by R. Lee Smith
Amber moved over to the fire and numbly rearranged it for roasting. Smoke got in her eyes. The tears came streaming out. She tried not to be too conspicuous about it. She didn’t care if they hated her, but she didn’t want them to see her cry.
* * *
All things served Sheul. Meoraq had often mentioned his increasing difficulty keeping the many lazy humans fed when at his prayers, and so came meat, directly into his camp. That it came in the form of hunting tachuqis was surely a divine comment of another kind, and one which Meoraq humbly acknowledged as he butchered them and gave his thanks.
He did not try to glean every strip of meat on the beasts’ bones. Tachuqis, particularly those with young, were aggressively territorial and he could not imagine there could be others close enough to be a threat to him, but the blood on the wind was sure to bring ghets eventually. Meoraq stripped the first corpse of its breast, flank, and tail meat, took the legs for meat and marrow, and hacked the spines away to get at the tender strip of dense, salty fat it carried. For organs, he took only hearts, kidneys and livers, and left the rest behind for the inevitable scavengers.
When he returned to camp with the first load, he was not surprised to see that the humans had withdrawn themselves beyond the borders of labor, and that Amber tended the roasting coals alone. She took the meat without asking instruction and he moved rapidly on to the next animal, annoyed with her for no reason whatsoever.
But no, he had reasons. She’d stood her watch, had carried back a timely warning, and had acted swiftly and well to preserve the lives of her people. All fair and good. And then she’d run off alone into the dark with her spear and stabbed it blindly into a damned tachuqi.
Except that she hadn’t been alone, truly. She’d begun, at least, with Scott.
And that made him…so angry.
That she had gone with Scott out after the tachuqi was bad enough, but he thought he could forgive it in time. What he could not—would never—forgive was the blood in Amber’s hair, the broken end of the human’s lamp, and Scott himself safely back at the fire telling him he did not know where Amber was. Even these thoughts in Meoraq’s mind put such heat in his throat that he could not swallow; he was actually drooling through his bared teeth like an animal. Again and again, he tried to count his breaths, but thoughts of Scott and blood broke every scrap of peace he found. The butchery of the tachuqi gave him only pale gratification, but at least it occupied his hands.
He brought the second beast’s bounty to the fire. Again, Amber took it without comment. The first tachuqi was roasting well, save for the salt-back, which she didn’t seem to know what to do with, and the marrow-rich bones, which she’d set aside as trash.
“Save those,” grunted Meoraq, pointing. He’d show her how to cook them when he was done with the butchering.
She nodded, silent.
He went to deal with the last tachuqi, musing as he went on her uncharacteristic quiet. Women should be quiet, of course. A good woman should be all but invisible in her man’s House. Or her father’s, rather. Then her man’s. It was unnerving to see Amber as well-behaved.
Then again, she had just faced down a hunting tachuqi. Courage and stupidity may have helped her wield the spear, but perhaps now that it was done, she was reflecting on her actions and how badly things might have gone.
Her shirt was torn. Had the spear been a hand’s width shorter…
“Idiot,” grumbled Meoraq, and began to cut the dead tachuqi out of its skin.
Midway through this difficult process, it occurred to him that he had called her an idiot to her face. She’d embraced him anyway (he was not going to think about that) but she still might have heard it. Perhaps he’d bruised her feelings.
Bruised. The image of Amber’s stomach behind the tatters of her shirt intruded, scratching across his mind and raising that fighting urge once more. It was light enough yet, but by dawn, her colors would be in as dark as thunderclouds. Fell on a rock, she said. Running in the dark after her tachuqi. And blissfully forgetful of all the fragile human organs she carried in that soft belly that could be split as easily as they could be bruised. She might have been seriously injured. She might have been killed.
