by R. Lee Smith
That evening, after his camp was made (if it could be called evening while the sun was only half-fallen from its highest point), Meoraq went alone into the plains on the pretext of hunting. There, he removed his harness and his tunic, and bent his neck before Sheul. He prayed, reciting the Deliverance through all twelve invocations, and meditating until his heart was clear and all his clay was numb with cold.
When this was done, Meoraq bent yet further, gathering a palmful of wet earth to daub over his mortal heart. The wind dried it to a gritty shell against his bare skin in moments. He bowed low, shivering, to press his hands flat to Gann. His prayers were not ended, but only begun.
“O my Father,” he said, “hear Your son. I cry out to You from the darkness where I am in desperate need of succor. Great Father, the cold season is almost upon me and I can see no way for all the humans You have given me to survive such a wintering. I know that the lives of these few humans are a small measure of the hundreds of families who would depend upon me if I am called to be steward of Uyane’s line in Xeqor and I am ashamed to show my face to You and admit that even so, the burden is too great. I must cry out to You, merciful Sheul, for shelter in the wild places, for food in the hour of famine, and for strength in the bodies of the weak.”
Meoraq paused to reapply humility in the form of mud on his exposed chest. He could not feel it anymore. His shivering had become a constant tremor throughout his limbs. It took great effort to bend back to the ground without sprawling across it—effort that made him think of Amber fighting one foot down in front of the other, where his thoughts had been since this prayer began. Now he must come to it.
“Great Sheul, O my Father, You have called me to this pilgrimage and given me the honor of this ordeal. My heart is sick with shame that I cannot steward these humans without Your intervention, but I must be shamed, O Sheul, or I must see them die. We have been too long in the wildlands and with this new attack upon my camp, we will be there longer still. A woman was injured…” Meoraq trailed off, painted more mud onto his numb and aching chest, and said, “A good woman was injured, but by Your mercy, she lives. Now I bend on her behalf.”
Hearing those words spoken aloud, even before Sheul who surely knew all things, made Meoraq profoundly uncomfortable. He hesitated, then said the words which were soon to haunt him: “Her wounds slow us all and I cannot tend these humans in the wildlands indefinitely.” This was truth, but even truth could be molded into many shapes. “I ask You as Your true son who has served and loved You all my life, relieve her of her pains and so relieve me of this burden.”
Dead grass rattled in a slow gust of wind. Meoraq raised his head, but the plains were empty and the skies above were growing dark.
“I leave myself in Your hands, O my Father,” he said finally, decisively, “as You have left them in mine. Be with and watch over Your son as I tend them, and bring us safely to Xi’Matezh. I am ever grateful for Your blessings, for every breath is Yours, O Father, and I thank You humbly for each pain that I am alive to feel.”
He bent one last time, touching his brow to the muddy grass and holding it there while he took a slow count for the Six and spoke their names. Then he dressed again and went on his hunt while he still had light enough to see the ground.
He found a dead corroki calf lying close to a trampled tachuqi in the muddy path of its herd with an obvious story to tell: A tachuqi attack and a vengeful cow whose herd rallied around her. The tachuqis retreated when one of their half-grown chicks was killed, moving on after easier prey (Meoraq thought it very likely these were the self-same tachuqis who had come upon his own camp, now three days behind him). The corrokis lingered, waiting for their cow’s animal grief to dim, and finally traveled on this morning. The tachuqi’s carcass was too mangled to serve him, but the calf, well-preserved in the cold, would feed his hungry humans for many days.
Meoraq began cutting the calf out of its armored plates, grateful now that he had made his camp in the middle of the day. All things served according to Sheul’s design. He heard all prayers and answered.
That thought too would haunt him.
As the sun sank low behind the clouds, Meoraq returned to camp, dragging the first load of meat on a crude litter fashioned primarily from the calf’s own back-plate. He dropped it by the fire, heaved a great stack of human packs off the sled he had made, oh, a brace of days ago, then beckoned to Scott and his servants and went to cut some poles so he could make a second.
