by R. Lee Smith
Meoraq’s hand on her shoulder tightened briefly, making her realize how her voice was climbing…and quavering. Again, she quieted without conscious effort, but her attempts to catch his eye were futile. He watched Scott, only Scott, with his head still on the tilt and now his mouth very slightly open to show the glinting tips of a few teeth, but he wasn’t saying anything. Why wasn’t he saying anything?!
“A ship would be in a hangar,” Eric said after an uneasy glance at the bots. “It’d be protected. Like the spider-things from last night. They were all okay, not even a little bit wonky. Even the bot that lived there was doing just fine.”
“One of them! All the others were dead! You can’t just ignore that! You can’t…” She trailed off, seeing nothing in Eric’s face but a flat disdain that she simply couldn’t understand. He wasn’t some crazy Manifestor, he was a Fleetman who’d called Scott an idiot a hundred times behind his back. He knew better than what he was saying. He knew better! “Look,” she said, abandoning Eric to try and appeal to the others. “I want to go home as bad as the rest of you—”
Scott laughed loudly and several others joined in with scorn.
“—but this isn’t going to happen,” Amber insisted. “It’s just not! It’s…It’s silly!”
“You’re right, Bierce,” Scott said, actually smiling at her. She was down, surely he had to see that, but he just couldn’t resist a parting kick. “Thinking we might find a starship is just silly. Why don’t you look Meoraq here in the face and tell him we’re on our way to meet God? Why don’t you ask Him to send us home? Hell, let’s ask Him for a brain and a heart and some courage while we’re at it, what do you say?”
Amber never had a chance to answer. The hand that gripped her shoulder with such strength now abruptly shoved her to one side so that Meoraq could stride furiously forward. Scott jumped back, but he wasn’t quick enough. In fairness, Amber really didn’t think anyone was quick enough. Meoraq snagged him by the shirtfront and yanked him close, holding him easily upright even when Scott’s feet went right out from under him.
And then he tipped his head back, studying the sky with a calm and thoughtful air while Scott struggled at the end of his arm. “I do not require your belief,” he said at length. “Not yours. Not hers. Not anyone’s. Sheul needs no standard carried before him into battle. His will permeates all things, human. All things. So. I do not require your belief,” he concluded, still speaking softly as he raised Scott up just a little higher, just a little closer to his furious dragon-like face. “But I will not tolerate your mockery. Perhaps it does not offend Sheul, but it fucking well offends me.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Scott said hurriedly. “I was just trying to make a p—”
“Regardless of what you think you will find when we reach Xi’Matezh, that is where I am taking you. It is not a matter for discussion and it is certainly not a matter for you to argue over. ‘But the Second Law writ was this: Lo, the Age of the Ancients is ended. Let their cities fall to ruins. Let their time pass out of memory. Let no one seek to master or remake the machines with which they poisoned Gann, lest they be corrupted in return, for such corruption shall be deemed unforgiveable.’ So did God speak and so did the Prophet record and so am I, Uyane Meoraq, bound to enforce. Hear me and mark me well, S’kot, Xi’Matezh is the oldest of the shrines built at the hour of the Fall and there may well be machines even in that holy place, but if you seek to make yourself their master—” Meoraq brought Scott right up to his scaly face, lifting him until nothing but the very tips of his scrabbling toes touched the ground and doing it with just one hand and no suggestion of effort. “—I will draw His blade and cut you down and leave you to rot where you lie. How do you mark me?”
“Meoraq, you can’t arbitrarily—”
“How do you mark me?”
“How is it a sin to use a starship if God Himself put it there for us to—”
Meoraq drew his long sword and raised it slightly, just slightly. “How do you mark me?” he asked, no louder and with no greater menace. He didn’t really need it.
“I understand,” said Scott.
“Do I have your obedience?”
“You’ve always had my full support, Meoraq. You’re an invaluable resource and I’m confident we can come to some mutually respectful compromise before we reach your temple. In the meantime, you can rely upon me to direct my people to provide you with any assistance you feel you require in the course of your efforts.”
