by R. Lee Smith
7
Amber fell asleep while cooking, which, if someone had told her it had happened to them, she wouldn’t have believed was possible. In the aftermath of the tachuqi attack, she had thought she would be awake all night and so she’d busied herself with chores while the others gradually went back to sleep, ultimately ending up behind Meoraq’s tent with a small fire and the stewing pouch, washing up and crying some more. The next time she checked on the meat, Meoraq’s mending kit had been set out in a conspicuous spot, so she went back behind his tent to see what she could do with her shirt. The hanging shreds were beyond help; she ripped them off, then went ahead and ripped the whole shirt up to the neck and started sewing. The new seam was as ugly as a surgery scar, but the shirt fit a lot better, so she did them all the same way, even her sweaters from home, leaving only her last new Manifestor’s shirt still folded and untouched in the bottom of her pack.
She didn’t think she was tired, the same way she didn’t think she was too badly hurt, but with her adrenaline burned out and her emotions pulled thin, a full stomach and a dark night, it happened. One moment, she was leaning over a half-sewn shirt to turn slabs of meat on live coals, and in the next, it was day and Meoraq was shouting the place up: “I said, get back! That is for smoking, not for eating! You have had all that I mean to give you today!”
She woke up, but not fast. Her head felt cottony, thick with hurt, but her head wasn’t even half the problem. She’d never hurt so much in her life. Her stomach was a furnace of so much sick heat that it felt almost like a separate entity—a pregnancy of pain—with a weight and a pulse all its own. She had to touch it, thinking with half-asleep logic that she could measure the extent of her internal injuries by how much swelling she found, but decided she must still be dreaming once she had. ‘I am not this flat tummy,’ she thought decisively, and was comforted. She left her hand on the stranger’s stomach, though. It hurt to bear her hand’s weight, but it felt good to be cradled, and after she’d had a few minutes to brace herself, she sat up.
It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t quick, but she made it happen. Cold air hit her as gravity took her blanket away, forcing her to pull it back up. While it would have been exaggeration to say that the blanket felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, she could honestly say it felt like ten, and that was ten too many for the arms that had kept a giant man-eating ostrich at spear’s length the night before.
All these thoughts had time to pour themselves, thick as syrup, redly throbbing, through her head before Amber noticed it wasn’t her her blanket. Her Fleet-issue sheet of tinfoil was nowhere to be seen. In its place was a real blanket made of some heavy woven material, dark red in color, wonderfully warm. After that sank in came the real shock: she was in Meoraq’s tent, lying on his bedroll, which had her grass-bundle-and-waxed-saoq-hide one, great as it was, beat all to hell.
While she was staring at this in a stupefied kind of horror, a lizardman’s shadow grew suddenly huge and dark on the wall. “Be quiet!” Meoraq hissed. “If you say one more word, S’kot, even to beg my forgiveness, I will split you down to the ground! Great Sheul, O my Father,” he continued under his breath, “see Your son in his hour of trial and give me the strength to keep from killing that ass-headed fool just one more day.”
With that pious thought hanging in the air, the mouth of the tent rippled, bulged and finally opened. He stuck his head inside, moving carefully and making no sound, only to see her already sitting up.
His spines slapped flat. “Fuck,” he said, and withdrew. His silhouette twisted, his long head turning in profile, sparking some vague storybook memory—a dragon, a cave, a damsel in distress—before he shattered it by shouting, “Get back, you pack of ghets! You! If I see you reach your hand toward my fire again, I’ll cut it off! Back!” Then he looked in at her again.
“Hey,” she said.
He glowered and came all the way inside, flinging the flap shut behind him like it was a door he could slam. Muttering savagely under his breath, he dropped to one knee and began rummaging through his pack. His spines were still flat. Those yellow stripes were out and glaringly bright on his black throat. Amber re-thought her ‘What the hell am I doing in here, lizardman,’ approach and said instead, “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
He grunted, pulled a rolled-up mass of something from his pack, and tossed it at her. It fell open on impact and dropped into her lap. Some kind of leather shirt, long-sleeved, nicely-tailored. His spare tunic.
