by R. Lee Smith
But she had never left Amber. She was there still, silent, invisible, clinging on to Amber’s hand and doubtless streaming water out of her empty eyes. Amber, who still spoke of ‘catching’ the others, just as though there were anything left of them to reach out and hold in her hand.
Because they were dead. He knew it and had known it ever since he had seen their broad trail end at a crumbling canal and realized that they had chosen to walk inside it. Why? Because it would be covered against the rain. Because it would be flat and easily traveled. Because no one was there to tell them not to walk in a storm canal in the rainy season and those idiots would need to be told. No, Meoraq could see it clearly: Scott had led them into the tunnel and some hours hence, some ancient reservoir had overfilled, prompting some unthinking machine to open a ventway and empty a few hundred thousand meti-weights of water into Scott’s safe, dry, level road. They were dead.
But even in death, their souls would never be freed from their clay unless they were burnt. Meoraq knew that. He knew it, but he’d never once thought of them and the hell their undying clay must be now enduring. If he felt anything at all, it was only a grim satisfaction that he would never have to see them again. He had his Amber, now his wife, without the thorn of her annoying kind and especially her whining little blood-kin, and he had been content.
And Amber had said nothing, because she, as his obedient wife, must be content also. Content with nothing to burn but dolls in the shape of the one she loved enough to call ‘sister’.
Self-disgust reached a sudden, jarring pinnacle throughout his mind and body, like Gann’s own orgasm. Meoraq halted—Amber bumped up hard against his back—and began yanking at his harness-fastens. “We are stopping,” he spat, throwing his tent to the ground. “I have to pray.”
Amber made a sound of spiritless assent and staggered a few steps away, dropping her pack and collapsing on top of it. Seeing that made him feel even worse, but it had been her insistence that they travel. He would have been happy to give her a day’s rest this morning if she had not been—
If she had not been burning Nicci.
Now he looked at her, even though he should be on his knees, palms to clay and deep in prayer. He looked at the woman Sheul had given him, married to him, and realized with a sinking belly that the dual burden of grief and illness were simply too much for even his stubborn Amber to carry.
He began to clear the earth and gather what tinder there was for a fire. She did not move to help him. A second glance showed him she was lost in sleep already, mired in it, despite the pain that yet twisted her soft features. He tried not to wake her, but she startled when he struck the fire, moaned, and finally dragged her eyes open. She stared without recognition at the growing flames for several seconds before her eyes went wide and filled with dismay.
She tried to sit up, fell, and tried again even as she protested, pleading with him not to make her stay, she could walk, she was fine.
He put his heat-stones in the fire and filled the stewing pouch with water.
She caught at his arm, cursing and apologizing, vowing that she would never stay up all night again, only please please not to do this. They had to catch up. They had to keep going.
He opened his pack and brought out his fine inlaid tea box. He put all he had left of the dawnslight blend in the steeper and dropped it in the water. He put away the tea box and brought out some of yesterday’s saoq, tepid and greasy in its wrappings. He held it out to her.
She glared at him, lightly trembling, then snatched up her spear. She had to climb it as a crutch to gain her feet, but once gained, she set off into the prairie, limping and swearing at him. She fought when he brought her bodily back, but she was too tired to fight for long. She collapsed again on top of her pack, weeping furiously behind her hands, and fell asleep as soon as the storm lagged, tears still wet on her skin.
Meoraq sat and watched his tea heat. He did not pray, exactly. Certainly, he did not pray as he probably should have done, back bent and with all the ritual words in place, but any man’s heart can be an altar if it is open and any man’s words can reach God’s ear if they are sincerely spoken.
“Father,” said Meoraq at last, and knew that he was heard. He looked up into the sky, not to see Sheul’s face among the rolling clouds but to show Him his own, naked and troubled, here on Gann. “Father, I cry out to You from the darkness. Lift up Your lamp and show me how to find them. Let me give them their last prayers and release them to Your judgment.”
Sheul listened, but did not speak.
“I do not ask for myself,” Meoraq admitted. “I should. They are Your children also and deserve the care all children of Sheul may expect in passing from this mortal life. I should love them, as the Word tells me to do, and seek them for myself, but I don’t. I can’t. Were it not for my woman’s pain, I know I would not be calling to You now. Forgive Your son his failings,” he said, touching his palm to Gann and taking away small daubs of mud to rub over his mortal heart. “But do not punish his wife because of them. I beseech You, Father, set me on their last path and let me find where they lie so I can give them true death.”
Sheul’s hand was heavy upon his shoulder, but His great voice still remained silent and Meoraq knew why. Finding where Scott and his humans had washed up would mean turning around. It would mean five days of walking back to the canal and who knew how many days more to search. The bodies might be spans and spans away; if he were lucky, the canal might have fallen in at some point, allowing the bodies to be vomited out on the street where they were visible, but if not, they had surely finished up in some ancient cistern. Or several cisterns, spans apart. Either way, a search could easily eat up the rest of the season, with no guarantee of ever finding even one body. And any body he did find…after so many days soaking in the stormways, he would never know which of them it had been.
