by R. Lee Smith
The tense set of his shoulders relaxed slightly. His spines came up, just a little. “Yes. By far.”
“You ever think about what’s going on at home without you?”
“Sometimes.” He scratched at his snout. “I’m sure they’ve sent for my brother by now, but he might not attend until after the cold season. My father’s ministers can manage the House until I return and Nduman has…somewhere else he wants to be.”
“So if you go home—” The if was important. Home was a touchy subject for him. “—what’s the first thing you’re going to do?”
“Pray.”
“Well, duh. I meant after that.”
“Mm.” He leaned back to think about it. Slowly, his brooding scowl became a smile. “In the steward’s private chambers, there’s a full bath…You won’t know what that is, but it’s like a deep basin, twice the size of this tent, that can be filled with water and kept heated.”
“Imagine that.”
“My first meal will be held in the festival hall, or in the lord’s garden if the weather is fair. They’ll hang the lamps. My father’s ministers as well as the heads of the more important households will be there to give me their oaths, so I’ll be expected to provide entertainment. There will be music and singing and some sort of dramatics…I’ll have to find out whether or not Uyane has performers on staff, although I can’t really imagine that we don’t. I’ll have to attend as long as the guests do and they’ll be trying to impress me with their loyalty, which means we’ll all be there all night.” He thought about it, quietly laughed. “It’s going to be hell.”
“What will you eat?”
His smile became a smirk. “Calf’s head and marrow, probably.”
“Gross.”
“A feast for lords.”
“It’s still gross.”
“I’ll send down to the kitchen for something else later if you like.”
“What makes you think I’ll be there, lizardman?”
“You belong to me.”
“Think so, huh?” Her voice didn’t rise. Her smile wasn’t strained. They’d had this exchange often enough that she didn’t even consider it a fight anymore.
Amber rolled onto her back and brought out the shadow-bat again. His head turned to track its movements. On impulse, she made a tusked fist with a broad, cud-chewing thumb: a corroki.
“You want to know what I think is funny?” she asked, lumbering it across the tent wall. “You’ve never asked what it’s like where I’m from. Never once.”
He watched the corroki and said nothing.
“Don’t you think that’s odd?”
His spines flexed and flattened a few times.
She killed the shadow-corroki and sat up. “Really? You’re not even a little curious?”
Nothing from the lizardman. He kept staring at the wall as if it were still covered in shadow-puppets. His face had lost that easy smile and gone as grim as he could make it, which was pretty damned grim.
“Well,” she said, trying to pretend nothing was wrong, that this was still a cheerful way to pass a rainy night. “The sky is different. I mean, I’m from the city, so I never saw much but smog anyway, but it’s still different.”
Silence.
“How is it different, you ask? Well, to begin with, it’s—”
“No one speaks for a Sheulek.”
“I wouldn’t have to if you’d talk to me.”
He grunted, glaring at the wall above her head.
The rain pattered down.
Unexpectedly, almost angrily, he said, “Were there lights?”
“Sure, all the time.”
He gestured curtly upwards. “Were there lights in the sky at night?”
She started to answer, thinking in a confused way that he meant city lights, and realized all at once what he really meant. “Stars? Yeah, we had stars. But you couldn’t see them in the city even when the smog was down. The other lights were just too bright. I never saw them myself, except on TV. But they were there. Haven’t…” She hesitated, but he was finally looking at her, so she went ahead and asked. “Haven’t you ever seen the sky? The real sky, I mean.”
“The Age of the Ancients ended,” he said by way of answer. “For His wrath was great. And the blight covered every land, and poison bled into every cup, and madness into every heart, until the shadow of His wrath gloved all the world.”
Amber sighed and rubbed at her face. “That’s a direct quote, isn’t it? I asked you a question and you’re quoting your Bible at me.”
“The Age of the Warrior awakened, which the Prophet called the Hour of Gann’s Dominion, but there is nothing eternal, save His love and the promise of His forgiveness.”
“What a remarkably roundabout way of not answering me.”
“When God’s faith in His children is renewed at last, the Hour of Gann will end, and with it, the shadow of His wrath. We are in the last days, Soft-Skin.”
“Uh huh. And you know this because…?”
“Other men have seen the storms clearing.”
“But have you?”
“It was not my time to see.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
He watched her rub her face (with both hands now; some nights he drove her crazy). His own expression was a lot like hers had to be: resigned and frustrated and amused all together.
“I have never seen the sun,” he said, “but I have seen its light. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Be nice if I could hear it without listening to Gospel Hour for Lizardfolk first,” Amber muttered.
“I didn’t mark that.”
“I’m not repeating it.”
“Ah.” Meoraq’s head cocked. “Tell me about your human god.”
Amber looked up, startled, to meet red eyes glinting with challenge. “Why?”
He snorted, as if his point had been made. “I have often thought that you argue with me solely because you enjoy argument. Now I know it.”
“I do not!”
“I have been twelve years in God’s service. I have been His Sword in hundreds of trials and felt His hand upon my shoulder a thousand times more. Before that, I studied His laws and read His true Word and in every possible manner learned to see His mark where He left one. I have been my entire life in His sight, and even before, when He chose to have me born under the sign of the Blade. And yet you argue with me each time His name is invoked, when you know nothing.”