She hurriedly pushed his blanket down, exposing her mended shirt with the new black stitching staggering its way from neck to hem. It was still a little big on her and the cloth puckered and bunched all along the ugly seam, but it covered her. “I don’t need that. I fixed my shirts.”
“I decide what you need. Put it on.”
“Meoraq—”
“Put it on.”
“I can’t!”
“Don’t whine at me. Put it on.” He leaned back on his heels and looked at her, rubbed his throat, checked his belt buckle, and suddenly spat, “How do you feel?”
Amber plucked listlessly at one sleeve of the tunic. “About this?”
“I don’t care how you feel about that!” he snapped. “How badly are you hurt?”
She dropped her eyes to keep from looking at his, which were blazing, bright as fresh blood, furious. He wanted to get moving, of course. She’d slept half the day away already, and yeah, she hurt, there wasn’t a square inch on her that wasn’t reliving last night—worst of all her stomach, which felt like she’d swallowed a hot, jagged rock—but she for damn sure wasn’t going to whine at him about it.
“I’m okay,” she mumbled, looking at the tunic. His tunic. The tunic everyone was going to see her wearing.
Silence. He was staring at her. She could feel him staring, even though she didn’t dare look.
Outside the tent, people were talking, moving around. She found herself wondering who’d started the morning fire, who’d topped off the flasks. Her stomach hurt.
“I’ll be out in a minute, okay?” she said finally, desperately. “Just let me get myself together and I’ll be ready to go.”
“Take all the minutes you want,” he replied. “You’re not going anywhere today. Tell me where it hurts.”
“I’m fine.”
“You may not go anywhere tomorrow either,” said Meoraq, just as if she hadn’t said anything, as if she weren’t even there. His scaly fingers closed on her chin, forcing her head back. He glared at the side of her face, then pulled her chin down almost to her chest so he could see the top of her head. When he was satisfied with that, he nudged her shielding arm aside and pulled her shirt up to expose the plum-colored skin of her stomach. She sat there, clutching his tunic and waiting for it to be over.
“You’re very quiet,” he remarked, prodding inevitably right where it hurt the worst.
“Does anything I say matter?”
“What would you say if it did?”
“We have to keep moving.”
“Then, no, it does not.” He dropped her shirt and pinched her chin again, having another look at the side of her face. “We leave at my command, and I wait upon our Father’s. No more arguments.”
Amber shut her eyes and waited until he was done thumbing through her hair.
“I have tea and a little stew I want you to take,” he said at last, releasing her. “And then I want you to rest.”
The thought of having to eat anything put another hot, jagged rock in her stomach. They ground together, breaking off points that stabbed their way into her heart, her throat, her eyes.
Amber nodded.
He grunted and left, letting in a great gust of frigid air before the flap fell shut behind him.
Amber pushed his blanket back and moved off of his bedroll. She put his tunic on over her shirt so she wouldn’t have to feel it touching her skin. It was soft and warm and a bit stiff. It smelled faintly of smoke, but mostly of new shoes; it had never been worn. She cried a li
ttle, but only a little. Then she scrubbed her eyes dry on her sleeve, put her boots on, and crawled out of his tent.
The sun was even higher than she’d thought, almost directly overhead. Everyone was up, milling restlessly through the camp with nothing to do, nowhere to go. She saw Nicci first, because Nicci was there on Amber’s mat where she could dimly remember leaving it, although the memory felt days old, unreliable. Amber limped over, holding her stomach in the cradle of one arm, and bent laboriously to collect her spear.
Nicci watched solemnly until Amber had straightened herself out. Then she huddled up tighter under her blanket—hers and Amber’s both—and said, “Are you all right?”
All her life, no matter how she’d actually felt at the time, the answer to that question had been yes, usually in the kind of scornful, impatient tone that was meant to make the other person sorry they’d ever asked. Now, although she still could not bring herself to admit to the truth out loud, Amber shook her head.
