by R. Lee Smith
“If I am man enough?” Meoraq echoed, but Amber did not re-engage him. Thunder broke and boomed across the plains, making her flinch back. The lightning came in sheets overhead, filling the night with a constant, flickering illumination that periodically let out a flash of white brilliance. It wasn’t enough to read the Word by, perhaps, but it was more than enough to see Amber’s round, staring eyes.
“Go back to the others,” Meoraq told her, once it became obvious she was content to stand there all night.
She stirred, like one waking from a sleep, and shone her light on the glass again. “You don’t have tornados here, do you?”
He took her wrist and forced the light down. “Mind where you aim that damned thing! Go, I say. Obey me!”
“Quit grabbing at me. I want to see—” And there she stopped, not for the storm this time, but to give him a sudden, startled look. “Oh shit. It’s not the ship, it’s the window.”
“Eh?”
“I thought you were just being a dick about—” She started to shine her light at the tilework on the wall, then stopped and forced the beam down. She looked at him, her brows creased in alarm. “We’re not alone out here, are we?”
Meoraq flexed his spines a few times (If he was man enough, she said. If.) and finally forced them to relax. “I haven’t seen anyone, but that is no reason to set a beacon at every window.”
She tipped the lamp upwards, so that it shone its light briefly across the underside of her face, then switched it off. The storm continued, pouring light in sheets across the churning skies, more than enough to let him see the furrow of a frown on Amber’s troubled face. “Maybe we shouldn’t stay here tonight.”
“Now?” he asked irritably. “You have to say that now? Human, it is hours too late to move on, even if your accursed people would condescend to be moved.”
“I would much rather get rained on than murdered in my sleep,” said Amber, but she jumped at the next clap of thunder all the same.
“You are under my watch. No one is going to murder you, except perhaps me if you insist on ignoring my commands. Go back to the other room and stay with your people.”
She did not react to the threat. Indeed, she gave no sign she’d even heard him. She was staring at the window again, clutching her human lamp, now dark and lifeless, in both hands. Both shaking hands.
“Calm yourself,” said Meoraq gruffly. “It’s only a storm.”
“I’m calm,” she said, but in a strained and distracted way. “Do you see me freaking out? No. I’m totally calm. I just…don’t feel very safe.”
“There is nothing to be gained by worrying over the weather. We are in Sheul’s care tonight.”
“I know you think that’s comforting, but it’s not.”
“So be it. Console yourself instead with the knowledge that you aren’t sleeping in the rain. And treasure it, human, because I promise you, that is a luxury.”
“But we’re completely boxed in. If anyone bad comes, the only way out—”
Meoraq unclipped his kzung and showed her the shine of its blade in the stormlight. “—is through them,” he finished, and flared his mouth to bare all his teeth. “Is that man enough for you?”
The flicker of the storm made it difficult to tell, but he thought she smiled. And then she screamed as lightning struck the ground directly outside the window, sending shards of stone into the glass. The thunder that followed shattered what the stones had cracked; the window blew inward and smashed itself across the floor. Meoraq turned his head away from the wall of freezing wind that blasted in at them and was nearly knocked from his feet when Amber slammed up against him.
Like a little fork of lightning inside his mind, Meoraq’s thoughts washed out to white. He could not hear the storm, feel the wind. For a moment—the very briefest moment, the very longest—he was aware of nothing but the press of her body to the whole of his, her hands digging at his back, the warmth that was her breath blowing against his heart. He could not feel himself at all, except where he was defined by her touch.
Her embrace.
Meoraq returned his sword to his belt and awkwardly hovered that arm over her, lowering it by hesitant degrees until his hand just touched her shoulder.
Amber pushed herself away quickly and no sooner had she done so than the door hissed open and they were joined by Scott and several of his men. In near-perfect synchrony, they threw up their arms against the driving rain that had found its way indoors, but Scott had enough voice to shout, “What the hell happened in here?”
“Out!” Meoraq ordered. He caught Amber by the wrist and headed through the door, pushing Scott and his men before him and towing Amber after.
“What did you do?” Scott demanded on the other side, and without waiting for an answer, thrust his arm at Amber and said, “She broke the window!”
“I did not!”
A crash of thunder like Sheul’s own hammer turned the rest of her words to a scream he could not hear. She ducked down, her hands at the sides of her head to cover her human ears, and she stayed that way even after the thunder rolled away.
And she wasn’t the only one, Meoraq saw. Many other humans had assumed protective positions or had at least cleaved on to some other human. Some of the females were actually crying.
“Okay,” said Scott, and said it several times in his attempt to restore order. “Okay, just calm down. It’s only wind.”
“Yeah, so is a tornado,” said Crandall, looking nervously up at the ceiling. “I’m from Kansas. I see this shit all the time. Hey, lizardman, is this place safe?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean—”
Thunder. Screams. Meoraq waited.
“I mean, this is an old building, right?”
“Yes.”
“So is the roof going to fall in on us? It’s not, is it?”
Meoraq flicked his spines forward and back dismissively. “It might.”
