by R. Lee Smith
Color rose pink in her cheeks. She looked down, picked at the unsealed seams of her boots, said nothing.
He could have said more, perhaps a word comparing a fall in the mud of the prairie to a fall in the mountains they would eventually have to cross, but couldn’t think how to phrase it and it was very distracting to be this close to her. He leaned away instead, letting the matter go, to lift the cap of the sealing glue and show her the brush affixed to it. “This is ready. Just paint a thin skin along the edges where the sole joins the body of the boot. Take care to make a full seal.”
“Okay.” She started to get up. “Guess that means I’d better go get Nicci’s.”
His spines came forward in surprise and then flattened. He waited and true enough, Amber returned to him with a second pair of boots, newly resoled.
“You taught her well,” said Meoraq darkly.
She sat down with the boots in her lap and just looked at him.
Meoraq traded out stones. The bloody water in the stewing pouch was beginning to simmer, sending out tiny bubbles like beads to slide along the lumps of largely unidentifiable chunks of meat. It gave him something to look at while he mastered his rising temper and counted breaths. At last he said, “My mending supplies exist to be used. I do not begrudge their loss if they teach a useful lesson.”
“I think I did okay.”
“Yes. You learned to use a needle and an awl to mend your boots. N’ki learned to use you.” He slammed a wet stone down in the embers and glared at her.
Amber applied resin to a boot. Nicci’s boot. “She’s doing the best she can.”
He had to look at her twice to be certain this absurd statement was not meant as some human joke, but she appeared to be serious. So he snorted at her, and if that were not enough to let her know what he thought, he added, “Sheul provides the raw stuff of our souls, human. The polish is left entirely to us.”
“I didn’t catch much of that.”
“It means we are responsible for our own character. N’ki is helpless because she wants to be helpless, and if that is what she wants, that is what she deserves to be.”
“Lighten up, lizardman. It’s not easy to hike through the damn wilderness when you’re not used to it. If I can make it a little easier for her, why shouldn’t I?”
“What a stupid thing to say!” he said disgustedly. “Do you think it helps your N’ki to be coddled like that? Do you think it helps any of your people, who must all work that much harder to care for her?”
“I’m taking care of her. You don’t get to judge me for that.”
Meoraq leaned in aggressively close to say, quietly but with feeling, “I am Sheulek, human, and I get to judge everyone.” Straightening up, he added, “You were the one to tell me that feeding is not the same as saving, and it is just as true for N’ki as it is for you.”
“She shouldn’t be here,” said Amber, and immediately coughed out a sour laugh. “None of us should, but she really shouldn’t. She didn’t want to. I made her come with me. I made her come here.”
“If you can do that, making her fetch water once in a while should be easy.”
But she didn’t smile and her stiff-backed silence as she sat proofing her Nicci’s boots made the echoes of his own words seem fanged, which of course they had been. Meoraq hissed almost soundlessly through his teeth, rubbed crossly at the end of his snout, and changed out the heating stones. The wet stone hissed; the hot one spat.
“Who is she, then?” he demanded suddenly. “What is she to you?”
“My sister.” Her mouthparts faintly turned up even though anger was still in every hard line of her. “You honestly can’t tell?”
“Are you saying you’re kin?”
“We’re family. You know. Sisters.” She touched her hand to her chest and moved it rapidly out and back again, tracing an invisible line between hearts.
“You come of the same father?” he guessed, and swiftly sketched two badly-drawn humans in the ash around the fire, on their knees in female fashion. After a moment’s thought, he added the swoop of human hair above them, then drew in the governing figure of a father. “You were sired of one man?”
Her smooth brows knitted. She hesitated, then shook her head. “Our mother,” she said, and leaned forward to draw curves on the father-shape—not head-hair, but an embarrassingly accurate suggestion of twinned teats. He did not look at her when she was done. “But we had different fathers,” she said, indicating them vaguely, one to either side of the mother. “Different men.”
He twitched his spines to show he understood, and if he had successfully translated her words, a great many things had just become clear.
When a Sheulek came to the House of conquest and the steward had no daughters to offer for his fires, the accepted alternative was to give one’s wife. Any sons who came of this union were for the Sheulek to raise, but if a man’s wife bore a daughter, what harm could come of raising it in its mother’s household with the other children of her marriage? So it seemed obvious that Amber was one of these—sired of Sheulek, or whoever took that role in their human cities—while Nicci came of their mother’s wedded man. They were not true sisters, only blood-kin, like he and Nkosa. Blood-kin through the maternal line, but blood-kin all the same.
“Who was he?” Meoraq asked. “Your father.”
“I don’t know. I never knew him.”
“Your mother’s man, then. What man did she marry?”
“What did she…what?”
“Marry.” Meoraq held up his hands and clasped them. “How was she bound?”
“I’m not…sure I’m getting you, but if you’re asking who she lived with, she lived alone. Well, with us, but not with a man.”
“How is that possible?”
“What do you mean?” Her mouthparts were curling up again, as if she found his suspicion humorous. “Why would she have to?”
“Who raised her children?”
