by R. Lee Smith
‘It’s not a sin,’ he’d reasoned, if one could call that shiver-white throb of heat in his brain a reasoning thought. ‘It’s only a sin if I do it. There’s nothing in the Word that says she can’t do it for me.’
So he’d waited, but she hadn’t. He could hear her breathing above him, feel the tremble in her hand, and then, by all the names of God and Gann, she took her hand away. She’d left him there, stabbing foolishly out into nothing, and put herself to bed and the only thing that had stopped him from leaping on her like a raging beast had been the sound of her soft tears. That, and the thin hope that she might come back if he only lay still enough long enough.
But no. She fell asleep. She’d put her hand on him and brought out his cock and breathed on it and gone to sleep.
And she’d left his father’s knife uncovered in the dirt. Meoraq glared at it, but did not recover it, much as it infuriated him to see it neglected there. She might wake and remember it, and if so, she must see only what she had left behind her. A naked blade. A sleeping man. Both primed to enter flesh and abandoned.
He lay back down and shut his eyes, frustration like a forge in his belly.
Perhaps she didn’t know, he thought suddenly. Perhaps she did not recognize his cock because it was not limp and loose and generally disgusting. He supposed that humans did not mate as dumaqs, did not penetrate at all but only…what? By all the movement he had glimpsed on past encounters, he knew they had to be mashing themselves together somehow, but as horrible as that image was, Amber surely would think it just as wrong to have a dumaqi member stabbed into her.
And yet…
He’d seen her naked many times during the terrible days of her illness and so he couldn’t help but notice the slit at her loins. It meant nothing to him at the time, which was a better testament to his character than it was now, when he could think of nothing else. Regardless of how their males were formed, he knew that human females were similar to normal women, at least on the surface. He may not be able to sheathe himself entirely, but there was something and he could pierce it.
In a burst of determination, Meoraq flipped onto his feet and took two long strides toward the tent. He was done. He’d been patient. He’d tolerated every unintended offense and quite a few intended ones and, by Sheul, he was ready to be the man that proved she was a woman! If it meant getting creative about the method, so be it, Amber’s hand had put him in a damned creative mood, but he was waking her up right now!
The wind turned abruptly, stirring the grass with whispers in which Meoraq heard the ghost of his father’s voice: A Sheulek is the master of his clay, always.
Meoraq cursed silently, blasting his own thought-space with profanities he never would have dared to utter to the true ghost of his father. A Sheulek was a master of his emotions as well, but he would just have to work on that.
He went back to the fire and lay down beside his disgraced knife. He glared at the tent where the human slept on, oblivious to him. He closed his eyes, measured out his breath—
She’d put her damned hand right on him.
—and began to pray.
4
In another few days, Meoraq saw the mountains. They were just a smudge on the horizon now, a broken blue line he could see only from the highest point of one of the many steep hills they had to climb, but they were in sight. The borders of holy Gedai, birthplace of the Prophet and of the Word, a land Meoraq had heard of all his life but never expected to see, and now the mountains were before him. They had ceased to be a part of the myth of Xi’Matezh and had instead become inevitable.
He pointed them out to Amber with a broad smile, but regretted it immediately when she dropped her pack and lunged ahead. “Where are they?” she gasped, searching the empty wilds. “I don’t…I don’t see them.”
He could see it in her soft face, how she tried to be a little happy when he told her about the mountains, but she didn’t care. He had meant to show her how much closer they were to God’s true House, but without intending to, he had instead shown her Scott’s people, her people, and then removed them all over again. She said it didn’t matter. She kept walking. And she cried that night, when she thought he couldn’t hear her.
He wanted to give her back her people, as much as he hated the thought of having them back. He wanted to prove they were all dead so her grief would finally end, but he couldn’t do it without killing her blood-kin, her damned Nicci. He wanted Amber, the whole Amber, and he wanted her to want him the way she thought she wanted the cowardly, treacherous cattle who had left her in the grass to die. He wanted all these things, all at the same time, and the conflict left him in such a constant state of resentment and self-disgust and sympathy that he could hardly speak to her at all.
