “Twice.”
“And I should have left as soon as I had the belt. You know. Before you had to tell me to leave.”
‘I didn’t,’ thought Meoraq disgustedly, and cut the last stubborn fiber holding the saoq’s heart to its body. Aloud, he said nothing.
“It won’t happen again,” said Amber.
She seemed to be waiting for something and Meoraq had no idea what she wanted to hear. He savaged at the carcass some more, preserving the tastier organs, but burning the majority. It occupied his hands the way that counting breaths occupied his mind, but it was not peace.
“Are we good?” she asked finally, in what seemed for her a rather weak voice.
“I do not mark you.”
“Are we…” She faltered to a short, helpless silence, looking back over her shoulder at the sleeping people of his camp, and when she faced him again at the end of it, it was with obvious strain. “I know what you said about not needing friends and I…I know how you feel about me—”
He frowned.
“—but I need someone around that I can still talk to,” she finished in a shaky rush. “And if I fucked that up last night, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I just need to know that we’re still…the same.”
Meoraq started to rub at his brow-ridges, saw the blood on his hands, and settled instead for stabbing his knife into the shoulder of the saoq. He looked up at her, making an effort not to look ferocious. “I don’t talk to people, human. I never learned how and I think I must not be any good at it. If there’s something you expect me to say back at you, you are just going to have to tell me what it is.”
“Are you mad at me?”
His spines flared. “No. Why would you think so?”
“Because I barged in on you and woke you up for a stupid reason.”
“How many times—” Meoraq stopped there with a snort and unbuckled the belt he wore. He stripped it off, looped it over so it hung even, and held it up to her.
Her hand reached out and drew back again. “What’s that one for?”
“So you can whip yourself and be done with it.”
She stepped away at once, actually hiding her hands behind her back for an instant like a child.
“No? You’re certain? Then shut the door, human, it’s done.” He put his belt back on. “I wasn’t sleeping and it wasn’t a foolish request. As for your, ha, invasion of my tent, I forgive you for it. Enough, eh? Enough.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, then said, “Can I do anything to help with that?”
Meoraq followed her nervous gaze to the saoq before him and studied it as if it were new. “What would you do, if you could?”
“I guess I could make some skewers.”
“Well then?”
She wandered off toward a tree. He heard wood crack as she fought a few thin branches down. He heard some of her people protesting the noise as well, although no one seemed to be protesting the thought of roasted saoq when it pleased them to wake up.
Amber returned to sit at his side, mangling meat onto her harvested sticks with considerable difficulty. The bark of the mganz was the hardest thing about it; its wood was soft and wet enough to be useless either for burning or tool-making. He took the opportunity of her distraction as she fought with it to run a critical eye over her boots. Not a bad effort, for her first. Nothing that would earn her any prizes, but not bad. They still needed to be sealed, however.
He got up, gesturing to the rest of the saoq so that she could keep herself occupied, and returned to his tent. The hide flap’s stays were not tied in the knot he’d used on leaving this morning. Just within and to one side, out of danger of some errant stride, his mending kit and his wrapped brick of soap rested together atop his greatly diminished supply of leathers.
She’d come right into his tent. Right inside. He could smell the soap on her skin and the wet smoky smell of her hair and she had been right here.
Enough. Close the door, wasn’t that what he’d just told her? Good advice. It was over. Close the door. He hunted out his bottle of proofing resin, and returned to the fire to find that Amber had finished skewering the meat. She had also taken it upon herself to put the meatier bones into his stewing pouch with his heating stones and just enough water to cover them. She wasted nothing…except the heart, liver, kidney, and bitteret, all of which she had seen him set aside.
She saw him looking and hesitated, holding her skewers of meat awkwardly between her fists and as far away from her clean clothes as possible. That cause was lost, of course. She had already smudged herself with soot, dirt and several good smears of blood. White showed everything, which was why they made the brunts wear white tabards at Tilev. It didn’t stop them from brawling out of the training ring, but it usually made them think before they did it, at least long enough to take their tabards off.
He’d actually told her about that brunt in his middle years. He’d never told anyone—not his father (although Rasozul had surely been informed), not his brothers, not even Nkosa. But he’d told Amber…and she had still come to sit with him this morning.
