by R. Lee Smith
But it was a long way to go and a great risk to take over something she couldn’t really use. What he wanted was something she wanted. Something that would make her happy. Something…
The wind gusted again. Meoraq turned his head, just to get the sting of it out of his eyes, and there before him saw a clean saoq track in the only patch of ground nearby soft enough to take one.
He smiled. “Yes, my Father,” he said. “I hear You. Necessity before desire.”
He readied his kzung, put the thoughts of wristlets and fancies from his mind, and returned himself to hunting.
The tracks led him to a small pile of saoq droppings, still warm. Shortly afterwards, Meoraq had the beasts themselves in his sight, a small herd of males banded together against the coming winter. He killed two of them and they landed in their death-throes atop a cluster of lhichu…
Lhichu! The stalks of the plant were strong and supple enough to let him truss the saoqs together, but it was the roots he thought of, the roots he had been meant to see.
Sheul’s hand rested briefly on Meoraq’s shoulder and took itself away, but not far. Never far. Meoraq prayed his thanks and knelt to gather in his blessings.
Amber came to help when he returned with the saoqs, carrying Scott’s share over to his fires and keeping the rest of the humans out of his way until Meoraq was done with the butchery. When she came back, he gave her a sabk and the offal and put her to work making the skewers that would be their own meal, and while she was busy with that, he set the two saoq heads down on a sturdy patch of ground and cracked their heads open. Then the heads went on the fire—not without some regret; the meat wouldn’t be near as tender with the skull open and empty—and Meoraq put the brains in his stewing pouch with water, hot stones, and the chopped lhichu root. He mixed this into a thick paste with his hands, shook them clean, more or less, and then turned to her and said, “Take off your clothes.”
Several of the nearer humans twisted around to stare at them. The one called Crandall let out a loud whooping sound and began to laugh.
“No,” said Amber, plainly startled.
“Just your breeches then, at least.” He unfastened his own harness and shrugged out of his tunic.
“The hell I will!”
“Please yourself,” said Meoraq with a shrug of his spines. He took Amber’s shoulder and shoved her firmly to the ground, then picked up one of the saoq hides and dropped it in her lap.
She let out a startled cry, trying unsuccessfully to scoot out from under it.
“Be quiet and learn something.” He removed his breeches and sat down facing her wearing nothing but his loin-plate, which, being metal, was easily washed. He handed her one of the scrapers from his pack, pulled the second hide over his folded legs, and went to work. “You will find it tempting to stroke along the grain, but it is far more effective to cut against it,” he told her. “Start at the neck, like this, and work your way down. Let the weight of the unfinished hide pull against your grip and keep it as taut as possible. If we had trees, I would show you how to build a frame, but that will have to wait for a future lesson. How do you mark me?”
“I’m covered in blood! Damn it, lizardman, I’ll never wash this shit out!”
“I told you to take your clothes off.”
She scowled at him, then picked up her scraper and hunted out the neck of the saoq’s hide. Her first clumsy pass only smeared the bloody fat across the membrane, but before he could correct her, she leaned over to see what he was doing and copied it with a fair amount of success. As he’d hoped, having something to do had brought her back to life. Having something to prove would liven her even more.
“Just throw it in the fire,” he said when she had her first handful of scrapings. “Try not to get blood on the cleaned area.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He showed her his work. “This is what it should look like.”
“How the hell are you…? Okay.” She bent, yanking at the hide to try and keep it taut, and scraped harder. “Like this?”
“Keep your wrist straight and the pressure of your hand even as you stroke. Go slowly until you know how the tool wants to move in your grip.”
“That sounds so dirty and you don’t even realize it. You’ve done the whole neck already,” she said, eyeing it with hot disbelief. “How are you doing that so fast?”
“Practice. This is not a contest. Mind your own work.” He took a moment to roll some of his excess cleaned hide, noting as he did so that the other humans were still watching them. No one looked particularly interested in the work itself. They appeared to just be watching him and Amber…and some of them were smiling.
“You understand these people,” he said crossly. “What are they staring at?”
“The guy who told me to take my clothes off.”
“What does that have to do with—” He broke off and looked her, then at himself in his loin-plate only, and then at her again. Bizarrely, the first words that came from his throat were no heated denial, but merely, “What, here in front of them?”
She rolled one shoulder. “Dinner and a show.”
“Is that what you thought?”
“No.” Firelight could be deceptive, but her face seemed pinker than it was. “I don’t know…No!”
Meoraq’s spines twitched. “How can you not know what you were thinking?”
“The same way you can not know what it looks like when you start stripping and tell a girl to take her clothes off,” she replied. “Nice panties, by the way.”
It was a joke, although its meaning eluded him. “And when I began to cook the brains?” he inquired, pointing back at the satchel with his scraper.
“Soup.”
“You thought I meant to feed you brains?”
“How is that more disgusting than what you always feed me?”
“Example!” he demanded, laughing through his incredulity.
“How about all the heads?” she shot back, pointing at the two in the fire.
“The head is the best part,” he replied. “I save it for myself and allow you to share it.”
“Okay, marrow. Marrow is horrible.”