Amber could see that Meoraq knew that none of that had been an enthusiastic, ‘Yes, sir!’ He let that be fairly obvious; he probably wanted Scott to see it, too. But there were subtler signs that suggested Scott’s usual tactic of using big words in complicated ways had been once again successful and Meoraq had no clear idea of just what Scott had said at all. Amber waited tensely for the slap that precedent suggested was coming, the slap that would lead to the bellowing and apologizing, which would lead to the whispering and the dirty looks and everything that was bad already would only get worse and worse and why couldn’t Meoraq see that?
But maybe he did, because in the end, he grunted and set Scott on the ground. “So. I consider the matter closed, and I will hear no more about it,” he warned, sheathing his sword. “I will not allow you to preach at me all the way to Gedai. If I am present, you are silent.”
Scott straightened out his jacket (too briskly; one of the sleeves tore a bit up at the shoulder when he tugged at the cuff, exposing the slightly deeper crimson of the other jacket he wore beneath it) and nodded once, in a commanding way. “I have to admit that I am disappointed.”
“I am present,” Meoraq said curtly. “You are silent. And we are leaving.”
He proved it, walking away up the street without even a backwards glance to see if people obeyed them. They did, drawing off in little groups to whisper and giving him plenty of distance, but they did. Amber lingered, wanting to run after him, to walk beside him and soak in his confidence until she could wear it like a coat and let all these ugly stares just bounce off. She thought he might let her, even if he wasn’t too happy about it, but she also knew how it would look. Not just like she was running off to hide under Meoraq’s skirts after he’d gone waving his sword around again, but like she’d put him up to it in the first place. They might already think so—and if they didn’t, Scott would have them thinking it before long—but she wasn’t going to show them they were right.
“Come on, Nicci,” said Amber, reaching out her hand. “The sooner we get out of here, the better things will—”
“Leave me alone,” Nicci said, anger thinning her voice into a caricature of their mother’s. “Just leave me alone. I’ll talk to you later, but right now, I’m so sick of you that I can’t even look at you!”
“Nicci—”
“I’ll take care of you, Nicci!” Nicci spat, screwing up her face in a horrible sing-song sneer. “We don’t have a choice, Nicci! I know what I’m doing, Nicci!” Each name was another bullet and when the chamber was empty, Nicci threw the gun. “I wish Mama was here instead of you.”
And as Amber stood there, stupidly gaping, her baby sister deliberately raised her arm and slapped her in the face. The blow mostly caught her on the cheek, a little on the nose. Heat flooded her wind-chilled face. Amber didn’t move.
Nicci turned around and left her. She ran to catch up with Scott (i was going to do that wasn’t i but it was meoraq i wanted meoraq i want now O god to catch his arm the way she does and have someone to walk with) and they all walked away.
“She didn’t mean it,” said Amber, alone in the street. “She always comes back and we’ll say we’re sorry and it’ll be fine.”
“I have to believe that,” the recording in the kiosk hissed. “I have to. I do.”
Amber looked at him. The lizardman in the screen looked back at her through a haze of static. Then the image blipped once, hard, and the whole kiosk went black and silent. A thin plume of smoke rose out of the speakers and the
wind took it away.
She started walking.
4
Meoraq viewed the time spent in the ruins as time lost and it took some hard driving over the next few days to make it up. Without the distraction of the ruins to stop and stare at, they moved themselves along much faster, faster even than they had moved before they had ever seen the damned place. Scott used his lies as a cattleman used a bait-stick and the humans were just as happy to trot in pursuit as any mindless beast. Truth, as long as it kept them moving at this pace and he didn’t have to listen to it himself, Meoraq was content to let Scott make all the promises he liked, although he knew it upset Amber.