Amber’s human smile faded. She went back to work on Nicci’s other boot. “I guess the polite answer is, she did.”
“Say truth. Who raised her children?”
“She did. It was her house. In her name, paid for with her money, filled with her things. Hers. Women don’t have to get married where I’m from if they don’t want to.”
Meoraq leaned back, staring at her. He tried to picture the land she described, a land of milling humans, like yifu in some great undiscovered nest, but the images his mind presented were those of the ancient ruins, and the people he saw inhabiting them, his own. It had been that way for dumaqs once, before the Fall. Men and women, living together, walking freely about in the streets, open to any man’s eyes; it remained a shocking prospect. Meoraq flexed his spines, then shook that off and frowned at her. “What did she do? Your mother?”
Amber’s thin smile broke and she refocused her attention on Nicci’s boots, although they were entirely sealed. “She died. I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”
Meoraq watched her fuss with the boots. Eventually, she realized she was done with them and set them aside. She took up her own and finally got to work on them.
“Were you married?” he asked, and when she gave him that puzzled frown again, clasped his hands together. “Were you bound to a man?”
Understanding smoothed out her clay-soft features, but she didn’t answer right away. She only looked at him, her thoughts moving like stormclouds behind her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
Why did he want to know? He scratched irritably at his throat, but his scales still felt cool. “I’m trying to understand you,” he said. That much was truth. He wanted very much to understand this creature who crawled into his tent uninvited and left without dismissal, and more than that, he wanted to understand which of the many males in her pack had a claim over her. Because…?
Meoraq hissed suddenly through his teeth and snapped, “I don’t need a reason!” which Amber not-surprisingly believed to be directed at her.
“No,” she s
aid. Her head bent. She dipped out proofing resin and painted her boots. “I was never married.”
“Did you…” He wasn’t even certain how to ask this. “Did you keep your own household?”
“No. We lived with our mother.”
She did not look at him when she answered. Her voice was tight and the silence that followed it, even tighter.
“Did you take labors?” he asked at last.
“Yeah, of course I did. Me and Nicci both.”
“What did you do?”
She slid him a glance and laughed without much humor. “I built machines.”
He recoiled.
“Well, I didn’t build them. I stood next to the machines that built the other machines and made sure they ran smoothly. I couldn’t even fix them if they broke. Just a button-pusher, really.”
He wasn’t sure if that was better or not.
“N’ki did this also?”
“Oh hell no. Nicci was a waitress.” Amber glanced at him, read the confused slant of his head perfectly and said, “Do you have places where people go just to eat?”
“Yes, of course.” Surprised, he sat up straighter. “N’ki kept such a place? She never cooks!”
“No, I know. She showed people where to sit when they came and they’d tell her what they wanted to eat and she’d bring it.” She set her boots down, capped the resin, and held the bottle out.
“Is that all?” He pointed at the ground, away from the fire. “She carried food?”
“Yeah.” Without the business of sealing her boots to occupy herself, Amber returned her attention to the stew. It was bubbling constantly at the sides now, but it would need an hour at least before it stopped looking like chopped offal in water and became food instead, and it did not require constant tending in the meantime.
“For coin?” Meoraq pressed.
“Yeah.”
“Someone gave her coin just to carry food?”
“Not a lot, but yeah.”
Meoraq leaned back to think about that. When he visited a public kitchen, which was often, the cook passed him his meals directly. He could not comprehend why anyone would pay a woman just to touch it for him, and he could tell by the small smile on Amber’s pliant face that his confusion was very evident.
“And I built machines,” she reminded him. Her smile faded. “Do you have to kill me now?”
He thought about it, concerned, but ultimately determined that he did not. “The Word forbids us to master or seek to remake the machines of the Ancients. Your machines were those of humans and not the Ancients. You offend none of His laws. Besides, you are here now.”
“Yeah.” She raised her head, searching the empty plains that surrounded them. “My machine-making days are definitely over.”
“But you must not seek to master the machines you may encounter here or you will be subject to my judgment.”
She stirred the stew and didn’t look at him. “I’ll try to control myself. Making you kill me after you’ve gone through all the trouble of teaching me to light a fire would be pretty ungrateful.”
“It hasn’t been so much trouble,” he said, showing her a careless flick of his spines to hide his irritation. He picked up the nearest of her boots to prove it, inspecting the seal and grunting his approval. “You learn very quickly.” And before he knew it, certainly without planning, he said, “I like teaching you.”
“The hell you say. You can barely stand to look at me.”
“I know.” He shook his head with disgust and stood. “Come, human. Let’s go have a look at this land while your boots dry.”
“What, in my bare feet?”
“Don’t whine at me. We won’t go far and you won’t be walking much once we’re out in the open,” he added with a certain evil humor. “You’ll be crawling.”
She looked down at herself, at her mostly clean clothes and fresh-washed skin. “Great. You’re sure I don’t need to stay here and cook?”
Meoraq glanced over to the far fire where the skewers of saoq roasted, the first of which were already brown and spitting merrily. The scent of food had drawn a handful of humans from their nests. He raised his arm and when one of them raised an arm back at him, he beckoned it over. “Tend to those,” he ordered, pointing at the meat. “How do you mark me?”