Meoraq knew very little about women and even less about humans, but as much as he wished to make some grand romantic gesture to his grieving wife, the reality was that the other humans were gone. The clay of their flesh would crumble; the spark that had once warmed it, lost forever. This was truth, and as Master Tsazr had once said, truth does not care if it comforts you.
The fire was failing already. He would have to go find real fuel or let it die. The tea was not very dark yet, but drinkable and hot. Lost in his own brooding thoughts, torn between the realities of this camp and the intangibilities that lay beyond it, Meoraq reached into his pack and felt about for his cup.
His fingers touched something cup-like wrapped in his spare breeches, but with an odd protrusion he couldn’t quite—
Oh. Oh no.
But yes, and soon he was holding them—one garish human cup in each hand—and asking himself how by Gann’s wicked whim he had managed to forget the stupid things so completely? Damn him, all this time, Amber had thought them lost forever. All this time, he’d made her come to him in her embarrassed way to beg for his cup when he was done with it, and there were days when he had made damned sure she knew she was inconveniencing him. All this time, but like the humans themselves, as soon as they were out of sight, he’d simply never given them another thought.
“Great Sheul, take Your hand from my shoulder,” he groaned, dipping out some tea, “and send it against my stupid snout. Wake up, Soft-Skin. Come, wife. Wake and hear me.”
She muttered thickly and curled closer around herself, rolling away from him when he nudged the cup against her shoulder. “No. We’re fighting. That means I don’t have to deal with you if I don’t want to. Leave me alone.”
Sheul’s hand stayed gentle where it rested on him. Meoraq simply leaned further over and set the cup down in front of her.
She made him wait a very long time before she opened her eyes, but he knew when she’d done it by the stiffening of her turned back. After several shaking breaths, she pushed herself up and looked at him.
There were many things he wanted to say, and some he did not want to say but knew he ha
d to, but when her green eyes came to him, it all fell away.
“We are done walking for the day,” he told her.
She picked up the cup and held it loosely between her hands, staring at the tea.
“Tomorrow, we will walk again, but we stop when I give that command and you will not defy me.”
She stirred at the tea with her finger, but did not drink.
“All things are possible with Sheul, but I cannot promise you that we will ever find them.”
Her eyes closed. “I know.”
“I will not allow you to kill yourself searching.”
“Meoraq—”
“No,” he said forcefully. “It is not your life to give. It is mine.”
She said nothing. A single tear welled beneath the tightly-shut lid of her left eye, but it never grew fat enough to fall.
He hoped the matter was settled now because he really did not know what else to say. He took up her second human cup, filled it, and arranged himself beside her. After a moment, determined to prove that he was not a scaly son of a bitch, or at least, not always, he put his arm around her.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“I know. As soon as I have the tent together, I want you inside it. From now on, that is where you sleep.” He put the hammer to that with an authoritative grunt and drank some tea. It was cold and overwatered. He drank it anyway.
“Then what?”
“Eh?”
“What happens next?”
“We travel on to Xi’Matezh,” he said, surprised that she felt this had somehow changed.
“No, I meant tonight.”
“Tonight?” His mind, wonderfully blank, suddenly lit with Sheul’s own exasperated slap of illumination. He uttered a little laugh, surprised as much by her coyness as by this unexpected drift in the conversation. “You don’t have to wait up for me, Soft-Skin. If the fires come, I’ll wake you.”
Her brows drew together. Her eyes flicked in a bewildered way toward the coals where his tea had warmed.
“Sheul’s fires,” he amplified.
Her confusion did not appear to clear. A troubling thought occurred to him. “How much do you know about sex?”
She snorted. “I know God doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“So you…don’t know anything.” He thought about that, a little stymied by the enormity of the task now before him, and decided that, just like trying to teach something new to his brother Salkith, it would be best to start with gentle compliments. He reached out to pat her thigh. “You did very well during first conquest.”
Her furry brows rose in peaks and then crashed thunderously down. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
It didn’t always work with Salkith either.
“I enjoyed your struggles. I would permit you to fight again, if you like.”
“Oh believe me, lizardman, I will.”
He smiled. “It pleases me that you want to be my well-mannered woman,” he said, peeling back the neck of her shirt. Ignoring her playful slaps, he licked at the mark he’d left in her soft skin. “But I would rather have the insufferable she-warrior I was given. So if you want me, put your hands on me and tell me so.”
“What if I don’t want you?”
“Ah, my wife, is that what’s bothering you?” He licked her again, slowly this time, tasting the strange, rich bitters of her blood, and felt it when she shivered. “We have only been married two days. Surely that is too early for you to start worrying that I might set you aside, especially since you have burned for me so readily thus far.”
“It wasn’t like that!” she said, fetchingly embarrassed, as women often were, by this public acknowledgement of her pleasure. “I was lonely and…and scared! That’s all!”
He could guess how much it cost his proud woman to make such an admission. He tipped his head to run the side of his snout gently along the curve of her shoulder, following it up to her slender neck in spite of her efforts to shrug him off. “And you needed me.”
She stiffened.
