by R. Lee Smith
“How does it look?” Meoraq asked. He didn’t sound very concerned. “Is it still flowing?”
Amber tore her eyes off the stain on her shirt and looked at his back. His scales, wedged aside when the quill had pierced him, had merely slipped back into place, sealing the wound almost bloodlessly, but the scrape preceding it, and all the other lesser ones, were so smeared by blood that it was impossible to tell if they were still leaking or not.
“A little. Should I…What do I use for a bandage?”
“Bandage? Stop trying to paint it out worse than it is! Just lick it.”
“What?”
“Lick it. To help it heal cleanly.”
“That may work with you lizard-people, but I’m pretty sure I remember hearing that human mouths are dirty. Here, wait.” She dashed over to her pack for her last Manifestor’s shirt. It took a little effort to get it going, but she soon tore one of the sleeves off and came running back to him.
“That was your good shirt,” he said, watching her dunk it in the hot water.
“It’s the only thing I have that I’m sure is clean,” she told him. “Turn around.”
He didn’t, just stood there, so she went behind him and dabbed at the blood on his back.
He didn’t move, didn’t speak.
“God, there’s another one.” Amber pulled a second quill, buried so deeply that it had snagged her wash-rag before she’d seen it, and immediately began searching for a third by sweeping her bare hand back and forth across his skin.
He stiffened so dramatically that it was like feeling a man turn to stone, just like a troll in those story-books she could so vaguely recall from her state-care days. When she’d been six. She’d been six and Nicci was being taken care of in the baby-wing upstairs and Mama was gone. She’d been six and she got three meals every day plus snacks and the sheets were always clean and the dishes were always done and life was story-books and juice boxes and the hill in the yard that she rolled down just one time, just the once, tumbling fast and screaming and laughing and free past all the trees and broken bricks and trash that could have hit her but didn’t until she lay there at the bottom on her back thinking life was good, life was great, and it could never get any better. And it hadn’t. She’d been six.
Amber burst out crying, puking out tears fast and hard and very loud for the few mortifying seconds it took to swallow them down again. She took her hand off Meoraq’s unmoving back and stumbled away, swiping at her face.
The wind blew over them, stirring the grass and pushing smoke in a hot curtain between them. Meoraq’s eyes on her were unblinking, hot as live coals. She couldn’t look at them, had to look at his dark blood on the sleeve of her last clean shirt instead.
“I’m so sorry.”
He did not reply.
“I should have seen it.”
Still no answer.
“Please…” don’t leave me. Amber bit down on that until her lips stopped shaking, but as soon as she unlocked her jaws, it found another way out as a trembling, “Please don’t be mad at me.”
He broke his gaze at last, turning his terrible eyes and whatever furious emotion was in them on the sky. “I’m not.”
“I didn’t see that thing or I never would have gotten so close.”
“I know.” He glanced at her, scowled, and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “A sleeping kipwe is well-hidden in the wildlands. I didn’t see it either. And you…”
She waited, twisting her wet, bloody sleeve between her fingers.
Meoraq hissed something under his breath impossible to catch. He rubbed at his brows again, then at his throat, then dropped his hand to his side and yanked a quill out. He glared it down, tossed it away in the grass, and looked at her again.
Without speaking, he unbuckled his sword-belt. It and the hooked sword he carried landed on the discarded heap of his tunic.
“What are you doing?” Amber asked, and hated the little whisper in which she asked it.
“I, nothing,” he said brusquely, sitting down in the grass to unfasten his boots. “You are tending my wounds. And you can bathe me while you’re about it.”
“Oh.”
“Such wounds,” he grumbled. “There will be songs sung of it one day, surely. Meoraq and the Kipwe.” He lay down and bucked his hips up (Amber felt a blush like a physical slap to both cheeks) to push his breeches down. He kicked them off indifferently, still muttering, and unbuckled his metal panty-panel.
Then he was naked. Completely naked. Wearing nothing but his scaly skin and his favorite knife on a cord around his neck, he stood up again and beckoned her to him.
“I’ve never…bathed anyone before,” she stammered.
He stared at her like he thought she was kidding. “Well,” he said finally. “I think as long as you don’t use mud, you’ll make a good effort of it.”
She hesitated forward a step and he turned around, raising his arms like a scarecrow, muttering under his breath about the absurdity of a land where women got paid to carry food but didn’t know how to bathe a man.
Amber dipped the rag in warm water and dabbed at his back, just under the scored place where the porcu-bear had scratched him. “What was it? The thing you killed. You called it something.”
“Kipwe. They come over the mountains every year to winter in the plains. We must be close.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Eh?”
“I just stood there.” Amber looked at the torn scales under her hand and then at the dark blood staining her rag. “I just stood there and watched you get hurt.”
“I’m beginning to take that personally,” Meoraq said, tilting his head to a dangerous angle.
“What do you call it when you get stabbed with hundreds of bony spikes?”
“Shameless exaggeration.”
“So, what? You’re going to stand there and tell me that thing wasn’t dangerous?”
