by R. Lee Smith
Meoraq snarled and lunged forward, but again, between one running step and another, he was suddenly in Master Tsazr’s room at Tilev. He staggered to a stop, then checked his body to see if he had become a brunt, but the hands he held before him were a man’s hands and the chest he saw below his chin was the scarred playing field of a Sheulek. He looked up again just in time to meet Master Tsazr’s hand slapping hard against his snout.
“I expected better of you,” he heard as he lay dazed on the floor. Master Tsazr’s mud-caked boots tromped around him and away to the window-ledge. “I knew for eighteen years that the doors of Xi’Matezh would open for me. For eighteen years, I prayed for a reason worthy enough to let me go. But you, ha! You make a holy pilgrimage just to avoid your responsibilities at home!”
Meoraq braced his hands on the floor and slowly pushed himself up. He kept his throbbing head bent, feeling his former master’s stare like coals on his scales.
“You stood here in this room and pretended to listen when I told you that being Sheulek meant more than seeing the world and fucking a different woman in every city.” Tsazr snorted contemptuously. “And here you are. Walking all the way to the end of the world and back so you can have just a little more time to do it.”
“No,” said Meoraq, but he could not raise his eyes.
“Lies! Go on then! Ask! If I choose to answer only one question, what will you make it? What have you been rehearsing for the day when you stand in the temple at the Heart of Gann? What will you ask when you have God’s own ear? Say it!”
He would have given every coin he had in the world to be the master of his own mouth in that moment, but the vision took his tongue and the words came out: “If I am to be the steward of my bloodline, where is the woman worthy to be bound to me? Set her down before me, O Father, or let it be Your will that I sire my sons as Sheulek.”
Tsazr let a full silence fall before he breathed out his sneering hiss. “And you are such a prize.”
Whatever had hold of him let go. Meoraq shoved himself to his feet. “It wasn’t supposed to sound like that!”
“How was it meant to sound? ‘O great Father, if You want the benefit of my superior seed, I command You to provide me a woman no more than twenty-two years in age, with black eyes and all her teeth, very pretty, who can cook, sing, dance, write poetry, and stay virgin-tight for all her life, or You can settle for those I sire by conquest’? How dare you make demands of Sheul! He is not some servant in your House, Uyane, you are a servant in His!”
“I can have any woman I want!” Meoraq shouted. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know there will be sixty of them waiting at my door when I get home? And every one of them, the same fucking woman!”
Tsazr’s eyes sparked. He leaned back, his arms folding under his sabks.
“I don’t want a pretty, black-eyed, cooking, singing, dancing, simpering, mewling, whining, empty-headed idiot!” he finished, now in full throat-throbbing rage. “Give the fucking House to Nduman! Give it to Salkith! I would rather die a Sheulek tomorrow than live fifty years with a wife like that!”
“A wife like what?” asked a new voice, one that severed his fury as easily as the stroke of a sword severs flesh.
In turning, Tsazr’s room at Tilev became his father’s House at Xeqor, and there stood Rasozul, beyond his prime but still powerful, showing his son only his broad, scarred back as he donned his armor.
Meoraq betrayed himself with a step backwards. “Father?”
The old warrior glanced around. “Are you ashamed of me?” he asked, in that same calm, reverberant voice Meoraq remembered of his father.
He recoiled, stricken to the very heart of him. “No! Never!”
“No? Not even in the disgrace of my retirement? Did I not accept the defeat of a woman bound to my bloodline? Is this not the fate that drove you out into the wildlands?”
Meoraq felt his soul wither. He knelt, palms open upon the tiles, but no hand came to him in a forgiving clasp. His father continued to gird himself—endless armored plates and sharpened edges went on, only to vanish into his skin, leaving nothing but another scar and a place to put another piece of armor, another weapon.
“Your mother was a responsibility of the office I accepted when I came to this House as its steward,” said Rasozul. “I did not want her. I chose her wristlet from a barrel of such trinkets and wed the woman to whom it belonged, so little did the matter mean to me. But when her breeding years were done and I had my sons by her, I did not turn her away. I did not begin nor end any day that I passed within these walls without sharing at least a warm drink and a private word in her company. My fires burned for her alone, all our years together. I gave her memory the only tears I shed in my life. This is the fate you despise, to have earned the true affection of a good and faithful woman. This was the woman you despised, who never heard a word from her eldest son that was not spoken with contempt. You were ashamed of her, my son. And it made me ashamed of you.”
Meoraq bent his back yet further, bent until his faithless head touched the floor, but no touch of forgiveness came and no more words. When he dared at last to look up, he was in his father’s House no longer.
He was nowhere at all.
But he was not alone.
Before him, his neck bent and palm to Gann, Meoraq saw Meoraq.
“No more of this, I beg you,” he said hoarsely.
The other Meoraq meditated and did not reply.
He staggered to his feet and saw blackness in all directions, devoid of life or light. His copy remained motionless, tranquil, as Meoraq ran first one way and another, exhausting his body only to find himself exactly where he had first stood. At last, he swung to face himself, shouting, “What do you want of me?”
“What,” the other Meoraq mused, “do you want of me?”