“Am I doing something wrong?” Amber asked.
Kneeling that way, half his height and draped in too much overshirt, he suddenly found it easier to picture her as a human child on the hilltop she’d spoken of. He could see the crowd of children around her, chanting and jeering the way that children do when injury is imminent, but she would not have hesitated. Fearless Amber. Stubborn Amber. He saw her tumbling, her thin arms hugged close to her chest and eyes squeezed shut, flying blindly past trees and bone-cracking stones until she came to a dizzied stop. Just the once and never again. Just the once, because she had loved it.
“Meoraq?”
He wanted to tell her that he understood. He had spent a lifetime learning it—in Tilev, where he had lived out every year from age three to twenty, never home for more than a two-brace and that during the coldest days of the season; in House Uyane, where his own father was more a name than a man even to his son; on the road that Sheul had set before him, where every journey began and ended in battle and the almost-friend you looked forward to seeing after half a year’s absence could be whipped or worse just for slapping you once on the chest. He knew that joy can be a terrible thing to feel, when you know you can’t have it every day. He wanted to tell her…but the other humans were stirring, and so instead he said, “Give those to S’kot.”
She hesitated again. “All of them?”
“Yes.” Meoraq opened the bottle of resin and set it where it could warm.
“Um…I hate to admit this, but they’re not going to save you one.”
He snorted. “You think I need you to tell me this? Go on.”
She went. He watched her go, and when she was bent (her shadow black against the firelit leather as she bent and stretched and then came crawling in to him) and at work in the coals, he turned his knife back on all that was left of the saoq. Choice meats, they called this in the cities. The food of governors and lords. He remembered without warning being a child at Rasozul’s table—a rare privilege—being served cattle’s heart, and how terribly grown-up it had made him feel. These days, it was just an extra-tough cut of meat and he ate it as little as he could. But that would change when he went home, he supposed. If he was made steward of House Uyane, he would be eating heart nearly every day. Farm-raised, young cattle’s heart, minced with herbs and simmered slow or fried quick and served with roasted riak.
But today, he was still Sheulek, and he was eating wildland stew.
Amber returned. He could hear her bare feet padding over the crushed grass, and he could hear them slow as she saw him drop bits of saoq heart, black and dripping with blood, into the water. Meoraq tipped his head at her and nicked the end of the bitteret so he could squeeze out the crumbling mass of its protected organ, along with the tangy fluid that it floated in.
Amber put the back of her hand against her mouth and
watched solemnly as it all went into the stewing pouch. She said, “I don’t even know what that thing was.”
Meoraq glanced at the dangling tube of the empty bitteret before tossing it into the fire. He told her the word, then flexed his spines and said, “It has something to do with digestion, they tell me.”
“Do you have one?”
“Of course not. Only grass-eaters, like saoq and cattle.”
“What does it taste like?”
“It tastes,” said Meoraq, now cutting up the liver, “like the food we are fortunate enough to have.”
“Which means it’s gross.”
“I don’t ask you to enjoy it.” He added the kidney and wiped his knife clean before sheathing it. “But I warn you, I’ve been pressed to eat far worse things in my time than stewed bitteret.”
She laughed, stirring once at the contents of the pouch. “So have I, if it comes to that. Thanks for helping me with my boots, by the way. I know you don’t believe me, but I swear I’m not trying to make things even more difficult.”
He grunted, nudged at the still-warming bottle of glue, and then leaned back and looked at her. “Do you see those trees?”
“Huh?”
“The mganz trees. Do you see them?”
Amber looked over her shoulder at the trees. “Um…yeah?”
“Do you see any others?”
She looked at him again, frowning, but sat up a little taller and searched the plains around their hilltop camp. There were thickets here and there and, in the distance, shadows of what might be zuol copses, but no other trees in sight. “No.”
“Sheul set them in my path.”
She rolled her eyes and settled back down. “Of course he did.”
“Yes. As easily as He set you for me to find.” Meoraq leaned close, lowering his spines. “But even He cannot make you ask for help when you need it.”