Or she might not. He had to remind himself that a wound was not the same from human to dumaq. No creature he knew of showed injury so vibrantly or so easily as humans. Dumaqs bruised when they were young, before their skin thickened and scales grew in dark and hard. Meoraq could remember carrying the colors of his warriors’ training as proudly as if they were priestly medals, at least up to his fifteenth year and the beginning of his last growth. He’d come to it no earlier than the other boys in Tilev, but he’d had time since then to see boys outside the warrior’s caste. The sons of farmers and cattle-hands, the sons of craftsmen, the sons of priests—they were still grey and thin-scaled well into their seventeenth, even their twentieth years…
He thought about that in a distracted, brooding way as his hands went about their work uninterrupted, waking back to himself to find that he’d cut the tachuqi’s middle talon from its foot. He studied it there in his hand, his head cocked, curious and amused. He was still in his boyhood mind. Hunt-Master Takktha had taken his best students out into the wildlands occasionally to hunt tachuqi. If anyone managed to take one, it was his habit to award the boy the talon for a prize. It was not bladed and so stood fair in the sight of Sheul, but made a good knife for a boy, and a damned good story in the envious eyes of those who had to stay in Tilev. On the shelf below his sleeping cupboard at home, Meoraq probably still had the three talons awarded him over the years.
And was this Amber’s? Here she was behaving properly for the first time in all the days he’d known her, and he was making her a boy’s knife to go with her spear.
“I am a terrible influence,” Meoraq declared, tucking the talon through his belt. He could make her a hilt if they ever found decent wood to craft one from.
He went back to the humans’ camp in much smoother spirits than he had set out from it, hauling the last of the meat behind him and thinking ahead to the hilt he would make and the trick of sizing it for a human’s hand. Amber was still at the fire, alone. There were the tracks of tears on her face, although her eyes were presently dry. She did not seem to see his approach, although he made no secret of it. She saw him only when he flung his load of meat onto the heap, and it was with a start that she turned away to poke at the fire and the roasts and covertly rub at her cheeks.
He probably should not have called her an idiot.
‘Well, it was an idiotic thing to do!’ he thought defensively, and went over to have a better look at her. “Stand up.”
“Why?”
“Because I told you to.”
She huffed a breath out through her nose, not loudly enough to be a true snort, and looked away.
Meoraq caught her up by one arm and hauled her to her feet. She let out a hoarse cry and slapped at him, but he chose to overlook the blow and frowned instead at her flat, ugly face, which was now flat, ugly and horribly bruised. There was a scraped place along the plane of her left cheek, and a short gash at the tip of her ear which had bled enough to raise a few crusty spikes in her hair, but in spite of the swelling and the impressive color, he didn’t think the wounds were serious. Meoraq moved the shreds of her shirt (over her hissing and embarrassed protests) enough to see the bruise he remembered on her belly. It was huge, beginning just under the curve of her ribs and continuing on under the ties of her breeches, but it did not look swollen. He prodded at it cautiously and she smacked his hand. “Does this hurt?”
“Of course it hurts! Let go of me!”
He did, but he was frowning. “I want to see you urinate,” he told her.
She huffed again and sat down, returning her attention to the fire. “I wanted to see Midnight Eclipse when they played Madison Square, lizardman. Life is full of things we want and are never going to get.”
“Truth,” he muttered and rubbed hard at his brow-ridges
. He was no surgeon, after all. If she had done herself an injury, Sheul alone could cure her.
The thought gave him surprisingly little comfort.
“These need to be cooked,” Meoraq said gruffly and hunkered down to make room on the coals for the fat and bones.
“I wasn’t sure that was food,” said Amber, not rude any longer, but only…dim.
He shouldn’t have called her an idiot.
‘Admitted, but I still would have thought of her as one,’ he thought. Aloud, he said, “When I bring it as food, you may be assured it is food.”
“Even the bones?”
“The bones especially.”
Her brow creased for a moment, then smoothed out in dismay. “Oh, is it more of that gross bone jelly stuff?”