Sheul would make His will known in time. Meoraq believed that, even if Amber didn’t. Sheul would make His will known and until then, they walked.
The hills grew steeper, more compact and more orderly. Meoraq knew what that meant and he could have led Amber around easily enough—she had a tendency to fall into her own mind when she tired and she tired very easily these days—but he didn’t. Scott would have come this way, walking between the hills where it was relatively flat, as slopes gradually gave way to rubble and the rubble to ruins.
“I knew it,” said Amber behind him.
He grunted, his eyes moving restlessly from tower to archway to raised loop of road—all destroyed, all decayed, all fallen. Little remained that the land had not at least begun to swallow, and Meoraq could see several structures that would not be standing at all but for the years of dead thorns enwrapping them. No sane and reasonable man would ever get closer to those cracked towers than Meoraq stood now.
“Do you think they went in?” Amber asked.
“Yes,” said Meoraq. They were poor ruins, even as ruins could be reckoned, but Scott would have insisted on walking through them if he’d seen them.
And Meoraq thought he’d probably seen them. There was little left of the humans’ trail these past few days, but there was enough yet to catch a trained eye. Boot prints amid the animal tracks in the frozen mud at an icy stream. A tattered jacket, blown into a thorn break after its owner had no more use for it. The ash-heaps of their fires wherever they’d stopped to camp. No, they weren’t close, but the last sure sign of their passing had been only a quarter-span back, so they had seen these ruins.
Meoraq shrugged off his pack and handed it to Amber. “I’ll go. You rest.”
There wasn’t even time to take one step before his pack struck his back and her challenging, “You rest! I’m fine!” rang out.
He sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges, reminding himself that he had begged for her restoration. “Must we do this every day?”
“Stop saying that like I’m the one doing it.”
“Put out your hand.”
“No! You’ll tie me up!”
“I’m tempted,” he admitted, “but no. Never again. Now put it out, Soft-Skin.”
She glared at him, her mouthparts pressed together into a hard, pale line, and then suddenly thrust out her arm like a spear.
He waited, watching her hand tremble until it became too heavy to hold and she dropped it back to her side. “I’ll go,” he said, turning around. “You rest.”
“Jerk.”
“Pest.”
“Be careful, then.”
“And you.”
He went alone into the ruins with his kzung in his hand, but he knew already that they were empty. No lights burned in these broken windows; no voices called out from the speaking-boxes. Scott had surely stopped to indulge his fascination with the machines that dwelled here and perhaps to shelter out some little fall of rain, but the ruins were no place to sustain a man. Eventually, Scott would want a fire, clean water, a chance at hunting. Meoraq would find nothing here worth stopping for and he knew it, but he would find whatever there was and he would make some report of it to Amber, easing her mind just enough to let her sleep tonight, and tha
t alone made this inconvenience tolerable to him.
Meoraq’s eye wandered at that thought, drifting up over the broken walls where rooftops should be to look at the sky. High clouds, thin cover, fairly pale. He’d hoped for rain. He shouldn’t, as far as travel was concerned, but nights that it rained were the only nights Amber joined him in his tent. There was enough room for both their beds (with half an arm’s length between them, unless Meoraq arranged his bedroll just right, which he was very careful to do every night, just in case), and his blanket was wide enough to share, but she was being stubborn. Each night that the rains forced her inside, she’d perch on the very edge of her mat, wrapped in her silvery sheet, curled up small until sleep loosened her limbs. If she dreamed badly, she’d move around on her mat until some part of her found some part of him, and then the rest of her would creep in and cling.
So far, Amber’s hands (her freezing hands) had not slipped down over his belly to knead at him again, but they might. He told himself he had not decided how to handle it when that happened, but on rainy nights, Meoraq had taken to sleeping naked.
