by R. Lee Smith
They worked in silence, he scraping and cleaning, she rocking back and forth while her hands made endless spirals over the wet and slippery surface of the hide. He did not watch her.
“Now fold it over. Flesh to flesh,” he told her, and was annoyed to feel a coiling warmth in his loins at those artless words. “By which I mean, the wet sides should press together to form a kind of seal to itself.”
“Okay,” she said, kneeling on the folded hide to pat it down. “Like this?”
“Fair enough. Tonight, you sleep on them. The weight and warmth of a living body helps the cure to absorb. Tomorrow, we scrape away whatever did not. We should smoke them too, but we will need good green wood for that so we will do without. Here.”
She took the second finished hide and laid it out on the ground, pouring the rest of the warm brains over it without being told. “What are we making out of them?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Oh.” Her eyes tapped at his and fell away. He could see her shoulders stiffening, armoring herself as if against a blow. “I…I don’t suppose maybe I could get a jacket or…you know…something?”
“Not without a fleshing pit and not with saoq in any case, but there will surely be better hides in the mountains. And when we find them, you will already know what to do. You can make your own clothes.”
All of Amber’s face wrinkled around in ways that meant surprise, except for her smile, which was nothing like a dumaq woman’s smile and yet reminded him with great force and satisfaction of his mother receiving that little pot of jam or tin of candied blossoms and how she had looked at his father. If Meoraq had draped Amber head to foot in jewelry, he doubted he would get half the smile she gave him now for being told she could do a smelly, messy, body-breaking chore. He glanced up to send his Father another silent thanks and noticed the heavy skies all over again. “I want you to sleep in my tent tonight,” he said, frowning at them.
She looked up, brains dripping down her raised arms. “What? You what?”
“It means to rain. The hides should be kept dry.”
“Oh. Put them in your tent. Right.” She laughed a little. “I thought you told me to sleep in there.”
“I did,” he said, puzzled. “If you can’t mark my words, tell me so that I can repeat them. You need to sleep on the hides so that your weight and warmth—”
“In your tent?” Her face was very pink. Drops of brains fell lightly on her blood-stained thighs. “With you?”
Some great invisible hammer came clubbing down on the whole of his body, leaving him to stare foolishly back at her as if asking a woman to share his bedchamber, even if it was just a tent, had no special significance at all. How could he even say that without realizing how it could be perceived? If he’d said this to a dumaq woman—any dumaq woman—she would be bowing herself there right this moment to receive his fires.
And with this unplanned thought, the warmth in his loins became flame.
‘I only want her out of the damn rain so the hides won’t get wet,’ he thought stubbornly. He wanted the hides to stay dry while they cured and he would admit to nothing more, but when Sheul wanted him to make leathers, He provided lhichu, and when He wanted His chosen to breed, He gave them women.
‘And she is a woman, no matter what else she is,’ he thought. ‘A stubborn woman, an insufferable woman, a human woman, but a woman and when I order a woman to my room, by God and Gann, she goes!’
His head tipped warningly. “Do you not mark me?”
“I understand you just fine.”
“Then you will sleep in my tent.”
“Why?”
“What? Why do you think?”
She did not answer and the silence gradually stole both the edge from his voice and the urgency from his constrained member. He leaned back, scratching once, needlessly, at the side of his snout.
“Why do you think?” he asked finally, quietly.
“I think,” she said, not meeting his eyes, “you know you can sleep on these things without me.”
He looked at her without really seeing her. His mind was like the clouds, heavy without weight, in constant motion but unchanging. He did not think, exactly, but after a certain span of time, he said, “Come to my tent tonight.”
She stilled, but only for an instant. “No,” she said, and backed away to fold the hide over.
So. He’d not only ordered her to his tent, she had refused to go. Meoraq rubbed at the side of his snout several times, until it began to hurt. “Why not?”
