by R. Lee Smith
The second thought that came to him was relief so profound as to be prayerful that she was here at all—awake, alive, and arguing with him. Weak yet, but with sleep and warmth and decent feeding, she would soon be strong, he was sure of it, and when he made his prayers tonight, he would make them upon his belly in humility before the merciful God who had lifted her out of the ashes and set her again in his hands.
But that was his second thought. His first made it plain that he was not ready to share her bath.
3
So she rested and even if it was the right thing to do, she still hated it. The days took forever with nothing to do except eat and sleep and watch Scott’s trail fade away. The nights were even longer, lying alone next to the fire, often with Meoraq on the other side of it, staring at her. Two days. Three. Four, just to pace around the camp and work the stiffness out of her joints. And on the fifth, after she woke up to a few drops of rain tapping on her blanket, she rolled up her mat and packed her pack.
Meoraq, already awake and drinking his morning tea with his back to her, sighed and poured what was left into the flask he carried around his neck. He gestured at the waterskin, lying empty next to the fire. She took it away to fill it, knowing he was watching her and looking for the slightest weakness—if she stumbled, if she panted, if she shivered a little in the rain that was already coming down like pellets—any excuse to make her stay another day. She didn’t give him one. He helped her take down his tent without speaking and they were on their way.
It rained all morning and they walked in it. Amber kept her head down, holding onto Meoraq’s pack like a baby elephant to its mama’s tail. She didn’t think. The cold had numbed her brain as much as her body, but her eyes were open and as long as she could see the trampled path left by Scott and his pioneers under her feet (only trampled, the panicky part of her would cry, not muddy or tore-up, but only trampled), she felt okay. The rain finally stopped, but the wind kept blowing, chapping her face and stinging her eyes, but drying her clothes, so that was all right. Meoraq kept trying to make her rest and she didn’t argue with him, but she made sure she was always the first one back on her feet again and when he started in with his passive-aggressive observations on where she thought would be a good place to make camp, she managed to put him off three times with a casual, “Let’s try over the next hill.”
The fourth time she said it, however, he stopped, turned her roughly around, took her pack and her spear, and dropped them both on the ground.
“I can keep going,” she said.
“Stubborn idiot!” he snapped, throwing his pack on top of hers. “This is not a contest to see who can go further!”
“Meoraq—”
“No! You will go over that hill and over the next and over the next until you can’t walk and can’t think and then the tachuqis will come or the ghets or a pack of raiders because there is always something to watch for, damn it! These are the wildlands and surviving here means stopping before you exhaust yourself!”
“Maybe you’re right, but—”
“Maybe?!”
“But we have to catch up!” she insisted. “We’re just getting further behind!”
“We will find them in God’s time, not yours. Now, you rest.”
“But—”
“Rest, I say! No one but you would argue with that!”
Amber bit at her lip and followed the trail the only way she could, with her eyes, through the plains and eastward out of sight. “Maybe—”
“No.”
“I didn’t even say anything!”
“And I am not going to hear anything! You are resting!”
“Maybe you should go without me.”
He threw down a half-assembled tent pole and leapt up.
“I’ll rest right here and you can go find them!” she said, trying very hard to sound reasonable while speaking loud and fast to stave off his inevitable interruption. “I’m just slowing you down and we both know it!”
“And we both know my answer, so stop asking!”
“You can find them and bring them b—”
He thumped her hard on the forehead with one knuckle and pointed severely at her trembling mouth to make her shut it. Those yellow stripes were coming out on his throat. “I am not leaving you,” he said, not shouting, not even hissing. Somehow, that was worse. “I am never leaving you. If it is our Father’s will that we take the hateful S’kot and his hateful servants back into my camp, so be it, I serve Him in faith. For now, it is my will, human, and I will have your obedience. How do you mark me?”
“My sister is out there,” she whispered.
He broke the hold his hot, red eyes had on hers and stared over her left shoulder for a long time. Then he stepped back, rubbing at his throat until it cooled to black again, and went back to assembling poles without speaking.