“You wanted me,” he murmured, and felt that same soul-deep thrill as when he had heard her say it.
“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered.
“Lies.”
“It was just sex. You didn’t even like it!” she said suddenly, renewing her shrugging shoves. “You acted like you were doing your damn taxes the whole time!”
He didn’t know every word she used, but he thought he caught her meaning. He grinned and nipped at her. “A Sheulek is the master of his clay, Soft-Skin, but mine wanted very much to finish too soon. Be reassured, I liked it.” He reached for his belt, nuzzling at her throat with long, slow strokes of his snout. Her scent filled his senses, became a taste, became a throb in his very heart. “Shall I prove it?”
“No,” she said, but she didn’t duck demurely away. She held onto her cup of tea as the color rose in her flat face and tried to pretend there was no hand kneading at her hip, no snout rubbing up and down the length of her throat. She even tried to drink.
“Your hand is shaking,” he observed, and moved his own under her shirt to lie upon her bare belly.
She thumped down her cup and tried to scoot away, but she didn’t have the leverage and fell back instead. He dropped comfortably atop her at once, nipping at her jaw and purring while he eased her stubborn legs slowly open around his. And they did open, but not without a lot of kneading and nibbling.
“Damn it!” she shouted, smacking her fist against his shoulder even as her thighs parted. “I asked you what you wanted, I asked you, and you said it wasn’t sex!”
“It wasn’t,” he grunted, bracing himself on one arm so that he could sweep his belt off and let his cock extrude in an immediate and insistent rush. “It was marriage. The sex would just be sex without it. Not that there’s anything wrong with the sex,” he added, now struggling with the loin-plate, which had caught in his straining breeches. “If you’re worried that you don’t please me, you can be easy, Soft-Skin. Your body was made to pleasure mine.”
“What a huge relief,” said Amber in a curiously flat voice, each word carved and set separate from the others.
She really had been worried. He paused to stroke his snout along her throat again, then resumed the battle with his loin-plate and won. “I will burn with you, my wife. And you will burn with me.”
“You’re driving me crazy,” she said, arching her hips to help him tug her breeches down. “You know we’re not really married.”
He stopped. It wasn’t easy. His man’s shaft pulsed in his fist where he gripped it for the guidance it needed to find its way inside her in this bizarre position, but he was the master of his clay and he ignored its urgings. “I didn’t mark that,” he said, a bit breathlessly, but with admirable self-control. “What did you say?”
She looked up at him, her brows furrowed, and bit at her lower lip with her small, blunt teeth. She was also breathless and flushed as well, and she looked down the hills and valleys of her body at the cock in his fist with an expression that was at once profoundly annoyed and entirely defeated.
“We’ll fight about it later,” she promised, reaching between them to take what he offered and guide him home.
A true master of his clay would have firmly removed himself and thrashed this out. Human speech did not change from one tone to another; he knew what she’d said and he knew he should not allow it to lie spoken.
But her body took him in, hot and wet and gently squeezing at the whole of his length in ways miraculous to feel, and he was no Sheulek then, only a man willing to trade every future argument in all the world just to stay right here right now. So he let it go, and whatever twinge of conscience he may have felt in that release was swiftly forgotten in the pursuit of the one that eventually followed. It was not his proudest moment, but he would just have to pray about that. Later.
7
Maybe it was true. Maybe they really were married. Amber had never actually befriended a married couple and di
dn’t have much personal experience with the married lifestyle, but Meoraq certainly seemed to fit the stereotype, even though he’d never been to the movies. He grunted when she talked to him, insisted he knew where they were going even after admitting he’d never been here before, coddled her unnecessarily when he decided her poor little girl-body couldn’t keep up, and then ignored her on the one occasion she asked to stop.
She asked for two reasons. First, the rain that had been drumming down on their heads for the better part of three days had undergone a series of disturbing changes in a short stretch of time. This morning, although drizzly, the wind had been relatively warm; next, it had stopped raining for maybe an hour, but gone very dark and very cold; about an hour ago, the sky had taken on a vaguely grainy appearance, almost like she was seeing an old movie, and it had started raining again, the drops like nails falling, not on her head, but straight into her face. Since then, it had been getting darker almost by the minute, even though she knew they had hours to go before nightfall. The lightning, which to be fair had never really stopped, picked up in frequency and intensity, until it began to feel like they were filming that grainy old movie in front of a huge crowd of paparazzi. And now there was thunder—not the low rolls and grumbles that had been following them for days from the distance, but the kind that she could feel shivering in her bones.
The second reason, the selling point as it were, was that quite unexpectedly, they were presented with a place to go. The hill they’d been climbing hadn’t been the latest in a series of suspiciously regular, short, steep hills. It was just a hill, like any of a number of hills that had been growing the closer they came to the mountains. It wasn’t particularly steep, but it was very slick and muddy, thanks to days of rain and the wind blowing directly in her eyes. The rocks that jutted out of its thorny, mud-slick sides weren’t the squarish chunks of eroded walls that had fallen in and been covered over; they were obviously just rocks. There had been, in short, no clues whatsoever that this was waiting on the other side.