But he didn’t think it would rain tonight. He still had perhaps three hours of daylight left, and the weather could do almost anything in three hours’ time, but he thought tonight Amber would be out on her mat by the fire, stubbornly trying to hold a watch even though he’d told her not to bother anymore. They were in Sheul’s sight, just as he had been during all the years he had camped in the wildlands alone, and must trust to His watch. She did not agree.
Three hours until dark…
He supposed he could waste enough time here that they would have to camp nearby (not within the ruins, he would not allow that even for Amber’s ease of mind), but he didn’t see the need. Amber might not want to go, but if he phrased it right—We should stop here so that you can have a half-day’s rest—he was confident that she’d march herself on. They could put another span behind them in that time, even if she had to stop again.
So then. Meoraq returned his beast-killing blade to his belt and, just to be able to say honestly that he’d done all possible, cupped his hands around the end of his snout and bellowed Scott’s name. The call bounced away down the streets, unheard. Meoraq listened, waited, watched a machine wheeze out of one alley and into another, then cupped his snout and hollered again: “Humans! Come!”
A thin, metallic finger tapped at his leg. A machine coughed out some unintelligible inquiry, prying at its front panel.
“Get away,” Meoraq told it absently, and it coughed again and moved on. “Humans! Give cry if you hear me! It is Uyane!”
Still nothing. Meoraq allowed himself a smile, but only a short one. He turned around and headed back to Amber, his eyes sweeping from wall to broken wall only because that was how he’d been trained when traveling in the wildlands. He saw nothing, just stone and metal husks digesting in the open air. Time and raiders had picked the place over down to its rusted old bones, leaving nothing but wreckage and decaying relics for the machines to tend until their last spark of perverse life was spent and they died.
Or were killed.
Meoraq stopped walking and looked back over his shoulder at the dead machine that had inspired the last piece of this rambling (and somewhat smug) line of thought. A machine. A bot, as Amber would call it. It stood just inside a rather small, plain structure, whose only notable feature was that its roof had only partly fallen in. Through the broken wall, Meoraq could see it lying like a protective shield over what few furnishings had survived the years of exposure and salvage. Just a big, empty room and a dead machine…which had been smashed to death by a piece of stone broken off the wall. He had seen a machine killed that way once before.
Meoraq put his hand on the hilt of his kzung again, but didn’t unclip it from his belt. Amber was waiting. He could go. One dead machine meant nothing worth investigating further and there were only three hours, maybe less, before nightfall.
“Fuck,” said Meoraq. He climbed through the wall.
Past the worst of the debris, beneath the overhang of the surviving section of roof, he saw the char of their fire. The little that remained told him they’d burnt their sleds, and while Eric had built one of them, the other Meoraq considered his even after Scott stole it, and he was annoyed.
“Humans!” he called. “Come out, if you hear me! Uyane Meoraq stands before you! Come!”
Silence. The wind outside gusted, making a moaning sound as it blew through open windows and over roofless towers. Here, nothing stirred.
Two sleds could not have burned long, but the humans had stayed by their fire long after it had gone out. When they’d moved on, some had walked through the ashes. Smudgy bootprints led Meoraq out of this dubious shelter into an adjoining room, one with a window. There, the tracks suggested the humans had gathered, shifting aimlessly as humans did when Scott was speaking.
Meoraq frowned, looking through the window to try and see what Scott had seen, what Scott had wanted everyone to see.
He wished Amber were here. She’d see whatever it was at once, he was sure. All Meoraq saw was the wreckage of a city he shouldn’t even be in.
Had it been a machine? Decaying vehicles and other unwieldy devices littered the streets and infested the innards of the broken buildings. Any one of them might have inspired Scott to some new sermon, but he thought not. Maybe if one of them were working, but not these. Even the living machines, the bots, were so decrepit that they could only undermine Scott’s effort to convince them of a viable flying ship in Xi’Matezh. So what, then? What else was there?