“Anything can be dangerous under the right conditions.” Meoraq held up his hand to stop the bath and went to move the roasting kipwe off the hottest part of the coals. When he came back, it was to lie down in the grass at her feet. He gestured vaguely at himself and tucked his arms up behind his head, closing his eyes. “You seem to think yourself a coward for not leaping at the thing with your naked hands. Whereas I would think you a fool if you had.” He snorted, then added, “For all the rest of your life.”
Slowly, Amber knelt down beside him and began to clean around one of the fresh scratches on his arm. Her fingers made a rasping sound as she moved over his scales, a sound that made the gooseflesh pop out on her arms and her stomach want to shiver. “Does this hurt?” she blurted. “When I touch you?”
He was quiet for so long, she thought he’d dozed off, but then he said, without opening his eyes, “My flesh is not fragile. A Sheulek feels no pain even when he is broken. When he is not, he feels nothing.”
He had more quills stuck in him. She could see two of them now, tucked up under his armpit—just two nubs, scarcely discernible against his uneven skin. They had been lodged deeper than the last one and both took some work to worry loose, but Meoraq neither moved nor made a sound when she told him they were out. She looked at him, but he ignored her, lying splayed and by all appearances asleep, and after a while, she put her hands on him again and began to sweep them in small circles over his body, washing with one hand while the other quested ahead for more lost quills. The shush-shush sound this action produced summoned a tangle of images too dim to grasp, but she didn’t try to alter her rhythm. Her hands kept moving—her hands on his body—over his shoulders, over his chest, up along his throat and down again.
The quiet was crushing her, filled with nothing but that sound and the reality of his flesh under hers. How could she be thinking like this? Now, of all times! Looking at him stretched over the ground so silent and still was like seeing him dead and it could have happened, regardless of what he thought, it could have happened just like that and then she’d be out here alone,
which she deserved to be, because she just stood there and didn’t do anything.
A sob rose in her throat and she had to cough it out, but she swallowed the rest of them. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe herself calm the way she’d seen him do so often, but it didn’t work for her. When she opened her eyes again, all she could see was Meoraq, sleeping.
There was another spine between two of the long plates of his abdomen, so tightly lodged that she had to bend over (please stop thinking please stop not here not now not me) and bite it out. His blood tasted bitter on her tongue and had a smell curiously like cloves. She had to fight not to bend down again, fight not to press her lips against those scales that couldn’t feel her anyway, fight not to lick the way he’d licked at her neck once. She wanted him to put his arms around her. She wanted to be all right, dammit, and to know she was all right just once more, just once!
“You saved my life,” she heard her voice say. It broke on the last word. “Again. I keep…making you…save me.”
She stopped, gulping air to keep herself from openly crying, but he did not reply. His breathing was deep and even; his body beneath her hand, perfectly relaxed.
“Are you asleep?” she asked, now in the plaintive, scratchy, sing-song way that said tears were coming no matter how hard she tried to breathe them back in. “Meoraq?”
Nothing.
She patted his stomach timidly, found a quill and pulled it out, then looked at the bloody sliver pinched between her fingers and that was it. Her mouth cramped. Her eyes swam. Her head began to pound and her chest began to heave. She folded over, choking on breaths that wanted to be sobs, until she was curled against Meoraq’s warm side in a small, shaking ball. She had become an expert in the fine art of quiet crying; the only sounds she made beyond a hoarse huh-huh-haaaaah were intermittent mousy squeaks and they weren’t enough to wake Meoraq.
At length, the storm passed, but she huddled there for some time anyway. Her eyes were open, but unfocused, processing nothing beyond light and shadow, grass and sky. When she finally raised her head and looked, Meoraq was still asleep.
Amber picked the cloth out of the grass and washed her face. It was cold. She dunked it in the stewing pouch, now the bathing pouch, and tried again, but the wind took away the heat before her skin had time to really feel it. She dabbed at Meoraq’s bloody scales some more; he couldn’t feel her or the wind or the cold.
She finished cleaning him up, then made one last pass for quills, not so much because she expected to find them, but just so she could keep touching him. The tough old Amber who didn’t need anybody was dead and buried; the weepy, useless Amber who was left needed to be touched tonight, even if all he did was wake up and grab her wrist and tell her to keep her hands to herself.
But she found one last quill buried in his hip. His blood had blackened it to the same color as his scales and it had broken off right at the surface of his skin, making it easy to miss and hard to get out. She spent several minutes trying unsuccessfully to pinch it between her fingernails before she had to give up. “I think I need to borrow your knife,” she said.
No answer. His chest rose and fell slowly. His eyes stayed shut.
“Meoraq?” She patted hesitantly at his stomach.
He did not respond.
Amber hesitated, then closed her hand around the bone-hilt of his favorite knife and pulled it from the sheath slung across his chest. He did not move. The tip slid in under the quill, slicing easily through even his tough scales. She sucked in a whispered curse, but Meoraq never flinched. Fresh blood welled up and trickled out around the quill; she eyed it and him uncertainly, then cut the wound a little wider, just enough to get her fingernails on it. She had to twist at it a long time before she had enough to bite, but she did eventually get it out and he slept through the whole thing.
Amber dabbed unnecessarily at the wound, which had already sealed itself. His blood was hot on her fingers, but cooled fast, darkening to black in the open air. The scent of cloves wafted up. Meoraq slept.