“The food of lords and abbots,” he countered. “Delicious.”
“Liver.”
“Ah, well. Liver is good for you.”
She finally gave him a smile, even if it was a pale effort. “So yeah, brain soup. Mmm-mmm, good.”
He gave her a teasing hiss and went back to work on his hide. “The Book of Oyan forbids men to eat either brain or bowel, so you need never fear that particular dish be set before you. Besides which, I’ve put lhichu in that, which is probably poisonous.”
“Put what in it?”
“Lhichu root. To preserve the hide and soften it some. These will never be quality leathers, of course, but they would be utterly unworkable without lhichu.”
“Yours will be okay,” she told him, tossing another handful of scrapings on the fire and taking a moment to change out the stone in the simmering brains for a hotter one.
“You don’t mark me. I mean that we are merely curing these, not tanning them.”
“Why not?” she asked and immediately rolled her eyes and answered, “Takes too long.”
“I would not begrudge the time if you learned something from it, certainly not something as useful as tanning, but we don’t have a fleshing pit. A brain-cure and smoke will be sufficient for our needs until Sheul provides the means for better.”
“I didn’t catch that one word. We don’t have a what?”
“A fleshing pit. A lined hole or even just a basin where we would soak the raw hides in rending matter so that they could be more easily defleshed. If we tried to take the scales off without one, we would tear the hide to pieces.”
“Oh, I get it.” She started to scrape again, then paused and looked sharply up. “Wait, soak them in what?”
“Rending matter,” he repeated patiently. “Stale urine, mostly. And various other ingredients t
o bate and soften skins. The hides would soak several days, depending on whether the beast has scales or hair—”
And then he realized why she’d stopped him. ‘Rending matter,’ he’d said, using the single dumaqi word which loosely summed up all the unpleasant materials used in the process, and that word, of course, was s’kot.
He glanced around at the other humans, but watching hides being cleaned was tedious work and they had returned to their own side of camp to watch the saoqs cook. Scott was there, too far away to hear his name in Meoraq’s mouth and learn its meaning (the low part of him that heard Gann’s whispers felt a short pang of disappointment), but Amber heard, Amber understood. He raised his eyes to her, braced for the eruption.
She was smiling. “You know, I always wondered why you said it like that, with that little hitch in the skuh-part.”
“It seemed fitting.”
“Extremely. What does human mean?”
“Eh?”
“Don’t play dumb. Human. You say it weird. Like yooo-mont. What is it?”
“It refers to a kind of beetle.”
“A good kind?”
“Not…particularly.” And because he knew the question was inevitable, he added, “This is n’ki,” as he drew a careless loop in the air with his scraper. “The form of it, you mark? The…eh…the roundness.”
Her brows creased. “I don’t get it. Nicci’s not fat.”
“I didn’t need a word with true meaning. I just needed a word.”
She watched him work. Her brows stayed wrinkled. “Why?”
“It is one of the laws of Sheul. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word and your name cannot be spoken in dumaqi.”
“Seriously? It’s a sin to speak another language?”
“Not one of the unforgiveable sins,” he admitted. “But even the smallest flecks of shit will eventually flavor the stew.”
“Gross, Meoraq.”
“Mud, then. My point is, even the smallest sins can weigh heavy with repetition.” He hesitated, his hands slowing, and said, “Did you never wonder why I have never called you by your name?”
“Well…yeah.” She rolled her shoulders, keeping her attention on her hide. “I figured it was just your way of telling me to keep my distance. Like when Scott calls me Miss Bierce and I call him Everly, you know?”
“No. I have never understood why either of you did that.” He glanced at her, then glared fixedly at his hands and pretended to care what they were doing to the hide. “I assumed they were human endearments.”
“What? No! My God, man, why would you even think that?”
Taken aback, he could only gesture with his scraper toward the other humans, attracting some attention, but only some. Scott’s sermon had spread to include a larger crowd. “I thought that was what you people did.”
“Why, because of Eric and Maria and all their kissy-baby talk?”
“They aren’t the only ones who do that and it always seems affectionate.”
“Trust me, when it’s Scott, it’s not us being cute. We genuinely hate each other.”
Meoraq grunted, unaccountably pleased, and then looked up again. “You think I don’t use your name because I hate you? I don’t hate you.”
“Yeah, yeah. You don’t hate me.” Even though she was smiling, the words struck at his Sheulek’s ears as a lie. He saw her again, sprawled in the mud with her bare foot thrust through the torn bottom of her boot, shouting that he hated her, that she was nothing to him but a nuisance, or words equal to that meaning. She might smile now, but there was something in her that believed it, something he knew he was to blame for, because he didn’t know what else to do but push her away…or bring her in closer.
“I don’t hate you,” he said.
“Okay, whatever. We can drop it now.”
He should. All the good feeling that had nested in him since receiving the lhichu had dimmed to coals and he could see the shadow creeping in again over Amber. He could shut the door, find something new to talk about, and maybe it would feel the same…but he didn’t think so.
“Look at me,” he ordered.