Some of the humans screamed some more, but this time, there was no thunder to frighten them. Scott hastened to settle them with complicated hand gestures and soothing words, but the face he turned at last on Meoraq was pale and strained. “That’s not funny.”
Anger flared and his hand snapped up, but he caught the slap before he threw it. “I am not in a joking mood, S’kot,” he hissed. “The ruins are old. The wind is strong. The walls could fall. I advise you all to pray tonight, for it will be Sheul’s will alone if this place still stands at the end of the storm.”
Thunder again, shaking the very foundations of the building beneath their feet. Humans screamed, males and females together now. One of them groped at Meoraq’s own arm and he was compelled to slap the thing away. Immediately after he’d done it, the thought came to him that he had not slapped Amber away and she’d had both her arms around him. It did not make him feel badly for the human he’d struck, but it did make him look for Amber among her people.
He found her clinging to Nicci, the two of them huddled so tightly together that he could not quite be certain whose arm belonged to who or whose head was buried in whose hair. A spark of thought—Must it be both of them?—lit and faded in his mind, as bright and brief as lightning. He frowned and turned deliberately away. “We have more shelter here than out upon the open plains,” he said loudly, determined to cut through their chatter if he could not quell it. “That is what you wanted most, isn’t it? So. This will be our camp. Remove these things,” he ordered, pointing at the chairs.
“And put them where?” Eric asked.
Meoraq pointed again, at the foreroom. “With the rest of the trash,” he said. “After which, none of you are to enter that room. Mark me, all of you. If you need to use the necessary, exit through the room you entered by, but you are to be swift about it and return here immediately.”
The humans eyed one another as the rain drummed down and the thunder shook at the walls. At last, Eric uttered a grating sort of sound in the back of his throat and began, “That sounds like a lot of work.
I mean, there’s a lot of empty rooms. I don’t see any reason why we can’t spread out.”
“Because I said so!” Meoraq hissed and grabbed onto his brow-ridges as if to hold them to his head. “I don’t have to give you reasons! I give commands! Where is your obedience?”
“Okay, okay!” Eric raised both hands and patted the air. “Here is good. Be cool. Bierce, you want to come deal with this?”
“Do we get a fire at least?” asked Maria, standing close to her man’s side. “Or do we have to be cool in the literal sense as well?”
Eric dropped his hands and looked at her, his face puckering as with pain. “Baby, you’re not helping.”
“Excuse me for being cold!”
Meoraq took two swift steps forward and put his face close to Maria’s even as she tried to hide behind her man. “Stop,” he said, very quietly. “Whining. At me.”
Maria did not answer. She clutched her Eric’s shirt and did not move.
Meoraq straightened up and gave Eric a dark stare, then turned around to address Scott. “This is not a discussion. I am giving you my orders. Clear the room, settle your nests, go to sleep. No fires,” he added, glancing back at Maria. “Most of these old buildings have fire dampening devices. Some of them still work. No fires. And no lights anywhere—anywhere—where they can be seen outside. How do you mark me?”
They didn’t answer, but they marked him well enough. Eric took his Maria firmly in grip and they began to move furniture into the foreroom, Eric hauling the larger pieces and Maria picking up the inevitable debris that broke off. Some others followed their example, but most just huddled up to mutter at each other and eye the ceiling whenever the storm hammered on it. Meoraq paced as far away from the lot of them as the dimensions of the room would allow before setting out the components of his tent. It was a shameful extravagance, and he knew he could be comfortable enough with just his mat, but the lights were going to burn for as long as the room sensed occupants and if he had to look at humans all night, he was going to kill one of them. This was no longer a facetious thought. Not tonight and not in this place.
“Meoraq?”
Amber.
“Leave me,” he ordered, looking at the pole he was assembling and not at her.
She stood there a moment more while the color throbbed in his throat, and then knelt down next to him. She picked up two pole-quarters and threaded them together. “I know you’re upset,” she said in a low voice. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
She recoiled a little. “Yes!”
And she probably was, but he didn’t feel like forgiving her. He was, as she said, upset. He supposed he had been angrier than this several times in his life, but he didn’t think he’d ever been so angry for so long, and it was wearing on him. He needed to pray, but here in the ruins, surrounded by humans, that peace was well out of his reach. Even Amber (whose arms had been around him, wholly around him) put an itch under his scales—the kind that could not be unfelt once you were aware of it, the kind that just grew and grew until even the sanest, calmest man alive wanted to take a knife and cut it out.
Cursing under his breath, Meoraq put his hand to his throat and rubbed, trying to cool the hot throb there or at least cover the color he knew he was showing. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay, always.
Amber was watching, no longer even pretending to fuss with his tent-poles. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t know.
He didn’t really care much.
That itch…
Meoraq leapt up and backed away from her, still glaring, still rubbing. “Assemble this,” he ordered curtly. “I need to make a patrol.”
“Are you crazy? No, Meoraq, it’s too da—”
He snapped his pointing finger around in front of her face; she recoiled as if she thought it were a knife. “You do not give me orders,” he said, and even though he said it quietly, all human chatter ceased at once. Amber’s eyes were huge and green and baffled; seeing them should have made him feel something other than this black itch, but it didn’t. It made it worse.