She watched him. After a while, she put her hands on him again, stained now with his blood and hers, and ran them gently back and forth as she stared into his face. She wondered if she would be able to tell him from other lizardmen, if she ever met one. She wondered if he were handsome, for a lizard. She looked at him, at her hands on his stomach, and then at the smooth place between his thighs.
Which was not entirely smooth.
She waited to feel something, some flare of guilt or shock or something, but didn’t, not even when she saw her hand travel down to the slight swell of his groin. She cupped him there, rolled her palm in just one gentle pass, then lightly squeezed. ‘Now his eyes will be open,’ she thought, and looked, but they weren’t. He slept.
She should have felt relief. She didn’t. If anything, she felt worse. Small and scared and lonely and…and human. The last human. The one human, and a weak, ridiculous one at that.
‘I’m useless,’ she thought. ‘I am a scared, weak, little human. I am a scared, weak, little girl.’
Tears stung. Of course. Girls were crybabies. Had she ever really thought she was tough? She would give anything, anything, to be held tonight.
Amber’s fingers flexed, kneading at his groin as if it were a woman’s breast, and discerning as she did so the solid press of something inside him. She could fathom little of its shape beneath his thick skin, only that it bulged out into a hard knot at one end. She moved her hand beneath this, exploring its dimensions, and when she squeezed him there, the scales of his groin suddenly split and extruded the blunt head of an organ.
She opened her hand. It slipped back inside him, leaving the wet shine of some clear, viscous, clove-smelling oil to show her where the opening had been. She looked at his eyes. They were shut.
You could press the mid-pad of a cat’s paw, she thought, and squeeze out its claws just like that. But he couldn’t feel it, not any of it. She rubbed low underneath that half-felt lump, then kneaded at him boldly in the same rhythm as her spike-finding caresses earlier until, with a heave, the whole of it came thrusting out.
It looked only just enough like a penis that she was sure that was what it was. Only just, and no more. It was scaled, like the rest of him, but the scales there were so fine that she could see the veins throbbing just below its thin surface and did not dare to touch it. At the base, just where the edges of his slit wrapped around it, she could see part of the hard lump she’d probably been squeezing: a thick knob of flesh, swollen to a high shine and covered in dozens of small, blunt barbs, all of them oozing more of that spicy-scented oil. The shaft that sprouted from this dubious bulb was not smooth, particularly along the underside, where it formed pronounced ridges, the very sight of which made her shiver. At the head of his cock, a short, stiff nub curled slightly back toward his body, and even seeing it for the first time, some instinctive animal part of her knew just where it would strike inside her and how it would feel.
Her hand, firmly gripping at his groin, shook. She stared into the slick eye of Meoraq’s cock and saw herself, how it would be to shift her clothes and straddle him, right here. She’d put that alien cock inside her and maybe it would fill everything that was empty and not just the useless woman-part. It probably wouldn’t take long. He might sleep through the whole thing.
Her hand opened. His cock jutted stubbornly another few seconds, and then his body took it grudgingly back again. Amber wiped at the streak of oil left on his scales, then stood up, away from him. Eyes burning, she staggered over to his tent and crawled inside, unrolling her bedroll and pulling his blanket over her head. Something big howled, not far from camp. Never far.
She began to cry without noise, without moving, like Meoraq when he slept. She slipped her hand down her pants and into urgent moisture. ‘Fear-sweat,’ she thought, rubbing. She came. She cried. She slept.
* * *
Meoraq waited until Amber was quiet before he sat up. He pulled in his legs, rested his elbows
atop his knees, and stared at the tent. His flesh was not fragile; neither was it stone.
He was not fool enough to throw down his guard and sleep so soon, not with a dead kipwe in easy distance of his camp and hungry ghets prowling nearby, and he was genuinely surprised that Amber believed he would. She, who had seen death snap at her so many times, had seen it snap at him and it had made her…well, a woman. He had hoped giving her a domestic chore like bathing him would calm her down, but it hadn’t. Feigning sleep had seemed the polite thing to do, in part because it let her tears have some privacy, and in part because being bathed by a woman had a tendency to arouse him and those were Amber’s hands moving over his naked body and he was a horribly insensitive brunt who absolutely was not going to have sexual stirrings while Amber cried herself calm. So he’d shut his eyes and slowed his breath and meditated, trying to unhear her sobs with some success and unfeel her hands with somewhat less success, and he had just begun to wonder when he’d ought to ‘waken’ and maybe brew some tea when she put her hand boldly between his legs.
Of all the things she might do, that had never occurred to him. Not even in his darkest fantasies, on nights when Gann had given him a thousand burning thoughts, had he ever imagined she would put her hand on him. But she did and it was no accident. She wasn’t bathing him; she wasn’t searching for injury; she was cupping him just below his slit and gently kneading—so shocking an act that he could not at first move…and then did not want to. A Sheulek must be a master of his flesh in every situation, but her hand moved and moved and Sheul Himself could not have unfelt that. He felt himself extrude and still he did not open his eyes. He only breathed, waiting in a kind of paralytic fever for what came next.