She did, with exasperation and defiance, and that was so damned incredible and she was so damned ugly, it seemed to go right around the wheel of funny and turn into something heart-breaking instead.
“It is Uyane Meoraq before you,” he said. “Son of Rasozul, who was son of Ta’sed, who was son of Kuuri, who was the forty-third son of the line descended of the Prophet’s Uyane Xaima. I am my House, that which champions the city of Xeqor in the state of Yroq, in the hour and the land of Gann. I am the Sword and the Striding Foot of Sheul. I am all these things and I say to you, I do not hate you.”
She met this declaration with a huffing breath and went back to scraping at her hide with considerably more force and less precision than before.
“You don’t believe me,” Meoraq realized.
“Actions speak louder than words, lizardman. Especially the ones you don’t say.”
“That ought to be my argument,” he shot back. “Who am I sitting with right now? Who am I teaching to cure a hide? What does a name matter? And if it bothers you, why haven’t you said anything until now?”
“Because I thought it was all of us!” She yanked the hide, half-done, further over her knee and went to work on the bloodier side, her arm jerking and slashing. “And then when you started saying people’s names, I figured I’d be next eventually. But now I know that, thanks to your stupid God, I get to be ‘Hey, you,’ for the rest of my life and you don’t even think there’s anything wrong with that!”
“Mind your work. If it upsets you this much, I’ll give you a dumaqi name.” The offer was bitter in his mouth. Naming was the work of a father; he didn’t always know exactly what he felt about Amber, but he knew none of those feelings were fatherly.
“I don’t want a new name! I have a perfectly good name! I want you to use it!”
“It is not a word,” he replied, stubbornly scraping at his hide and refusing to look at her. “It cannot be spoken.”
“I speak it just fine! Amber! Say it with me, lizardman!”
“No. Mind your work.”
“I am!” she snapped, but she put her glaring eyes back on the hide. “You have the most ass-backwards religion I’ve ever heard of. You’re perfectly okay with killing people but my name is some huge sin. My name sends you straight to Hell. That’s where you draw the line.”
“The line is not for me to draw.”
“Well, that’s just stupid.”
“There is no Word but the Prophet’s Word and I am done with this discussion. Mind your work!” he snapped, pointing, but it was too late.
The scraper slipped in Amber’s careless hands, narrowly missing her fingers, but cutting a gash right through the hide. Embarrassment lent new fuel to anger and she let out easily the most vulgar variation on a timeless epithet he had ever heard in all the years of his warrior’s life.
“That had better not have been addressed to me,” he said blackly. “My mother was a virtuous woman.”
“It had nothing to do with you,” she snapped, inspecting the damage to the hide with deep disgust. “I’m just a foul-mouthed bitch. Damn it, it’s ruined!”
“Hardly,” he said, taking it from her before she could finish shoving it off onto the ground. He arranged the hide across his own lap, going back over the places she had too hurriedly finished. “You should have stopped if you weren’t going to give it your full attention. It is better to do half a hide well than all of it poorly and teach yourself habits you will have to unlearn.”
She started to stand, flush-faced and tight-lipped.
He caught her by her bloody wrist and seated her again, perhaps with more force than was necessary. He did not release her right away, at first because he could see that she was just going to get up again, then because he was busy counting off six breaths, and finally because he could look at her calmly and see that beneath her senseless anger was embarrassment and u
nhappiness and exhaustion and everything else he had been hoping the gift of his hide-making lesson might soothe away for just one night.
He opened his mouth to tell her she was acting like a child and heard himself say instead, softly, “Do you think I would not call you by your name if I could?”
She looked at him and away, trying to pretend she was not attached to the arm that ended in his grip. “I guess you think it doesn’t matter. I guess you figure as long as I still answer to ‘insufferable human,’ it’s fine.”
“It’s honest, at least.” He sighed, opened his hand and rubbed at his brow ridges instead. “There are three words I could call you that come close to the sound of your name. Taambret, a disease we have that causes festering sores of the mouth.”
She blinked, her brows puckering.
“Mb’z, a vulgar term for one weak of mind,” he continued. “Amyr, the name of a kind of swimming creature that lives and feeds in the mud. And I will not call you by these names.”
“You said…You said it didn’t matter what the word meant as long as—”
“Not for you.”
She looked at the fire.
Meoraq picked up the scraper and continued cleaning her hide. “Take this one I have finished and make ready with the brains,” he ordered. “Pour half of them out—like that, yes, in a line—and let them cool.”
She obeyed, silent.
“Now use your hands to rub them in. This is why it is so essential that the hide be completely cleaned. Any fat or blood left behind will prevent the cure from absorbing well. I despise S’kot and I don’t care what I call N’ki,” he said, still scraping. “I will not offend God, but I will not insult you either, whether or not you know it is an insult. Any pieces of lhichu that have not softened can be disposed of now.”
She picked up the chunk she had been trying to press into the hide and dropped it into the fire. She still did not look at him as she went to work, but he could see her thinking. After a few false starts, she braced herself and said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
The apology was as embarrassing to hear as it had plainly been to say. Meoraq acknowledged it with an uncomfortable grunt and waved vaguely at the hide under her rubbing hands.