“You look pretty bad. Amber, I…about last night, I mean…” Nicci looked away, shivering under her blankets, toward Scott’s fire. Toward Scott himself, standing by his tent and watching them. She dropped her eyes, not looking at either of them anymore, but said, “Do you need help? To…you know…go?”
Amber considered it, which was depressing enough, but in the end, she knew that no matter how uncomfortable the short walk to the boulder designated as the bathroom might be, it wouldn’t hurt any less to hang off Nicci’s arm. She shook her head again and limped off alone.
By the time she managed to shift her clothes, squat without falling over, pee out the shrieking leaden hell in her guts, and put herself right again, she had begun to feel dizzy as well as tired and hurt. Feverish. Gripping her spear, she sat on the rock that had hidden her bathroom activities from camp and bent forward as much as her stomach would let her, letting her swimming head dangle over her knees.
“Here you are! And by Gann’s closed hand, here you are alone!”
She raised her head just enough to see Meoraq’s boots stomping toward her through the grass. “I had to pee,” she said dully. “I don’t do that in front of an audience.”
He kept coming, which she expected, and when he reached her, he took her by the chin and forced her to sit up straight. She more or less expected that, too. But the hand that wasn’t iron at her jaw was gentle as he stroked her hair back and peered into her eyes, and the yellow stripes at his throat had faded almost entirely to black. He was still glaring, but it was hard for lizards not to glare.
‘He said he liked me,’ she thought suddenly, which was not exactly true. What he’d said was, ‘I don’t care about anyone else,’ but the implication was there. He’d said that and then he put her in his tent to sleep and gave her his tunic in the morning and where was she supposed to go from there? She found herself wondering…if she put her arms around him right now, would he give her another of those stilted pats? Or would he hold her?
“I would be very clear now,” he murmured, rubbing his thumb lightly back and forth beneath her left eye. It hurt a little, like it had bruised up. She didn’t think she’d even been hit in the eye, just the ear. “You are not to leave my camp. Not alone. Not in company. Not at all. How do you mark me?”
“I’m still in camp. This counts as camp.” She watched his red eyes move, reading all the pain the old Amber could have kept hidden, thinking how easy it would be to just let go of her spear and hold on to him instead. “It isn’t your camp anyway.”
He snorted, but even that was gentle. “Whose then?”
“It belongs to all of us.”
“Ah.” He stepped back, gesturing for her to stand, which she eventually was able to do. He watched, spines forward, intent, as she took her first steps, then joined her at her side. He said, “I took a talon on my first tachuqi hunt.”
“Oh yeah?” She had no idea what that meant.
“Truth. And on my second, I took its foot to my chest. Why I wasn’t killed, only God could say. As it was, I was thrown some distance and briefly lost my reason, but I was able to walk back to the city and I slept in my own bed in the billets that night.”
“Wow,” said Amber, because she felt like she’d ought to be in the conversation. She hoped her noticeable lack of enthusiasm didn’t make it seem like she was being sarcastic, but she just hurt too much to care.
“I remember thinking that night how blessed I had been. A few shallow scratches, a knock on the head—hardly worth the mention.” His spines flicked. He glanced at her, smiling in that severe, lizardish way. “Come the morning bell, I felt as if I’d been nailed into a crate and thrown down the stairs.”
That was such an apt description of what she feeling that Amber managed a thin, strained smile.
“But the following day was tolerable, if not pleasant, and the day following that, I decided I would live after all. Every day, Soft-Skin.” He tapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A little better.”
“In the meantime, I’m making things worse.” She stopped walking while they still had some privacy, leaning heavily and with shaking hands on her spear. “Look at me. I’m not going anywhere today.”
“No.”