Roads, walls, scrap, sky. He couldn’t even see the mountains from here because the window faced north. No, it was nothing but ruin as far as he could see, cut into slices by cross-streets, fallen poles, a canal, until the plains took it all away. Nothing.
And yet, when Scott had led his people onward, he had chosen to lead them out through this broken window.
Meoraq followed, his spines flat to his skull. The tracks quickly faded and were lost. He had to stop and search every alleyway, every open door and broken window, every small space a human might have squeezed through, but found no sign of them.
He ended at the canal, which was not a true canal after all, but some sort of stormway, collecting the rain as it ran off the roads and whisking it away through a tunnel. Stormways like these were used in modern cities to irrigate farmland or water cattle while reducing damage caused by seasonal floods. Perhaps the Ancients used them the same way. In any case, there were some machines alive to tend them, because the stormway had not filled in with the unavoidable detritus that even abandoned cities excreted in hard rains. There were some cracks in the wall, and the grate that had discouraged foolhardy children of the Ancients from exploring the tunnels had fallen, but otherwise, it seemed well-kept. The canal was quite wide and easily twice Meoraq’s height in depth, but there was only a little water in the bottom, standing clear on top of a thick layer of greenish-black sediment.
Clear enough for Scott to want to fill his stolen flasks here? Meoraq hunkered down on the edge of the canal and thought about that, trying to be objective.
He couldn’t see it. The first person who got sick drinking this piss would end Scott’s power over the rest of them.
Meoraq straightened up, scanning the ruins on the far side of the stormway, but he didn’t see anything and he saw no reason to keep looking. The slope of the canal’s sides were shallow enough that he’d ought to be able to simply walk across, but he hated to get his boots mucky and he could just imagine what that sediment smelled like when it was kicked up. Yes, Scott had been here, but even he’d had the sense to move on.
Meoraq turned away from the canal…and slowly turned back.
The storm grate lay in the bottom of the canal’s eastern end, staining the sludge around it rust-orange. The tunnel’s mouth yawned above it at roughly knee-height, tall enough for a machine to walk comfortably within if maintenance were called for. Or a man. Or many men, walking in a l
ine.
His eyes shifted from the perfect black of the tunnel’s mouth to the sloping wall of the canal. The stormways were being maintained, but they weren’t scrubbed down often enough to prevent a thin veneer of scum from forming where water regularly flowed. A greenish-brown film skinned the lower half of both walls…but it had been scraped down on this side. Not cleanly, as a machine would do, but in clumsy stripes. Like skidding feet. Like boots, to be specific.
Meoraq walked along the edge of the stormway until he stood right above that scraped place. He hunkered down, peering into the tunnel as far as he could see. His arm could have reached further than his eyes, but his eyes reached far enough to show him all the scum-black tracks left by their human boots. All aimed inward.
“I am not going in there,” said Meoraq.
No one answered him.
“I say no. I say, in fact, fuck the fist of that very idea. I would not follow the Prophet himself into that hole and I for damned sure will not follow S’kot.”
Still no answer.
So. Decided, Meoraq stood and marched back up the narrow street, past the ruined building where Scott and his people had sheltered, and out into the broad travel lanes of this city. There he stopped and stood for some time, his head bent, meditating.
His prayers ended with a muttered curse. Then he raised his head and loudly said, “I require assistance.”
Three machines nosed out of their dens and crawled toward him. They all spoke, but only one of them was capable of making itself understood. “How may I direct you?” it croaked, opening its chest to display a glowing window where tiny images appeared in a neat row. “Error. Directory assistance not found. Error. Public communications channel not found. Error. Community calendar schedule not found. Error—”
“Come with me,” Meoraq said curtly. His meditations had left him with the strong conviction that mastery was more than the command of a moment’s need, but he knew he stood upon the very edge of breaking the Second Law. For now, Sheul was with him, but if he found Scott in that tunnel, he was going to kill him there.