She closed her eyes and just breathed. Meoraq found himself counting her breaths; a slow-count of six. She opened her eyes and raised her head just enough to look at him. “Because if it was just to get me out of the rain, you’d ask for me and Nicci.”
He did not amend his offer, which was vaguely disturbing to him in the part of his mind which was still thinking.
She seemed to be waiting, and when he only sat there and said nothing more, she slowly leaned back and gathered up the saoq hide to hold loosely in her arms. “What do you want from me?” she whispered, color dull and dark in her cheeks.
“I don’t know,” he told her and it had to be truth, however much it felt like a lie.
“Is it…” She clapped one brain- and blood-smeared hand to her face and pushed at her eyes, then shook her head and looked right at him. “Is it sex?”
“No,” he said, troubled.
The color in her cheeks deepened to an alarming shade and she looked away. “Okay.” She stood up, eyes averted and too bright. “I’m going to put these in your tent.”
Meoraq reached out and caught at her leg before she could flee. He rubbed his brow-ridges, cursing himself and all the words he could not make, because there was no way to tell her that it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t either that fierce eruptive will of Sheul or the shameful temptation of Gann, but this…this nameless thing that was neither fire nor clay but as constant as the wind, sometimes a storm and sometimes only a breeze, was always with him. No, it was not sex, but it had to be something that made him look for reasons to sit with her, to speak with her, even to fight with her if that was all there was, because even the most tedious and foul chore of curing a damned animal hide could become something to look forward to if he was with her. And it wasn’t sex, but he wished it was; it wasn’t sex, but if it had been, even that could be good, could even be glorious, just because it was with her.
He released her and said nothing as she carried the hides away. The wind gusted, throwing smoke into his eyes. He closed them and began silently to pray.
5
He slept on the hides alone that night. When Amber woke him for his watch, he offered her his tent again, but she refused and he did not insist. The rain came and went, rattling noisily off the metal blankets of those humans unlucky enough to have no tent, then blowing away. By dawn, the wind had mostly dried things out and there was plenty of cold saoq to pass around, but it was a cold morning and it only grew colder as the day went on.
They walked into the biting wind, moving fast to keep warm. The extra effort exhausted the humans quickly, which meant longer rest periods than usual. Amber lit a fire at each stopping place and Meoraq was generous with his reserves of tea, but still it was Scott they all clustered around—Scott with his endless talk of the ship awaiting them at Xi’Matezh and their lost Earth, as good as found once more.
They made their camp that night beside a thick copse of trees that gave them at least some shelter from the wind and enough wood to set several good fires. Meoraq’s evening hunt proved fruitless, but Scott and his people still had a few bones to gnaw and Meoraq had cuuvash for himself and Amber. Afterwards, he took her to the open plains to continue her spear-training. She didn’t want to, but she didn’t fight back when he pulled her bodily away with him, and after a few light cuffs, she stopped trying to stare off at her Nicci and paid attention to him.
When it grew too dark to see, Amber took the first watch and set off to make her nois
y patrol around the camp with renewed and entirely undeserved confidence. Meoraq occupied himself as best he could in the hopes that she would tire soon and come back to keep him company, but eventually he ran out of things to do. Alone and restless, he retreated to the edge of camp and tried to meditate, but Amber’s face intruded in the stillness of his mind and her words kept creeping back: Is it sex?
He’d told her it was not and he thought he still believed it, but he didn’t know what else to call the persistent distraction that took him every time he heard her, saw her, thought of her. It wasn’t sex, or at least it wasn’t the way sex had always been in his life, but it was something hot and deep and urgent beneath his skin, something he could not conquer no matter how often or how fervently he prayed. He could not in truth pretend surprise at this; a prayer must be sincerely offered to earn Sheul’s ear and he could not swear that he truly wished to be free of these feelings. The Word told him there was no sin in temptation, only in surrender, but that wasn’t much comfort to him as he fought night after day after night to find peace from his clay’s carnality.