Eric alone came to him, but he listened to Meoraq’s commands and put together a fairly competent sled with a minimum of instruction. Meoraq, in a generous mood, gave him a tap on the shoulder and even refrained from pointing out the areas that could have used improvement. “It isn’t far,” he said, taking up the tether of his old sled while Eric manned the new. “But it will take more than one journey and I want to run if you can manage it.”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Meoraq stopped and looked at the sky. ‘I am grateful,’ he thought. ‘For every pain that I am alive to feel, O my merciful Father, I am grateful.’
He turned around, but he was not the one under attack. Scott and his remaining two servants, Dag and Crandall, were on their feet before the fire (before the slab of meat Meoraq had brought them also, he noted), staring Eric down.
“I need my people here,” said Scott, furiously pointing at the ground beneath his boots. “If Meoraq wants help, he can use Bierce.”
“She’s hurt,” said Eric.
“I’m fine!” Amber called, struggling to rise from her mat.
“Sit down,” Meoraq said.
“But I can—”
“Sit.” He glanced at her, lowering his spines warningly, and she sat. When he turned back to Scott, the cattle’s ass was right in front of him.
“Stop giving my people orders,” said Scott. “If you want something, you respect the chain of command. You ask me and I’ll consider whatever it is, but stop giving my people orders.”
And while Meoraq was still reminding himself that he was the master of his clay and it would upset everyone if he cut Scott’s head off in front of them, however deservedly, Eric—of all people—suddenly said, “You gonna stand there with him and bitch about the chain of command or you wanna come pick up some food?”
It was unclear to Meoraq just which of them he addressed, but Dag and Crandall both pinked up in the face and dropped their eyes. After some uncomfortable moments, they shuffled away from Scott to stand with Eric. And it was Eric who looked his furious abbot in the face and said, quietly, “You need to get over this, man. You need to. Because this planet is not fucking around anymore. It’s going to kill us.”
“When we get to the skyport—”
“If there is one,” said Eric. “If.”
They locked eyes. All around them, watchful humans fidgeted and whispered. It was very strange to be one of the watchers instead of the one fending off Scott’s challenge, to feel none of the hot pleasure in seeing Scott skulk away, but only a growing unease. The storm had not passed, but was only darkening.
Like the sky, he thought with another upwards glance. What was coming with Scott…it would just have to come. Until then, he had work to do.
It took four trips and two sleds to strip the calf of all usable meat, and by the time they were finished, night was full upon them. The humans led the way with the light from their lamp-machines until they could see the fires that Amber had built. She was roasting the meat, stewing the organs, and hammering away at the marrow-bones with a rock when Meoraq came up beside her.
“This stupid fucking disgusting glop is not worth the effort it takes to get at it,” she snapped by way of greeting.
He grunted and handed her his samr, moving on with Scott’s servants to unload the sled. He listened to the chopping sounds as she broke into the bones, and since they didn’t come with shrieks as she dismembered herself, he allowed himself to become absorbed in portioning out the meat. For Eric in particular,
he gave the tender neck flesh. With humans, as with any half-domesticated animal, good behavior should always be rewarded if one wished to see it repeated.
It was not until the sled was empty that Meoraq straightened up to discover that Eric had gone no further than Meoraq’s own fire. His Maria was there with him, not cooking, but only sitting and chatting with Nicci. Scott’s other servants, Dag and Crandall, seemed to be in no hurry to wander off either.
He looked at Amber, who was trading out heat-stones in the stew and sitting watch over the marrow. She looked at him, her mouthparts crooked up at one corner.
The words, “Get away from my fire,” rose to his throat, but no further. Amber wanted to be liked by these idiots. It cost him nothing to welcome them for one night.
Well…not welcome, but he could tolerate them.
So he simply walked over, set the last of the meat over the coals, and gave Crandall a hard rap on the top of his hairy head. Crandall scooted away from Amber and Meoraq hunkered down in his place. Amber was eating marrow, he saw. On the flat of his samr, warrior-fashion. “Do you like it any better than saoq or tachuqi?” he asked, gesturing at it.