“Why am I here?”
“Why did you come?”
“Why do you torment me?”
“Why do you perceive it as torment?”
Meoraq managed not to swear, but could not stop the snarl. He stalked in a futile circle that led nowhere and turned back to find himself now standing and gazing at him with alien eyes, just waiting.
“I do not know what you want me to do,” Meoraq said at last. The words tore at him, a confession of the worst kind of failure.
“I want you to know what to do,” his copy replied, in the very faintest tones of exasperation. “How hard does it have to rain?”
Meoraq drew back, baffled.
His copy waited.
“I know who You are,” said Meoraq, and much as he fought to be master of himself, his voice shook.
His copy’s spines flexed in an amused fashion. Otherwise, he did not respond.
Meoraq gathered his nerve and took a step forward. “Why did You set the humans in my path? Was I meant to take them to Xi’Matezh? What else could I have done with them?”
“I sent you a warning,” his copy replied.
“What warning? I saw none!”
No reply. His copy stared him down.
“Why did You strike the woman ill and allow her people to abandon her? Where are they now? Is it Your will that I find them again?”
“And a boat.”
“A what?”
“And a helicopter.”
“What are You telling me?” Meoraq cried out in frustration.
His copy threw out his arms and cried back, “Why don’t you listen?”
And then the blackness shattered and Meoraq lay in his tent. After several stunned, stabilizing breaths, he found his lamp in the dark and struck a light. He could see Amber sleeping, curled small under her thin wrap, and at once the vision (no dream; a Sheulek does not fall asleep during meditation) coursed through his veins in a second, fiery pulse, growing hotter as he stared at her.
He knew. All at once, he knew.
Sheul’s fires burned in his belly, but that was nothing to the fire burning in his mind, taking away all thought and all but o
ne: He had begun this journey to ask Sheul to guide him to a worthy woman. Well, here she was and if she did not have a dumaq woman’s looks, neither did she have one’s mewling mannerisms. She was not the woman he’d expected, but she was a good woman and God Himself had given her to him.
The light from the lamp had finally succeeded in rousing her from her sleep. Amber rolled toward him, holding up one hand to shade her blinking eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it morning?”
“No.”
She got her elbows under her and pushed herself halfway up. “What do you want?” she asked crossly.
He knew what he wanted. The only question remaining was how to go about it and in the waking heat of his vision, there was only one answer. He drew his ancestral knife and showed it to her. “This is the knife of my fathers, the blade of conquest.”
She looked at it and then at him.
He waited.
So did she.
“This is the knife of my fathers,” he said again, a touch testily. “This is the blade of conquest.”
“Uh huh, I heard. And this is my mother’s honey-blonde hair,” she said, pointing at her head. “What do you want, lizardman?”
Her hair? He’d been expecting her wristlet, as dumaq women were themselves wont to offer. The intimacy of her choice briefly staggered him. He shook that off too, then gathered up a fistful of her mane as she began her formal protests, and cut it off. “You are permitted to fight,” he told her, but she was already slapping at him, so their mating rituals must not be too dissimilar.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Meoraq stabbed the blade deep into the ground, still piercing the hair—to hell with the tent; he could get another tent—and swept back the blanket. His belly was hot and every nerve felt new and alive in a way he had never known. He had never been so aware of his own body or of a woman’s. And she was still struggling, still pretending not to understand, but when he slipped his hand through her tangled hair and behind her head, her shouting, swearing protests stopped and she grew very quiet as he leaned close to scrape his chin along her throat, filling his senses with the fullness of her scent.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
His throat was too tight to answer, but hers was soft. He nuzzled his way up to the underside of her jaw and scraped his chin slowly down again, breathing her in. The heat in his belly had become pain, a second pulse like a hammer from within. His hand dropped, feeling along the front of her shirt and plucking once at the alien fastens he found there. “Take this off,” he murmured. “I don’t want to rip it.”
Obedience was not immediate—it never was with Amber—but at last he felt her shift and heard the rustle of fabric as she opened her clothing. At once he put his bare hand between her breasts and, as he tasted his way from her throat to her naked shoulder, he moved that hand slowly up and down, up and down, a little further on each gentle stroke, until he had slipped beneath the loose waist of her breeches.
She grabbed at his wrist, her skin smacking audibly against his scales. The next sound he heard was the soft thump of her back hitting her bedroll and she was flat beneath him and he was above her and his hand was there, stroking hard up and down through the small patch of coarse hair that grew above her opening. Her shoulder was soft and warm and tasted of smoke and rain and Amber as he gently bit, not piercing, not yet, but wanting to, needing to. Was she fighting again? It was hard to tell. One of her hands was on his chest, pushing; the other, at his back with her blunt claws prying at his scales. When he looked at her, her eyes were shut and her neck irresistibly arched, so he bit it and then scraped his chin hard where he had bitten, until he could taste her in every breath.
He didn’t want to wait anymore and neither did she. The edges of her slit were oddly plump and human-soft, but already open to his lightest touch; she was very aroused. Careful exploration with his fingers (she clutched at his wrist again, but did not move him and did not really appear to be trying) proved she was deep and pliant and that was all he needed to know. He burrowed his free arm beneath her, pulling her up off the mat, and yanked her breeches down until they tangled with her boots. He unfastened his loin-plate eagerly and then, with the last of his reason, he paused and leaned back so that she could see him.