She stayed quiet and out of his way, knowing she could fight all night if she wanted and never change his mind. “Can I help?” she asked finally, defeated.
“No.”
She looked around at the wind-blown plains, but saw no game and no sign that anything had passed through recently. There were no streams, no green swath of promise where water might be hiding, not even a swampy piece of lowland, just more dead hills rolling away on every side of them. The closest tree was easily fifty meters away and all alone—a huge, cancerous-looking thing with a squat, lumpy body trailing parasitical vines like hair from its few remaining branches.
“I’ll get a fire going,” Amber offered, heading toward the tree. It had clearly been dead for some time, which she hoped meant she’d find some branches around the bottom. She could see some kind of spiky bush at the dead tree’s base, so if nothing else, she could always burn that.
“We don’t need one yet. Just rest.”
“You rest. I’m fine,” she said, still walking.
“Insufferable human.”
“Scaly son of a bitch.”
He grunted without looking at her and went on putting his tent together.
The gully was deeper than it looked. The grass was hip-high and hard to walk through, with plenty of creepers wound through to try and trip her up. Amber went slow, muttering and swearing, keeping her eyes on her feet and determined to go one day, just one, without falling on her stupid face and giving Meoraq yet another reason to think—
“Stop!” he shouted behind her. “Stop now! Here to me!”
Amber rolled her eyes and turned around to see him running down into the gully after her. “I feel fine, damn it, would you relax?”
Meoraq yanked the hooked sword from his belt and no matter how pissed off he was, he would never pull a sword on her.
‘Don’t turn around,’ Amber thought with such clarity and in such a reasonable inner voice that she nodded along in agreement. ‘If you don’t turn around, nothing will be there.’
Very true. Very good advice.
Amber turned around and watched the spiky bush at the base of the dead tree raise its head and turn magically into an enormous, quill-covered monster, oh, about a meter and a half away.
It saw Meoraq first. Its sleepy eyes squinted, assessing this danger, as it raised one massive, claw-tipped paw—it had no fingers or toes that she could see, just a leathery pad for a palm and four huge hooked claws—to scratch at its neck. The quills that covered its entire body turned to fine hair over its flat face and chin, but kept growing along its jawline in a dead-on evolutionary imitation of a muttonchop beard. That, combined with its severe frown as it watched the sword-swinging lizardman tear across the plains toward it, made it look hilariously like President Martin Van Buren. There had been a row of presidential portraits all around the tops of the walls in her seventh-grade world-history class. She had not realized until this moment that she knew any of them and that was kind of hilarious too.
“Ha,” said Amber. She didn’t mean to. It just came burping out of her.
The creature’s head swung left and right, then down. It saw her. It had e
yebrows, of a sort. It raised them. Now he was a surprised Martin Van Buren. Mr. President, it appears William Harrison has just won the election. Pack up your shit and leave.
“Ha ha,” burped Amber.
The creature thumped its paw into the ground and stood up. And up. And up.
Even as a bush, it had been a pretty big bush, the kind that might burn maybe an hour. She had thought, following its magical transformation into an animal, that it was the size of a bear, because even though she’d never been to a zoo or seen a bear close-up, she’d seen them on TV and figured she knew how big they were, and yeah, big had a way of being subjective the closer a person came to a real live bear, but whatever this thing was, it was no more a bear than it had been a bush. It stood up on all fours and its ass was already taller than Amber, and then it stood up on its hind legs, doubling its height in a slow-motion second. It drew back its arm with a severe, presidential frown and swung.