“Yes. And stop making that face,” he added. “You need the marrow more than meat in these days.”
“I’m not having any.”
He snorted. “Yes. You are.”
“I don’t want it, Meoraq.”
“I don’t want to feed S’kot. Life is full of things we do not want to do and must do anyway.” He turned the strips of tachuqi fat, which were browning up nicely already. “Meat may keep the life in your body a little longer, but no one stays healthy on meat alone. The season for green leaves and grain is done. My cuuvash is spent. Marrow is what I have to give you and you will eat it.”
“I don’t see you forcing it on anyone else.”
“I don’t care about anyone else.”
It took a moment for him to realize what he’d just said.
Sheul brought His hammer down on Meoraq’s chest just once. He straightened up sharply to disguise his flinch and glared at her, thinking, ‘I said that. Why did I say that?’ and thinking fractured thoughts of her bruised stomach under her torn shirt, the clean streaks of tears under her dry eyes, and the little sound it had made—that muted, soft sound—when her body slapped up against his and she threw her arms around him.
She was staring back at him, but he didn’t know what she was thinking. Her eyes were too wide, too bright in the firelight. There was still blood on her cheek and in her hair; the urge to wet a cloth and wipe her face had barely formed before it had melted into the much less clear desire just to touch her. Not sexually (not at first), but just to touch. To feel her flesh, warm with life. To put his arm around her shoulders as he so often saw humans do with one another. To hold her and feel her holding him.
‘There is something wrong with me,’ he thought, and took the fat off the coals. He pulled his samr and served half the delicacy warrior-style, across the blade. She took it eventually and set it on her knees, staring at it instead of him. She shivered once.
“Eat it,” he grunted, and ate his off his kzung. It crackled open and melted in his mouth like a good custard, and he scarcely noticed. The rich, salty taste was a luxury in this world, prized by priests and lords and rarely savored even by Sheulek, but he could not enjoy it. He wished he knew what to say to take the heaviness out of the air.
Amber stirred herself at last and touched a fingertip to the roasted fat. It broke and oozed invitingly. “If I say something, are you going to call it whining?”
What a curious question. “I can’t answer that until I hear what you have to say.”
She rolled her eyes back and rubbed briefly at her face, then looked at him. “Fine. If I whine, will you shut up about it and just let me do it for once?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “I have very little patience with whining, particularly when one is whining about the food.” He pointed.
She gave the fat a lackluster glance, but dipped her finger in the steaming inner jelly and put that in her mouth. Her mouthparts twisted into a grimace, not one of her smiling ones. “Why is everything you eat so damned gross?”
“Because these are the wildlands and here we eat for survival, not pleasure. Is this what you want to whine about? The food? When you should be thanking Sheul for His mercy that you are alive to eat at all?”
“No.” She took another taste of the fat and finally nerved herself to scoop up a quivering mouthful and eat it properly. Her eyes scrunched shut and stayed that way even after she’d swallowed. “This is indescribable.”
“Good, eh?” He took another salty bite of his own share. “Men pay high coin in the cities to eat salt-back roasted on real coals just this way. I prefer mine cooked with riak and czaa, when I have the chance. You might like yours better that way.”
“If it came baked in a bar of gold, I don’t think I could ever like this. It stings my mouth.”
He looked up sharply. “Are your teeth loose?”
“No, I’m just cut up some from when…” She didn’t finish. She looked away at the other fire, where humans huddled together to sleep or exchange low words. She watched them in silence for a long time and then rubbed at her face in a terrible, broken way. “I really screwed up with these people, Meoraq.”
That was a new turn of phrase and he wasn’t wholly certain of her meaning, so he said nothing.
“The worst part is, I don’t really know how. I don’t deserve this—I don’t think I do—but I don’t think I can stop it either. It’s not because I think I’m right all the time and it’s not because Scott’s a dick…or maybe it is. All I know is, I could walk over there right now with a spaceship in my arms and they’d probably club me to death with it before they thanked me for it.”