“I can’t taste the difference,” she told him. “It’s all gross.”
“I can’t taste the difference either,” he confessed, taking some. “But they tell me there is one.”
Crandall was staring at him. After a while, Meoraq stopped politely ignoring him and stared back. Crandall got up and went to Scott’s fire instead. The few humans sitting up there made room for him and listened to whatever words went with his angry arm gestures. Some of them laughed. Scott himself was nowhere to be seen, which was odd. This was the time of night when he was usually pacing around the camp, hearing the many complaints of his people as they bedded down and telling them lies.
He watched for a time, making certain Scott was really gone and not just keeping himself uncharacteristically quiet and still. At last, he reached out and gave Eric a tap. “Where is your abbot?”
“In his tent,” Eric replied, and his woman added, “Sulking.”
“He’ll get over it,” said Dag, stealing a bit of heart-meat out of the stewing pouch.
Meoraq’s hand twitched, but he managed not to slap. Barely. “Get over what?”
Nicci rolled her eyes and made a chuffing noise.
“Same shit, different day,” said Amber. “You’re undermining his authority.”
“Would it kill you to be nice once in a while?” Nicci demanded, glaring at her. “He has so much to worry about right now and you just…you just push him around!”
“Scott does his share of the pushing.” Amber stirred the stew as all the humans found something else to look at.
Meoraq turned back toward Eric. “Does your abbot truly believe he will find a ship in Xi’Matezh capable of sailing him into the sky?”
“I don’t know,” said Eric after a moment. “Sometimes I think he does.”
Beside him, his Maria snorted. “If he didn’t, he couldn’t convince anyone else. He needs that too much, so yes, he believes it. And he’ll go on believing it until we get there and don’t find anything.”
“We might,” said Nicci, glaring at Eric’s woman, who snorted again.
“Meoraq…” Amber’s nerve appeared to fail her. She fussed with the heat-stones unnecessarily, and just when he thought she would wait until someone else changed the subject for her, she looked up again and said, “Why are you going to Xi’Matezh? Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said quickly, waving her hand. “You want to talk to God. But you talk to God all the time and I’m sure you think he answers—”
Meoraq sighed and patted her knee.
“—so why would you walk across the whole world to do it now? I mean, you’re tough, but this place could kill you.”
He acknowledged that with a flick of his spines. “I was called to find you. You were placed in my path.”
“Okay, whatever, but you were already on the road, is my point. Why?”
“The road…” mused Meoraq. He thought about it, beginning to smile. “So. I am on a sort of road. At one end, I am Sheulek, as I have been since my ascension. At the other, I am steward of my bloodline. House Uyane is the last of the great Houses in Xeqor to hold a direct line of descent. Whoever stands as steward stands in the sight of all men. Yet a Sheulek stands in the sight of God. It is too great a decision for a man to make.”
Maria leaned forward slightly to look at Amber. “What, is he the lizard-king?”
“Baby, be cool.”
“I’m just asking.”
“No,” said Amber, sounding annoyed. And to Meoraq, “Is it really worth all this walking just to ask God if you should quit your job?”
“It is a serious matter. I serve as His Sword and the tool of His judgment.”
“Can’t you serve him at home?”
“Of course,” Meoraq said uncomfortably.
“Just not the same way?”
Discomfort grew. Now it was Meoraq who leaned out to check on the stew. “In many of the same ways, actually. A steward must mediate conflicts in the households under him and may even be called to trial if one of those households falls under accusation.”
“But you have to stay home?” Amber guessed.
He looked at her.
Her arms raised, putting all the world on display. “Where you miss all this.”
“Ease off, Bierce,” Dag murmured.
“Don’t speak for me,” Meoraq told him irritably.
“Look, I’m sorry,” said Amber. “It’s your life. And I guess I can understand that running around out here is more exciting than staying home. The point is having an interesting story, right?”
Meoraq was startled into laughing out loud. “I don’t know any stories about Sheulek. Boys may think this life is exciting, but one city is the same as any other, walking means nothing but boredom and bad weather, and you can’t even remember the trials. No. The best stories, the legends, are told of stewards. They do the things that men see, after all.”