“What were you hoping for?” she asked. “What, if I tell you about my god and you tell me about yours, they’d pop up and fight it out?”
“Don’t be blasphemous.” He thought about it and snorted. “Sheul would win.”
“Your god could beat up my god. Seriously?”
“You have no confidence in him,” said Meoraq with a derisive flick of his spines, making sure she could hear his lower-case h. “Why should I?”
“I bet if I looked, I could find plenty of people on this planet who don’t care as much about your god as you do,” she countered. “Besides, it doesn’t matter how much you believe in something. Believing doesn’t make something true.”
Meoraq snorted again.
“Scott believes there’s a skyport at Xi’Matezh,” she snapped, and he frowned. “He got fifty other people to believe it with him. They all believe they’re going to hop on and fly home and, I don’t know, eat star farts and Hershey bars the whole way there. Nothing you ever said after twelve years as God’s foot made a damn bit of difference to any of them. That’s what belief does to people, Meoraq. Blind faith has got nothing to do with truth.”
He just sat there, frowning.
“I decided a long time ago that all religions are pretty much the same horseshit and I didn’t need it to feel better, so if you call that a win, you won.” She rolled over, yanking her blanket up around her ears.
The wind lapped at the side of the tent. Somewhere in the world, a lone corroki let out one of those moose-like bellows, but only one and it was very far
away. Inside, it was quiet.
Amber took it for a long, long time. Then she peeked back over her shoulder.
Meoraq was still sitting there, frowning exactly the same way.
She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Why do you want me to talk about God?”
“I want to see if you can.”
She sat all the way up. “Or if I’ll what? Burst into flames?”
His red eyes narrowed. “I want to see if you can talk about your god in the rational way you claim I do not, or if you’ll just call it shit and stop talking for the night.”
“Okay,” she said. “There is no God.”
“Ha!” He thrust his hand at her, grimacing hugely in lizardish triumph. “And you can’t do it!”
“You can’t get more rational than that!”
“I asked you to tell me about your god,” he shot back. “And you gave me your opinion. And if that’s all you can do, I fail to see how that is so much more sensible than what you call my ‘blind’ faith.”
He had a point. Scaly son of a bitch.
“I can’t quote the Bible at you,” she said finally. “But I could maybe tell a story.”
“Do so.”
“Not a true story, just the sort of thing people say to make a point.”
“I will judge whether it is true or not,” he declared.
“Yeah, right.” She took another moment to collect her thoughts and began, “So…There once was a very religious man who considered himself very devoted to God and faithful and righteous and all that.”
“All that nonsense, you mean,” Meoraq muttered.
“You want to tell the story?”
He grunted and gestured for her to continue.
“One day, it began to storm really hard and someone came to this man’s house and warned him to leave because it was going to flood. But the man refused to leave his home, saying he had served God faithfully and felt certain God would protect him now. Kind of like saying that he walked in God’s sight so storms don’t matter,” she added.
“Is that part of the story?” asked Meoraq. “Or is it just your opinion?”
“It rained and rained and suddenly the river overflowed and the whole valley flooded, including this man’s yard. So he was inside praying and watching his basement fill up with water when another man came by in a boat and shouted for the man to come with him to high ground. But the man refused, saying God would save him.”
Meoraq snorted disdainfully, but that was all.
“And it rained and rained and finally the man was forced to climb up on his roof. But he wasn’t there long before a third man came by in a helicopter and shouted for him to climb aboard and he’d take him to the rescue station. But the man refused, saying he had chosen the righteous path all his life and now God would surely save him. And it rained and rained and the water came up over the roof and washed the man into the raging floodwaters. He knew he was going to die and with his last breath, he cried out to God, saying, ‘All these years I have served you! Why did you do nothing to save me?’ And God said—”
For the first time, the sneer left Meoraq’s face. “He spoke?”
“Yeah, in the story. Anyway, God said, ‘What do you mean I did nothing? I sent a warning, a boat and a helicopter! Why didn’t you listen?”
Meoraq leaned back, frowning.
“That’s it,” said Amber. “That’s the whole story. It isn’t true.”
“Perhaps not,” he said slowly. “But I will not be certain until I have meditated on its meaning.”
“Oh for…I can tell you right now that it never happened. Isn’t that enough?”
He focused sharply in on her, his spines flaring forward in surprise. “Just because a man saw the story in his mind instead of on the street doesn’t necessarily make it less true.”
“Um…yes, it does. In fact, seeing a story in your head instead of in real life makes it entirely less true. In further fact,” she said, trying to match his expression of severe gravity and failing with a short laugh, “it makes it a bald-faced lie.”
“If a blind man tells you the sky is grey, is it less true because he can’t see it for himself? And if someone told him the sky was some other color, some ridiculous color…”
“Blue,” Amber suggested dryly.
He pointed at her. “Blue,” he agreed. “And he tells you it is grey, is it still the lie he believes it to be? Truth is not always what someone says, Soft-Skin. Truth is what something is, what it means.”