Meoraq leaned back in some surprise. “Do you want thanks?”
Now she looked at him, her brows furrowing. “Don’t you?”
“No. A Sheulek requires no man’s favor when he stands in God’s sight.”
“Oh come on. Don’t you think you deserve a ‘thank you’ after herding us across the wilderness and giving us food and water and then patrolling half the night to keep the man-eating chickens out of our camp while we sleep? Don’t you want just once for someone to appreciate it?”
He shrugged his spines. “Sometimes. I’m still a man and men can be petty, but I try to take the high path. Sheul may yet reward me for my efforts here; your people never will, I think. That cattle’s ass, S’kot, likes to keep them afraid of me.” He pointed yet again at her tachuqi fat and studied her face while she picked at it. “Did you think I hadn’t noticed?”
“He’s been pretty obvious, but you don’t act like you see it.”
“Because I don’t care. The world is filled with fools like S’kot, and worse, with the fools who let them act as wardens over them. They deserve each other. I don’t care what they think of me and neither should you.” He pointed at her tachuqi fat. She rolled her eyes again, but began at last to really eat it, and after she had taken several bites and he’d had time to think, he said, “I am Sheulek. Have I told you what that means?”
“It means you’re a foot.” She glanced at him. “A wandering soldier or something, right?”
“A Sheulek is more than a warrior. We are the instruments of God’s judgment.”
“I don’t think I got that.”
“Sheul’s will is not always manifest to those of us who dwell on Gann. When conflicts arise that cannot be settled by men, we Sheulek are called to mediate. Most of these matters can be settled with words,” he added, taking back his samr to clean and sheath it. “If you have conflict with S’kot, call him forth and I will mediate.”
“I don’t think that will go over too well.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, court will be in session all of three minutes before you bang the gavel down on Scott’s fat head. Admit it,” she said, giving him half a smile that did not much touch her eyes. “You’d love the excuse to take him out.”
“You think I have had no excuses before this?” He took a bite of his salt-back, swallowed, and added, “I don’t need one anyway. One of the privileges of carrying these blades is that I can use them against whoever I want. Yet for now, this moment, I must believe Sheul put him in my path for a reason.”
She snorted. “Maybe
it’s to kill him.”
“Father, hear Your son’s desire, but in the meantime, I don’t require his good opinion of me,” said Meoraq with a dismissive flex of his spines. “It wouldn’t mean much, coming from him.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with these people.”
“Neither do you.”
Her eyes rolled. She looked at the fire and moved roasts around.
“If you want his approval,” said Meoraq bluntly, hating even the taste of the words, “give him yours. Lay your open hand at his boot for all your people to see and his favor will fall like rain.”
“No. He’s an idiot. And I know you think I’m an idiot too—”
He never should have said that.
“—but if I just smile and let him do whatever he wants, he’ll kill us.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Yes!” She stopped and frowned into nothing for a few moments. “Yes,” she said again, with less heat but more feeling.
“So. Do what is right. Stop pursuing the gratitude of your pathologically ungrateful people.” Meoraq put a hand on her bent knee and leaned forward until his face and hers were a breath apart. “And stop whining.”
It seemed the right thing to say, for a change. She smiled a little anyway, and when she smiled, it was as though a cold hand reached directly through his flesh and squeezed at his stomach.
He had nearly lost her this night. A thumb’s width of bone at the end of her stupid spear had been all that made the difference between his Amber sitting at this fire…or burning on it.
Meoraq gave her a tap and stood up, looking away. “Mind the meat,” he said unnecessarily. Of course she’d mind it. “I need to do something with the carcasses before the ghets come.” He hesitated, then looked down—not directly at her, but close—and said, “You were very brave tonight.”
“And stupid.”
“But brave.” He reached…but closed his hand into a fist and walked away without touching her. He wanted to. And that was why he just didn’t dare.