“You are in my camp,” he told her. He should have been telling all of them, but it was only her. She was, in that moment, the only thing in the world he was aware of. “You belong to me. You give me your obedience and you do not argue with me.”
Thunder crashed and groaned. She looked up fearfully until the reverberations faded, but as soon as Meoraq turned to go, she was on her feet and clutching at his arm with her naked hands.
“Please, don’t go! I know you’re pissed at all of us and I wouldn’t blame you for leaving, but please don’t, not tonight!”
He found himself staring at her hand—her soft, pink hand—where it lay in stripes across his black scales. His mind was moving. He could feel it move, even though he could not quite catch his own thoughts. His mind was moving, but he couldn’t hear it. Like the hand that touched him, the hand he could see but not…quite…feel.
Meoraq closed his eyes and took a breath. Just one, for now. One for the Prophet, the wide open eye.
“Please,” she was saying, still touching him. “Okay?”
He opened his eyes and studied her from the quiet of his moving, uncatchable thoughts. He leaned forward slightly and took another breath—two for his brunt—and held it. She smelled like smoke and unwashed skin. She smelled like mud and dead grass and the animal dung she bundled for burning. She smelled of Gann and those were good smells, but they were all on the surface. Beneath all that was something different, something shiny and strange, like tiles pressed into a wall, like lights in the sky at night.
‘I have to get away from you,’ he thought, and it was not until he saw her immediate flinch that he realized he’d said it out loud.
She let go of him and stepped away, anger rising up fast in her ugly face. “Fine. You do what you want to do, but let me tell you something, lizardman. You may think God will protect you out there, but when you jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you. His divine protection ends when people insist on doing stupid things they know better than to do!”
“Where was this insight when you followed S’kot into this place, eh?” he asked acidly. “Or do you think he will catch you when you all leap from his wall?”
“Hey!” said Scott.
Meoraq swung on him. Scott vanished behind his people like smoke in the wind and all at once, the urge to go after him, to hack his way through the whole, monstrous mess of them until the screaming had stopped…but the thought was wrapped in some unfathomable way with the memory of Amber’s body slapping up against his and her arms going around him. He began to feel distinctly indistinct…the way he felt in the arena…just before the blackness of Sheul took him.
He pulled himself away, turned his clay toward the door and started walking.
“Then I’m going with you,” Amber declared.
He swung back, but she was already leaving his unmade tent to collect her spear.
“You are not!” he said loudly.
“Give me a flashlight,” she told Scott.
“You are not leaving this room!”
“If you go, I go,” she said. “Fine, be a dick. Someone, give me a flashlight.”
Yao provided one. She thanked him. Everyone else was watching Meoraq.
“I have given you an order, human! You stay here!”
“I’m going with you,” she insisted, and struck the butt of her spear onto the floor for emphasis. “Someone has to be there to run for help after a building falls on you!”
He cocked his head, his spines flat to his skull, but she would not bend her neck. She trembled, but she stood and stared him down.
“So,” he said at last, when he was calm. Truly calm, as opposed to the burning, thoughtless unquiet which had been as close as he could come to it most of this miserable day. He even smiled. “Give me your hand,” he said, offering his.
She eyed it, the stubborn set of her human jaws easing, the
n slowly moved her spear from right to left and took it.
He had her spun, disarmed, and on her knees with both arms behind her before the first wail was out of her mouth. He unbuckled his belt one-handed, whipped it free of his waist, and bound her wrists together. He seized her spear—every human in the room took a long step back, but none interfered—stabbed it low into the nearest wall at a steep angle, then picked her up and threaded her over the pole, accepting her kicks in grim good humor. He thumped her down, gave her a tap for farewell, and left her there, screaming curses at his back.
* * *
Amber thought she knew storms. They were the occasional nuisances that knocked out the phones and TV for a few hours, made a little noise, and got the garbage wet. She had never lived through one like this, didn’t know they could be lived through: Thunder you could feel; lightning you could smell; rain that made the floor you slept on vibrate like an idling car. The thought that the roof might drop on top of them was not a fear, but an inescapable fact.
So she waited for it, leaning up against the wall with Nicci’s head in her lap, stroking her as she would an anxious cat, watching people sleep. That part was easy enough; the overhead lights were still burning. Lots of people had looked for a switch, but no one had found one yet, so either the lights were programmed to stay on as long as there were people in the room or only the bots could turn them on and off. A few people complained, but in the end, it didn’t stop anyone from sleeping. Amber understood that perfectly. She was exhausted, in spite of the lights and the thunder and the general creep-factor of the ruins, but she couldn’t sleep. She wished Meoraq was here, or failing that, that he’d let her go with him when he went out on his insane patrol, and failing that, that he hadn’t tied her up and hung her on her own spear before he’d left, thus subjecting her to a roomful of humiliation and snickering before Crandall and Mr. Yao finally dared the lizard’s wrath and set her loose.