Something hit her. It wasn’t Mr. President the Porcu-bear because she was looking at him. It wasn’t a car either because they had none on this planet, or at least, none that worked anymore. It felt a little like a car, though. She’d been hit once when she was little. Mama had gone running across the road so little Amber went running after and the cars had mostly stopped, but one of them hadn’t quite and although Amber didn’t remember it hurting, she remembered that whole-body double-WHUMP of the car hitting her and then her hitting the pavement. Then, she’d gotten herself a scraped elbow and maybe a bloody lip, she couldn’t recall exactly. Now, she tumbled over the grass and thorns and looked up dazedly to see grey skies and rolling clouds and Meoraq hacking at Mr. President’s neck. The porcu-bear turned away from Amber at once and slapped with his other paw, aiming at Meoraq this time.
It must have connected, because it seemed from Amber’s vantage that Meoraq flew back, but he landed and pivoted and lunged again with such effortless and brutal grace that it might have been choreographed. The sword went in, not bouncing off the quills this time but stabbing through them, slashing deep into the porcu-bear’s neck. It bellowed and dropped to all fours, shaking its head and slapping Meoraq away. Again, Meoraq rebounded, pulling his other sword from his back even before he hit the ground. His boots kicked a clod of grassy dirt onto Amber’s chest. She tried to pick it up, but it broke apart in her hand.
The porcu-bear stood up again, fanning its fingerless claws with both hands and bobbing its head as it roared, which made it sound a lot like Martin Van Buren during some fairly intense coitus, but when Meoraq came at it again, it dropped and tried to run.
It managed surprising speed for the first dozen steps and staggered for a dozen more before collapsing carefully onto its knees. Glaring at Amber, who it clearly blamed for its predicament, the porcu-bear rolled onto its side and lay panting.
“I didn’t see it,” someone said. It sounded like her, but she hadn’t felt her lips move. Her eyes were still fixed on the dying animal, and even though she could see it lying there, it was as if she could also see it rising up in front of her too—just rising and rising, a mountain of quills and hot breath and muscle—ready to kill. She hadn’t seen it? Really? How could anyone miss it?
“It was lying down,” someone explained in her voice. Even Amber thought it was a weak excuse. “I thought it was a bush.”
Meoraq grunted and stomped into view. The porcu-bear took a swipe at him which he easily stepped over. He planted one boot on the animal’s side, gripped the hilt of the sword jutting from Mr. President’s neck, and shoved. There was no last kick, no grunt, no slump, but Amber knew the difference immediately. It had been alive; now it was dead. That was how quick it could happen.
Meoraq yanked twice and finally got his sword back. Drops of blood fell like beads from a broken necklace, scattering prettily over the animal’s stiff quills and rolling out of sight. Meoraq wiped it off and hung it back on his belt. “Kipwe already. We must be nearer to the mountains than I—Are you all right?”
“You could have been killed.”
His spines flared and flattened. “By a kipwe?” he demanded, sounding pissed. He knelt down to carve some meat out of the quill-covered carcass, and maybe he was talking to her while he did it, but she couldn’t hear him. His back was to her and on his back was a ragged tear in his tunic with the wet gleam of blood beneath.
“Oh my God, you’re hurt!” she blurted.
“I realize that,” Meoraq said testily, prodding at another tear, this one on his side. And there was another on his arm. His stomach. His thigh.
“You’re bleeding everywhere!”
“Calm yourself. You see here—” He opened the neck of his tunic for her, showing off a smattering of dark, wet smears over his chest. “—only scratches.”
“These are not just scratches!” Amber seized his tunic and pulled it out from his body, exposing an uneven line of dashes across his side where the monster had slapped him. There was very little blood, but there were several jagged nubs sticking out through his scaly skin: the splintered tips of the creature’s spines, broken off and buried in Meoraq’s flesh.
He had not resisted her grip, but stood silent and very, very tense as she stared in dismay at the many points protruding from his chest, hip, back and thigh, and it wasn’t until she raised her eyes to ask how bad it was that she noticed he was looking at her and not the wounds at all. His head tipped slowly to one side. He stared at her some more, this time with his spines forward and a frown on his face. “Are you all right?”
The question made no sense to her. None. The words danced around in her head, distracting and unintelligible, and flew away again. She looked back at his chest, because that still mattered, that still made sense, that was still everything.