As it should upset him. “To let a lie stand is to speak it with your own throat.” That was in the very first verse of the very first chapter in the Book of Admonitions. Meoraq could remember learning to make his letters by that self-same verse, and how his hand had cramped in the practice because he could not make them perfectly at first undertaking. And now he stood, twelve years gone in the service of Sheul, willing to close his eyes to the sin in his own camp for the false peace that masked it.
Meoraq meditated on this—once they were well-gone from the ruins and he had some leisure to do so—but an hour’s prayer at his fireside with all the humans milling nearby in their clumsy, complaining way proved too much a distraction. His thoughts kept turning from the failings of his character to places he had no desire to explore: the image of the ship set in tiles on the wall; House Uyane and whether Nduman had been called home from his own circuit (or from the woman and bastard children he covertly kept) to manage its households while Meoraq took this pilgrimage; Amber throwing herself against him, frightened by the storm.
That was the image that hooked on him and he found himself opening his eyes to study her where she sat now. He thought she looked thinner. He couldn’t be certain of it, but he thought so. He hadn’t really paid that much attention to her body until the night she’d bathed beside his tent and cast her shadow over it…and crawled in to him afterwards…and he knew that filthy, ragged clothing such as she wore had a way of making the body beneath seem smaller, but he didn’t think she looked right.
She’d had a pot of tea with him this morning before their travels, and a largish share of his cut of the gruu he’d found last night, but his share had been a spare one to begin with. Before that, there had been only bites of cuuvash for him and her both. The last real meal she’d taken had been days before coming across the ruins.
So. He would meditate later. His obligations came first.
Meoraq found his feet and beckoned to Amber. She looked at him, but did not move from her place at his fire. “Keep your people close until I return,” he ordered.
She didn’t ask where he was going. Neither did she take up her spear and try to join him. He wouldn’t have allowed it in any case, but she didn’t even try. She only bobbed her head in silence. She was watching Scott’s fire, so he watched it too, but saw nothing unusual about the throng of humans that surrounded it.
A thought struck.
“Where is your N’ki?” he asked.
“Over there, somewhere.” Amber turned away to prod listlessly at Meoraq’s fire with a bit of burnt stick. “She’s still mad at me.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Well, that wasn’t strictly truth: He could have easily told her that Nicci was a mewling little pest whose opinion ought to matter about as much as the mud on which Amber sat, but he knew it wouldn’t help. He often found it incomprehensible that the same Amber who dared to strike him with her naked hand and shout insult into his face could be so beaten down by a single scornful glance from the wretched sack of flesh that was her blood-kin. He didn’t say that either.
“Stay here,” he said instead and was further troubled when she gave that same silent acquiescence, enough to say against all wisdom: “Or come with me, if you wish.”
She glanced toward her spear, but touched it only with her eyes. Her head turned side to side, a human refusal, wordless. Spiritless. “I don’t want to leave her.”
“I’m not running you on into Gedai, just out for a short hunt. I thought you wanted to learn how,” he added, trying to prick at her.
“I do, but…” She looked up at him and away. “When she comes looking for me, I need to be here.”
He snorted.
She did not respond.
‘She’s dying,’ he thought suddenly, and was alarmed to find how swiftly and completely he believed it. The flesh was not the only part of a man that could die. The soul was eternal, not immortal. Whatever circumstance had brought her here (even if that circumstance was not a flying ship from another world, which was still flatly impossible) had left deep wounds in Amber. Now Nicci was carving more, and over what?
Scott. Scott and his talk of ships in Xi’Matezh.
He could do nothing for her (although the thought of dragging Nicci out of her nest of mewling friends and slapping some respect into her was appealing on some base level) except leave without pressing her further, so he did.
The wind was strong and sharp with the first of winter’s teeth. He could see rain on the horizon, but not moving this way, not yet. Still, there was a heaviness in the air that said the season’s storms were in the brewing and he was not surprised the game was in hiding. Night was coming on and unless he wanted to lose himself in the open plains after dark, he needed to find something quickly. Even another patch of gruu, bitter as it had been, would be welcome. His eyes were always open, tracking without conscious direction every small sign of life the wildlands gave up, but his mind wandered. Amber. It should have been all of them—Amber wasn’t the only one who hadn’t had a full belly in days—but no matter how often he set the aim of his inner thoughts, they always came back to Amber.