“Tell us one,” said Maria.
They all looked at her.
Eric leaned over to whisper, but she shook him off. “It has to be better than the bedtime stories the Commander tells. Come on, Meoraq, let’s hear it.”
It was right in the back of his throat to tell this woman that Uyane Meoraq, whether Sheulek or lord-steward, would never wallow so low as to put himself in competition with Scott for the favor of the fools who served him…but Amber was watching. These were her people and this was the first time he had ever seen them share her company at his fireside.
So he swallowed his first response and after some consideration, Meoraq said, “My father is…was steward of the bloodline and lord of House Uyane, which is the championing seat of Xeqor. As such, he was subject to be summoned to the city’s defense and his battles on those rare occasions earned him as much fame as honor. He was very well known, not only in Xeqor, but across all the world. Or as much of the world as is left under Sheul,” he amended. “Many years ago, when I was…six, I think. I suppose I could have been as much as seven, but I am certain it was winter because I was at home to see it. But however long ago it was, it happened that a band of raiders led by a man called Szadt attacked the neighboring city of Kuaq and took one of its gates.
“Here,” said Meoraq, waving them closer. He took up a burnt bit of stick from the fire and sketched in the soil as he spoke. “Here are our cities, entirely enclosed within walls, with our cattle-lands and fields protected at the open heart, you see?”
“Like a doughnut,” said Amber.
Nicci rolled her eyes. “The Commander’s right,” she muttered. “It’s always food with you.”
“Okay, it’s like a tire,” Amber said crossly. “Is that better?”
“There are four great gates at the cardinal points and often others in the various districts around the city, for ease of trade and the summering of cattle, but whether civil or private, each gate-house is fashioned with
but one tunnelway that opens to the outside at one end and to the inward terrace here. No other door opens to the outside and no other door opens to the city. The many watchmen appointed at the gate-house are garrisoned along either side of a central stair with the private homes of the officers and their families above, arranged to rank, with the warden’s home topmost, encompassing the entire floor so as to be the only home with access to the roof. So it is,” Meoraq concluded, eyeing his poor drawing for faults, “that there are only three access points to the gate-house: the outer gate, the inner gate, and the rooftop stair. All three points were easily held by Szadt and his men. The gates were built to stand and Szadt had the whole of that armory at his disposal. Apart from that, he had somehow acquired certain machines—either from the stores of the Ancients or built after their fashion, I do not know—which could be tossed out through the inward windows. These burst and burned to terrible effect, capable of killing twenty men or more in an instant.”
The humans looked at each other, but didn’t seem much amazed.
“They still worked?” Nicci asked. “The grenades or whatever they were?”
“He said they were built by this other guy,” Amber said before Meoraq could answer. She was scowling.
“He said maybe they were. And maybe the other guy just found them.”
“Can you two fight about this later please?” asked Maria, ignoring the censuring mutters of Eric. “I want to hear the story. Go on, Meoraq.”
He paused, not to let Amber and her blood-kin settle, but to think about whether or not he really wanted to give the human Maria the idea that she could give him orders. In the end, he continued, but only because it was a good story and he liked telling it.
“Kuaq rallied its defenses immediately, of course, and if Szadt had advanced out into the streets, surely he and his men would have been taken, but instead Szadt sealed himself within the gate-house to plunder it at his leisure. All attempts to break through the inner gate met with burning death. So too ended the efforts to send warriors around the outer wall to that gate. And so ended the disastrous assault upon the rooftop, when two whole legions of warriors were dismembered alive by more of the Raider-Lord’s infernal machines. And in the lull that followed each onslaught, Szadt provided those encamped without the gate-house with the terrible sounds of his entertainments as he tortured those watchmen he had taken prisoner. At one point, he offered to release the families for certain goods, but when another attempt was made to break the gates, Szadt ended all negotiations. For hours, the cries of the women and children were heard as the Raider-Lord shared them out among his men and then threw them screaming over the inward wall at each tolling of the hour.”