“You don’t get it.” Amber looked into camp, where more than a few faces were turned toward them, watching. “We’ve used up all our screwing-around time and they all know it. Now they all know I’m going to slow us down even more. Acting like it doesn’t matter doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“It matters,” he said mildly. “But if Sheul wills that we are on this side of the mountains when the snows come, so be it. Xi’Matezh will wait for us.”
“We’ll starve to death if that happens.”
He thumped her lightly on the forehead with one knuckle. “You forget that I have wintered in the wildlands before.”
“With fifty people to feed?”
His expression did not change in any way that she could see, but it became more thoughtful all the same. It was not, however, a good-gracious-I-hadn’t-thought-of-that kind of thoughtful, but more of a how-can-I-dumb-this-down-any-further? “God has set me on this road,” he told her. “And God will see me reach its end.”
“I’m sure he will,” said Amber, rubbing at her eyes. “But God has made it pretty fucking clear that he doesn’t care if the rest of us die.”
“Do not be blasphemous.”
“Don’t be a zealot,” she snapped back, and rubbed her eyes some more.
“Come.” Meoraq tapped at her carefully with his knuckles. “I have tea for you.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I know. Come anyway.”
Amber raised her head. One of the women was pointing at her, saying something unheard to the rest of them while they all stood outside the Resource Tent and shivered in their worn-out Manifestors’ uniforms. One of the others shrugged and, looking Amber right in the eye, made a crude circle of one fist and rammed her finger into it a few times. A riot of ewwws and Oh Gods drifted toward her on the wind as they laughed.
Nicci was with them. She didn’t laugh, but she didn’t walk away either.
Meoraq put his hand on her back and gave her a little nudge.
She looked at him, wishing she was the old Amber, the tough Amber, the Amber who could just walk away. She dropped her eyes back to the toes of her resoled boots and let him take her to his fire.
* * *
After his own encounter with the tachuqi that had kicked him to the ground, a young Meoraq had been on light detail a total of fourteen days. He wished he could give Amber the same, but he simply couldn’t.
On his frequent patrols, taking careful note of each fresh ghet-track and gnawed tachuqi bone, Meoraq found himself thinking of the road they had crossed outside of the ruins. The Gelsik road, he thought, although the particulars didn’t matter. It would lead to a city where Meoraq could declare conquest and demand enough cuuvash from its provisioners to make the rest of his pilgrimage without worry. He would have to de
mand a cart and a young bull to pull it, and since it seemed wasteful to haul two or three hundred bricks of cuuvash in an otherwise empty cart, he would demand enough tents and blankets to keep all the humans out of the weather. Warm clothes for Amber…and maybe even a new wristlet.
But as tempting as the thought was, he knew he would never do it. If pressed to give reasons, he could have said that this was a holy test set before him by Sheul Himself, and if the only way he could come through it was to cheat, he had already failed. That was a good reason, one that left unsaid the far more honest facts that if he took the humans with him to a city, his pilgrimage might well end there, and if he went alone, Scott would leave Amber to her own care, which was no care at all.
So Meoraq thinned the tachuqi meat as much as possible by stewing it with all the edible roots and leaves he could forage, and on the morning of the third day following the attack, when the last bitter drop was taken (given to Amber, fed to Nicci), he gave the order to strike camp and move on.
They walked, and if Meoraq had wagered his own left foot against the making of three spans distance in the course of that day, he would yet be walking. Even the humans complained it was not enough—there had to be some black joke in that—and Amber’s name was in all their mutterings.
She had begun well enough but soon flagged, dropping further and further behind until she and her Nicci were only two dark points on the very edge of the world. At first she carried her spear, then dragged it behind her, and finally began to lean on it. Meoraq spent much of the day looking back from some ridge or another, watching her struggle, thinking of himself limping along just that way, and the fourteen days he had been given for healing. But that was fourteen days within the walls of great Xeqor and this was the wildlands. He knew she was driving her exhausted body to the very edge of collapse so that she would not be a burden to them. He knew also that she was a burden anyway.
Meoraq had been the tool of Sheul’s judgment all his adult life. The unfairness gnawed at him.