His cock had flexed free the instant it had liberty to do so and now stood primed and ready before him. Amber froze, as he had suspected she might, to stare at it. Her expression was strange, difficult to read.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Meoraq awkwardly. He hated to break the mood, but some surprises were pleasant while mating and some were not. Human males were small and limp and fleshy. This had to be a shock. Far better to break the mood than to stab her with what she might perceive as a weapon.
“This is my masculine member,” he explained, and pointed. “It will go here.” When she did not correct him, he gripped her thigh and said, “Open to me.”
She stiffened, staring intently and in tight-lipped silence into his eyes, but then she obeyed without allowing him even a token show of force, submitting as one already in his possession.
He resisted the urge that swept him then, instead touching the soft skin below her brilliant eyes. “You are mine,” he said. It was early for these words. They were meant to come after, when conquest was done, but conquest, it seemed, already was.
She put her hand on his cock—a hesitant touch at first, one that grew firm as she closed him in her fist. She looked down, watching with a faintly furrowed brow as her fingers moved over him, growing slick with the oils she brought from him so easily.
Few women had ever done this for him and no woman had ever looked as she did now, neither angry nor afraid but still fierce when she met his eyes. No woman had ever said the words she said next, in a voice like the prairie wind, that shook but still blew strong, “I want you.”
She frowned when she said it, as if confused by her own meaning. He understood very well how that could be. Sheul’s voice had not been clear to him in all this time, and he had been trained to hear it.
“I want you,” he told her. These words had no place in the ritual at all, but they felt right in the air. He said it again as she lay down before him and again as he rose over her. He entered with those words and the proof came at once with the first rush of Sheul’s blessing, filling her womb before a single stroke had been made.
He’d never mated this way before—lying down and belly-to-belly—but it felt new and exciting and perhaps just a bit deviant. Covering her in this fashion, he was all that she must feel. His flesh, his weight, were all her sensations. Looking down, he saw her looking up and knew he was all that she could see. This was the conquest all others had been imitating.
Hers was not a dumaq body. There was no resistance, no clenched sleeve of muscle to battle through, but only a soft, tight well that gripped the whole of his length at once. He was free to withdraw and stab again, thrusting with the whole of his body and crushing her possessively beneath him as he made himself drunk on this strange, enthralling sensation. He was vigorous in his passion, perhaps too much so, his weight driving her back and forth across the ground, but she did not protest. Indeed, she fell back, relinquishing all control to him with a hoarse, human cry. Her little claws gripped at his back, their points prying at his scales as she bucked up at him. Not so fragile, then.
“Sheul, O great Father, make this woman worthy,” he groaned. “Let her soul be pierced and made open. Let her womb be warmed to receive my spirit—” And never mind it would be for the second time. The important thing was that he’d remembered to say it at all. “—and Yours. If it be Your will, raise her up with Your blessing and give her the gift of new life.”
She cried out suddenly, and at the same time, he felt her body seize on him in the grip of her own blessing. In the next moment, he shared it.
The second explosion was greater, which was so seldom the case. He felt it pour out of him, unbearably brig
ht and alive. He could not pray aloud in its grip, but the name of Sheul and all his ancestral fathers burned in his mind until it was done and he slumped heavily atop her. He felt he could keep going—he wanted to try, anyway—but three was the sacred number of creation and belonged to Sheul alone. He would not sour this gift with blasphemous lust.
“Now you have become completely mine,” he said. “Let Sheul who has made you for me witness as I take you from your father’s House and give you the headship of my own. I take you in, Soft-Skin, to be Uyane under me for all the days that remain to you. Hear me and know that you are mine.”
She spoke no word of submission, shyly or joyfully or any way at all, still lost in her own fires. He nuzzled at her, scraping the end of his snout hard across her skin to fill his senses with her scent and taste, and, every nerve alive with Amber, bit deeply into her shoulder. She yelped and struck him fetchingly as he drowsed, licking at the wound to stop it bleeding and thinking of what a fine scar it would make.
At last, Meoraq rose and retrieved his knife, careful to keep the hairs it pierced together. It wasn’t easy. After a moment’s thought, he held it out to her. “Plait this into a cord,” he ordered, “and I shall wear it.”
She looked at him for a long time before she took it. Perhaps among her people, a trophy of first conquest was burnt or buried.
Well, her people had turned her out. Now she belonged to him. He licked her shoulder once more and went, smiling broadly to himself, back to his mat and slept.
6
Dawn woke her, but he was already gone. His pack and hers were already bundled and good to go. A little more than half of last night’s horrible dinner had been tucked up beside her head next to his flask. Apart from the aching, scabby bite, a brand-new breeze on her ear and some dry threads of grass itching around inside her pants, she could almost believe she’d dreamed the whole thing.
She ate. Drank. Packed up the tent. Reached into her pocket and brought out what been covering most of the left half of her head the previous day. Her hair. He wanted to keep it. Like a trophy.