A boy of the warrior’s caste learned the Word long before he felt any urgings of his clay, but learning a thing does not always prepare one to encounter it. Meoraq had known of sex from books, from lectures, from the whispered speculations of older boys, and of course, from that night that he had seen his pregnant mother with his father, but he had been well into his thirteenth year before he ever felt the burn in his own belly.
There had been no cause for it that first time. No woman had ever set foot in Tilev. Boys did all the work normally done by servants. Even those females who met the fires of the training masters did so in the antechambers between Tilev and the eastern garrison. So there had been no spark, only a sparring match no different from hundreds of others he had fought without incident. But this one brought out the fires in him—which had itself been happening more and more frequently that year—and they didn’t go away when the match was won. And it must have been a bad win at that, because Meoraq remembered very vaguely being pulled from the beaten boy and held in half a choke by Master Takktha when it was over. Had there been a certain watchfulness in the old man’s eye as he watched Meoraq struggle his way back to calm? He hadn’t noticed then, but he thought so now. Once released, he had retreated from the ring to lean against the wall, still fighting those fires while they burned and flared needlessly inside him. He knew the Word, yes, and the lectures and the lessons and all of it, but sex was the furthest thing from his mind in that moment. If he’d wanted anything at all, it was to get back in the sparring ring and beat on someone until these fires either went away…or swallowed him. And so it was thinking that and kneading through his breeches at his slit, which had ached worse than a broken tooth but still somehow wanted to be touched, that Meoraq felt himself extrude for the first time.
He remembered screaming, even though he must have known intellectually what was happening to him. He screamed because of the alien thing pushing out of his own body and he screamed because it hurt to touch his breeches or even the swollen edges of his slit, but mostly he screamed because it wasn’t him at all, it was Gann inside of him, and after all his years of training and all his top marks and awards, he was utterly powerless in Gann’s grip.
Master Takktha cleared the arena at once. As Meoraq fell to his knees in mingled shame and shock and that first awful, baffling need, he remembered feeling the training master’s hands on his shoulders and hearing that voice calm in his ear: “Breathe, Uyane. Put your hands on the ground and give me your breathing. A slow count to six, son, deep and even.”
And he’d managed, somehow. His hands had been bruised for days from beating against the tiles to keep from gripping at himself, but gradually Master Takktha’s voice steadied him and he began to count. By his fourth recitation, he could feel himself slowly retracting, but it had been all Meoraq could do in that time not to take that terrible thing in his fist, right there in front of Takktha and Sheul and all the world.
Of the rest of the day, he remembered little, except that he had been released from lessons to pray, and he’d had to get a real metal loin-plate from the commercer before he went back to the barracks. As he’d been undressing in the dark, the weight of his new loin-plate like a stone tied to his belly, some brunt acting as dorm-warden laughingly called out to him, asking if he’d been locked in the closet where he’d run off to rub his cock. Meoraq spent the rest of that night in a holding cell with shackles binding his aching hands. The brunt spent that night and the one following in the infirmary.
Cock-rubber. It was the worst name to call a boy, the worst thing a boy could do. Every other carnal sin spoken of in the Word could be shut out behind the walls of Tilev, but every boy was alone with his clay and the temptation of ‘Gann’s grip’. Some succumbed. More than half the whippings administered in Tilev were in answer to that crime. Meoraq personally knew of three boys who had been locked into their loin-plates and one who had actually been branded and exiled after exhausting all forgiveness.
Endure the flesh, said the Prophet, do not indulge it. What pleasure came with the act of physical union was never to be sought for its own sake, but only as a sincere exaltation of life and as Sheul’s own blessing. To that end, there were no less than forty-four carnal laws written in the Word by which men could be judged, although it could not be said that all men were judged as equals. Most men were permitted none but their wife’s embrace during their lifetime, but the steward of every great House had a husband’s right over every woman who owed him obedience, and all those born under the Blade had liberty when Sheul gave them the fire.