“You’re bleeding,” she said. “There’s blood everywhere.”
His frown deepened. He looked at the gory hunk of meat in his hand, then tossed it into the grass next to the dead porcu-bear and sheathed his knife. He took her firmly by the chin and tipped her head this way and that, checked her hair, turned her around, and finally took her arm and started walking back to camp.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He grunted.
“I didn’t see it.”
“I know.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I want you to stop saying that.”
“It almost killed you.”
“I really want you to stop saying that.”
He brought her over to her pack and sat her down, checked her hair one more time, and walked away again. She sort of lost track of him for a while, as impossible as that should have been. He came in and out of her awareness and somewhere along the way, he must have gone back down to the gully because when she finally noticed the fire, there was a piece of Mr. President cooking on it.
Meoraq was on the other side of the fire, heating water in his stewing bag, watching her. “Are you here now?” he asked when their eyes met.
“You’ve still got blood all over you.”
“It isn’t serious.” He put a wet rock in the fire and a hot one in the bag. “You looked much, much worse than this the night you threw yourself at a tachuqi.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“No one argues with a Sheulek, human.”
“I had a few bruises. You’re covered in blood. It almost k—”
He cut his hand through the air and pointed it at her. “If you say that one more time, I’m going to muzzle you. No son of Uyane’s line has ever been killed by a kipwe.”
The porcu-bear sizzled enticingly while Amber’s stomach churned. Meoraq watched her and heated his water. The wind kept blowing and the world kept turning.
“Come here,” Meoraq said suddenly and stood up.
“Why?”
“Because I tell you to.”
She got up, not sure what to expect, and he began to unbuckle his harness. “It scarcely tapped me, Soft-Skin,” he grumbled. “I’m not hurt. But if it will bring you back from wherever you’ve gone
, tonight you will be my woman and tend to me.”
“How?”
He shrugged out of his tunic, tossed it and his harness together to the ground and gestured vaguely at himself. “Find a wound and clean it. I may have overlooked some quills. If you find one, take it out.”
Ignoring the arm he offered, Amber immediately moved around behind him to what she considered the worst of the injuries, or least, the one that had bled most profusely. High on his back, from just under the blade of his left shoulder to the deep valley of his spine, were at least two dozen stuttering dashes where the porcu-bear had slapped him. One of its quills remained, its broken stump as thick as her pinky-finger, stuck at the end of the bloody groove it had carved. She put her hand beside it, stupidly splayed so as to catch it if it tried to dart away.
She realized only after she’d done it that it was the first time she’d touched him, really touched him. Not his sleeve or even his wrist, but the real, solid, flesh-and-bone him. The feel of his scaly skin was thick and abrasive—much more so than it looked even—yet flexible over the swells of his muscular body, the way she imagined a crocodile might feel, or a dragon. And he was warm, the way she remembered from that day when he’d taken the knife away from her throat and pulled her roughly against his body. So warm.
“Now what?” she stammered.
Silence.
“Meoraq?” Hesitantly, she touched the tip of one finger to the rough edge of the protruding quill. “Do I…Do I just pull it out?”
His neck turned, not quite enough to let him actually look at her. “As opposed to what?” he asked. “Hammering it further in?”
She pinched at it nervously and let go again almost at once. It felt very solidly caught. What if it was lodged in his bone? Or his lung? What if she made it worse by pulling it out? What if he started bleeding and she couldn’t stop it?
“Take firm hold,” he prompted. “And pull in the direction it points. They aren’t barbed. It should come out cleanly.”
Amber pinched at the quill again and this time, tugged it free. She was horrified by its size: not quite as long as her thumb, which did not seem impressive until she saw it coming out of a living body. Meoraq’s blood rolled down its sides onto her thumb. Warm blood. She dropped the quill, fighting the urge to stomp on it too, and wiped her hand on her shirt half a dozen times, succeeding only in smearing the blood around.