“You can make a story mean anything, Meoraq. But that’s the thing with you religious people, isn’t it? God is this glorious intangibility, so no proof becomes proof just by how you spin it.”
His head tipped by degrees, like the ticking hand of a stopwatch, until it was all the way in humor and he could openly laugh at her. At her. Honestly. “You are going to have to tell me,” he said in that laughing way, as he swung out one arm to put the whole world on display for her, “what you see that constitutes no proof of God.”
She started to answer, but then just sighed. “I could point out that you’ve just made my case for me, but I doubt you’d see it that way. Why don’t we just agree to respect each other’s crazy ideas out loud, mock each other in private, and go to sleep?”
“That would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”
“Little white lies make the world go ‘round, Meoraq.”
“Your world, perhaps. Mine spins by its weight and magnetism, they tell me.”
“How shockingly scientific of you. I thought you’d tell me God spun it Himself.”
“Who do you think gave the world weight? Comfort yourself with your lack of faith if it pleases you,” he added, putting one hand on the floor of the tent and bending in his attitude of prayer, still smiling. “God does not require your permission to exist.”
“I don’t require His, either,” she countered, tucking herself in under the blanket. “Good night, lizardman.”
“Rest easy, Soft-Skin.” Meoraq’s mouth gaped in a brief grimace of fine-edged humor. “We are in His sight.”
She rolled her eyes, then closed them.
* * *
In the midst of that night, Meoraq spoke to God.
Amber’s tale of the human god had been, like the wind upon the prairie, an ever-present whisper in his mind throughout his meditations. It seemed to him that there was truth within it, truth far greater than the message it carried plain upon its face. He spoke it to himself as Amber slept, turning human speech into his own as much as words like helicopter allowed, but changing tongues did not remake the tale nor clarify the questioning itch that had lodged itself in his brain. So he meditated while Amber slept beside him and the wind blew endlessly across the empty plains.
He had never fallen asleep during meditations before. Therefore, he surely did not do so now.
The thought-space he inhabited did change, though, becoming a dreaming place he recognized as the antechamber of the temple of Xi’Tothax. As before, he stood before the holy forge, but the forge was lit now, melting the air around it with its heat and power, and the man who stood before him with the thigh-bone of Rasozul in his hands was not Exarch Ylsathoc. He kept his face deep in the shadows of his cowl.
“Your father is dead,” this man told him. “The House of Uyane stands without a lord. Will you come now to take up the stewardship of your bloodline?”
Meoraq could not speak, save for the words he had already spoken. They left his mouth in the way of dreams, separate of his will and emotion. “I have loyalty to more than one father. I cannot make this decision without knowing the will of Sheul.”
Eyes gleamed in the depths of the exarch’s hood, lit with accusation. He looked into Meoraq’s soul and saw the truth: not pious supplication before God’s will, but an unwillingness to be fettered to one woman, and worse, the sort of meek, milk-veined woman who would be no more than a breeding vessel with legs for all the sons he would be expected to sire and all the daughters he must raise in meek, milk-vein
ed imitation of their mother.
He could not have said this to Ylsathoc and he could not say it now to a stranger. Ashamed, Meoraq turned away, from the exarch and his oaths of office, from his own father’s bone, and in that small movement somehow left the temple and arrived in the plains on a bright morning. He could see the humans walking away from him. He could see Amber lying at his feet, her face white and still.
Now he could speak, feel, act. He ran after the humans and caught furiously at Scott, shouting, “Damn you for a coward and a murderer! How can you leave her?”
But the man who turned to face him, human though He appeared to be, was not Scott. Meoraq stumbled back. He had never known fear, true fear, the kind that froze the fire in one’s veins. Therefore, he did not know it now. He was uncertain.
“Fathers, take caution of the women you wive, for they will raise the daughters who wear your name,” said the man wearing Scott’s form. He spoke in dumaqi, quoting the first line of the Admonition of Womanly Virtues, which was so unexpected that Meoraq backed away again. “See that every woman of your household is brought forth as a proper woman in the sight of Sheul, Father of us all. A woman wears modesty around her neck and keeps low her eyes when her man speaks. A woman’s trust lies below her man’s boot, as her open hand also, to take in with graciousness all that he places before her. In all ways does she acknowledge him as steward over her and nursing no bitterness in her throat to be brought forth as slight and slander. A woman keeps herself covered and away from all eyes, save when her man alone has will of her, and receives him gladly at his every command. A woman speaks not against her man’s ear, nor walks before him, nor shows her eyes, but in three things forever seeks: To obey his word, to lessen his burden, and above all, to bear his sons.”
Nicci, wet-eyed at Scott’s side, expressionlessly opened her mouth and emitted a ghastly mewling cry, like a chorus of hundreds of faceless women all at once.
Meoraq did not step back this time; he leapt back. And when he looked at Scott again, Lord Saluuk of Tothax stood in his place. He bent, pulling Amber up from the ground, which became the very edge of the high wall of the city in a moment. “If she will not behave herself as a proper woman,” he spat, “better she be dead.”