Of course, one still had to see a woman to know His fires, and most of those in the warrior’s caste were men like his cousin Nkosa, who might have a servant now and then to add variety to the drudgery of siring sons on his wife, but who surely could not expect to bend more than six backs beneath him in a lifetime. Meoraq might have that many in a day, if he wanted them, and have each one twice at each encounter without breaking faith.
He had been with many women in his twelve years of Striding (as Master Tsazr had said on that long-ago day, more than he could count), but what of that? He had also gone cheerfully without, not merely for days but for days by the brace. And while there were a few times that he could recall being aware of the lack, for the most part, he seldom thought of women at all if he were not exposed to them. He had felt Gann’s lusts on occasion when traveling but never, never suffered from them. Then again, he had never felt them this way before—dawn to dusk to dawn again, every hour almost unceasing. It was more than temptation; it was torture.
The endless wind dropped to no more than a breeze, catching some human’s low moan in its sudden silence. Maria, he thought, stubbornly refusing to open his eyes and see. Maria and her man, her Eric, shut away in their silly little tube of a tent. Doing whatever it was that humans did when they were mating. He was not listening. He did not care. Someday, long years hence, when he was in some distant city after conquest or (just perhaps) home in Xeqor as steward to his House, he might think of this moment as he gripped at the bent back of a true woman, a normal woman, one obedient and respectful in her manner, who knew to bend her neck to a Sheulek’s whim and show some damned appreciation for it. A pretty woman, while he was at it, or at least not one with flesh like warm putty and hair sprouting everywhere and a face that looked like she’d been using it to beat her way through a brick wall. A proper woman who would never raise her eyes to him, much less her voice. A mewling, bowing, milk-veined woman…but it was Amber he wanted tonight.
Meoraq hissed to himself, stubbornly ignoring the ache and throb behind his loin-plate. He tried to meditate, counting breaths in the dark.
Never mind. Regardless of the wife he would be given when and if he returned from Xi’Matezh, he was Sheulek now. He was the master of his clay at every hour and in every temptation. He was Uyane Meoraq, a Sword and a true son of Sheul, and no slave to the lure of any fe
male. He was his own man, and even if one were to drop this instant at his feet—
A heavy body struck up against his back and, with a sharp cry and a failed grasping hand, Amber tumbled over his shoulder and landed heavily half in and half out of his lap. Her knee knocked him in the snout as she thrashed to right herself. He swore, grabbing at her with one hand and his injured face with the other, and heaved her off onto the ground. “Mind where you put your feet, damn it!”
“Don’t yell at me! What the hell are you doing, sitting in the middle of…of…”
“Of the ground?” he suggested. “Where else should I be sitting, eh? In the sky? What are you doing walking about in the dark anyway?”
“I couldn’t see you,” she grumbled, righting herself and rubbing at her knee.
“Then carry a lamp. Where are you going?”
“Scott has all the flashlights and he never lets me have one. And I still say you should be in your tent and not lurking around where people can trip over you. Aren’t you supposed to be lying on those hides anyway? Tell me I didn’t carry one all day so you could ignore it.”
“If it bothers you, go to my tent and lie on them,” he countered, and felt with bitter triumph the immediate throbbing of his slit. “A Sheulek goes where he will, asks what he will, and sits where he will. Now, and for the third time, where are you going at Gann’s hour, insufferable human?”
“I’m on watch! I was watching things!” She stopped there, perhaps in deference to the few raised voices protesting this interruption to their sleep, then heaved a sigh at him and punched her hands onto her hips. “I thought I heard something, that’s all. I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Meoraq’s frustration sharpened itself at once to a ready point. He put a hand on his kzung and stood up fast, peering into the dark in all directions.
“Relax,” said Amber. “It turned out to be nothing but a bad mood with a lizardman attached. Go to bed, Meoraq. I’m getting you up in a few hours.”