“Sheul, O my Father, hear Your son,” he muttered, his voice no louder than the wind that stirred the dead grass. Yes, he wanted God to hear him, but not the game, if there was any. “Raise up Your lamp and show me what I am meant to do. You have given me the charge of these humans and I have labored mightily in that appointment, O Father, but it is not enough. They are growing weak in my care, great Sheul. Weak in flesh and weak in spirit. Grant me Your wisdom, I pray, that I may strengthen them in turn and do Your will by them, whatever that will may be.”
Sheul walked with him, he was sure, but was silent.
Meoraq kept moving, pausing often to inspect each patch of spoor, but found nothing fresh enough to follow. There might be a few rogue males about for another brace of days, too weak or too unwelcome to join their herds in their seasonal migration, but after that came the true test. After that, he must either hunt tachuqis or corrokis—one, a vicious sword-footed predator; the other, an armor-plated club-tailed behemoth. Neither were likely to be solitary at this time of year. Both were dangerous even to seasoned warriors, invariably lethal to the inexperienced. If he could just get by until he reached the mountains, there would be other game—woolly xauts and burrows filled with mimuts, just right for two to share. Even the thuochs who preyed on them were said by some to be tasty. And once over the mountains…well, Meoraq had no idea what there might be for hunting in Gedai, but it had to be better than this. It would be warming up again by the day of his return, when the herds would come back, and it would be an easy road to Xeqor, if that was how Sheul directed him. In the meantime, he was here with all his humans and they were hungry. Amber was hungry.
“Father, I’ve no resistance to sharing out my cuuvash,” he said, crouching to investigate the long-dried track of a ghet—many ghets—in the thin layer of mud that had washed over this slice of earth in the last storm. Ghets, too, would be plentiful in the plains during the cold season. They would also be poison, in their meat and in their mouths, so if there were any nearby, he wanted to know it. “I will even share it out with all of them, although it would cost me all I have left, damn their greedy mouths, and they will be crying at me again tomorrow.”
But not Amber. Her mi
nd was so full of Scott’s poison and Nicci’s pettiness that she might not even feel hunger anymore. He wanted to do something for her. A full belly would be a fine start, but it ought to be more than that. He fed all the humans, regardless of personal feeling. He wanted to set Amber apart in a way that she could see, to show her that he did believe she was ‘different,’ that they were still ‘good.’
Now if only he had some idea how to do that.
“It is a silly thing for one of Yours to trouble over, my Father,” admitted Meoraq aloud. “But what strengthens the heart, strengthens the whole. So if You have no other will in this small matter, I pray You inspire me, because I haven’t the dimmest spark of an idea how to make a human happy.”
The wind sighed. The sense of a watching eye, a listening ear, had never been stronger outside of the arena. Meoraq grew still, straining with all his soul to receive his Father’s word, but there was nothing.
So never mind humans. What did women like? Amber was a woman.
His mother had been fond of sweets, not that she’d ever said so in Meoraq’s hearing, but Rasozul had almost always brought her a little pot of honey or a tin of fancies if he left the house, and she’d always received it with embarrassing enthusiasm. Meoraq still had most of the honey he’d been given in Xheoth and he didn’t mind making a present of it, but it seemed wrong somehow to just hand over something he already had and wouldn’t much miss. He didn’t know what to do, but he wanted it to show some effort. Besides, Amber would only feed the honey to her blood-kin anyway.
If he had a better idea of where he was, he might make a run to the nearest city and find something there. More tea and cuuvash—that was only practical—and something special just for Amber. Pretty clothes? But no, she’d give them all to her Nicci and go on wearing hers to rags. What else did women like? A new wristlet, maybe; hers was rather plain.