The human gave Amber an uncomfortable glance. “Where are you going?”
“With him, apparently.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
The human’s eyes narrowed, which gave it a distinctly suspicious look. “Why?”
Amber’s brows puckered, first in confusion, then in irritation. “I’m going hunting! Why the hell do you think?”
Meoraq raised his hand to catch the other human’s attention, then pointed down to his stewing pouch. “Keep it hot,” he ordered. “And don’t put it over the fire! I only have one water-tight pouch.”
“Then how am I supposed to—”
“Change out the stones,” said Amber, pointing at the one heating in the coals. “Just fish out the old one, drop in the hot one and try not to get too much ash in there.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
The question was directed at Amber, but Meoraq did not allow her to answer it. He snapped his spines flat and leaned in close enough to smell the unwashed, male stink of the human now trying to back away, and hissed, “Because it is not the task I set her. It is the task I set you!”
“Is there a problem over here?”
Meoraq leaned back, rubbing at his warming throat and allowing the human to escape so Scott could take his place. He was calm. A Sheulek is always calm.
“It’s not worth it,” Amber murmured behind him. “I’ll stay.”
“Get your spear and fill the flasks. I’ll find you at the water.”
“Meoraq—”
“Go.”
She went.
Meoraq folded his arms, resting the lengths of his first fingers along the hilts of his sabks, even though if it came to killing, he would never use an honor-blade on the throat of the hateful human Scott.
Scott smiled at him. Like all his smiles, it was a lie. “I’m glad we have this opportunity to speak privately.”
“So it seems,” said Meoraq after a moment’s judgment. “I will hear you then.”
“You’ve been a tremendous help to us in these first difficult days.”
Meoraq snorted. A ‘help’.
“And I appreciate it. We all appreciate it. However…” Scott’s face shaped itself into an expression of grotesque concern. “We are all increasingly uncomfortable with your attempts to assert control over us.”
Meoraq thought that over and took slow breaths and decided he’d better be sure he’d heard that before he lost his temper. “I do not mark you.”
“Control,” Scott said again. “Command might be a better word. Telling people what to do. And trying to intimidate us when you do it.”
“Ah. Go on.”
“I just don’t want there to be any confusion over who’s really in charge here. Now, I’m happy to assign someone to take care of the cooking detail this morning,” Scott said magnanimously. “And I’ll see to it that your…uh…whatever that is, is kept hot while you and Miss Bierce are…” Scott’s eyes rolled and his smile took on a crude sort of slant. “…doing whatever it is that you do, but I don’t want there to be any further incidents. In the future, if you have requests to make, you bring them to me and I’ll see what I can do about meeting them, but you need to stop just barking orders and slapping my people around.”
“I see.” Meoraq’s throat was very hot and tight-feeling now, but he made no attempt to hide its color or breathe it away. He did not draw; he remained calm. “Is that all you have to say?”
Scott considered. Meoraq’s throat throbbed painfully.
“I guess that’s it. But I do want you to know that I don’t hold you responsible. Miss Bierce has always been a disruptive element. I realize now it was a mistake to let
her act as my intermediary during our initial contact and I apologize for that.”
“I forgive you.”
The subtlety of dumaqi sarcasm was entirely lost on humans.
“Okay, then.” Scott clapped his hands noisily together and rubbed them. “I’m glad we got that sorted out. Is there anything you’d like to share?”
“Oh yes.”
The answer seemed to catch Scott by surprise. His smile slipped; the one that replaced it had teeth. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Good. Because I am only going to say this once. I don’t know who you were in your homeland or what you think gives you the right to talk at me like an equal—”
“Now wait a minute—”
“Do not interrupt me,” said Meoraq, quietly and distinctly. “This is not your camp and these are not your people. Everything you think you had became mine the moment I set my tent among you and will remain mine until I choose to release you. I am not asking your obedience. I demand it. I have forgiven much and will forgive more, I am certain, but the one thing I will never do is make myself your servant in the camp I have conquered. So here we stand, human, and either you will do as I command and cook the fucking gift of food—” Oh, calmly now. Breathe. A Sheulek is the master of his clay and his emotions, always. “—that I have brought you, or you can let it burn, but you will have no more from me until I see the obedience I am owed.”
Scott looked back over his shoulder at the far fire where the saoq roasted. More of his people had wakened and gathered there, but they stayed close to the food. These words were still private.
When Scott turned back to Meoraq, he was not smiling. “I think there’s a lot of people over there who would object to being thought of as your property.”
“Is that a threat?” Meoraq demanded, more incredulous than angry, although he was very, very angry. “You and all your piss-licking people together couldn’t take me if I were tethered to a tree!”
“It’s not a threat,” Scott mumbled, but his face had gone dark and even uglier.
Meoraq clapped a cooling hand to his throat and rubbed, rubbed. It didn’t help much. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe, and for no reason at all, the memory of Amber crawling into his tent in the dark watches of the night leapt full to the front of his brain. Hissing, he opened his eyes and there was Scott, brazenly scowling at him.