by R. Lee Smith
He caught the sigh before it could get him into trouble and rolled his hand at her invitingly. “I’m listening.”
But she just lay there and frowned at him for several long moments. Meoraq waited her out in comfortable silence, moving his eyes sleepily over the mess of her hair and trying to imagine it in drapes over the cushions on the bed where he and his father and all the sons of Uyane were born.
“Do you…” she began at last, waking him from an open-eyed doze. “Do you really think…we’re going to have a baby?”
“Is that a serious question?” he asked, smiling.
“Do I look like I’m kidding around?”
“You look—” He pulled her close enough for a nibble at her scarred shoulder. “—like a woman who has been burning hot with her man.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I believe I just answered your question.”
“We had sex. That doesn’t mean we’re having a baby.”
Half-asleep and not thinking clearly, Meoraq was startled into laughter. He quickly cupped the end of his snout, but the damage was done.
“It. Doesn’t,” she said, with that icy enunciation that meant she was very annoyed with him. “I can’t have your baby, Meoraq.”
“Of course you can. Don’t worry, Soft-Skin. I suppose it’s the sort of thing women get nervous about the first time, but you’ll do fine.” He patted her thigh again.
“You’re not listening. I can’t be pregnant. You,” she said with curious emphasis, “can’t make me pregnant.”
“God would seem to disagree.”
She clapped her hands over her face and mumbled, “You’re giving me a brain tumor,” through them.
Watching her take deep, calming breaths, Meoraq decided it was just possible that, no matter how freely she said the word, she might not know what sex really meant. “Come, wife,” he said, reaching out to catch her wrist until she allowed him to unmask her. “I don’t pretend to understand what’s upsetting you, but I’m willing to thrash it out if you are. Tell me plainly what you are thinking.”
“You and I can’t make a baby.”
“All right.” He took a moment to collect his thoughts and conquer his discomfort, and then said, speaking slowly, “Sex…is the mechanical means by which a baby is created.”
Her mouth opened, just a little, but no sound came out.
Encouraged, he went on. “When Sheul wishes a man and woman to produce a child, He sets the spark of that life within the man’s, ah, fluid, which is called ‘semen’.”
Amber clapped her hand over her eyes, then splayed it so as to stare at him through her fingers.
“This spark burns in his belly, causing him to desire sex. With Sheul’s blessing, the man will release that spark with his, er, semen, and if the woman is also blessed, she will conceive by him. How do you mark me?”
She continued to stare, although she did drop her hand. “I know,” she said at long, long last, “where babies come from. But you can’t really think that’s the only reason people have sex! We’re just doing it because it’s fun!”
“Each man’s clay desires its own gratification,” Meoraq admitted. “To eat beyond its fill, to take strong drink, to pollute the mind with poisons, and yes, to take the lustful pleasure that comes from Gann. That may take the form of sex, but it is no more than animal mating and it will corrupt beyond forgiveness if indulged. What we have, Soft-Skin, we have with God’s blessing and with His holy fires comes the promise of new life.”
She only looked at him, her thoughts in motion and her face unsmiling. “I can’t have your babies, Meoraq,” she said at last. “I can never have your babies.”
“Why do you keep saying this?”
“We’re two completely different species.”
He waited, but that seemed to be all. “Are we not both children of Sheul?”
“That’s like saying that since God made both tachuqis and saoqs, they should be able to have children too!”
“They could,” he said, “if Sheul wished it.”
She put a hand over her eyes hard enough to make a slapping sound.
“You’re a good man,” she said finally, without uncovering her eyes. “Strong. Brave. Noble, in a weird, hyperviolent kind of way. And I know you can be a smart man if you really, really tried.”
He wasn’t sure, but he thought there might be an insult hidden in all that praise.
She lowered her hand and looked at him. “I can talk myself blue in the face and never convince you, so just think about it. Think hard. Don’t just throw it all up there in the name of God, look at the evidence. Think. Don’t pray. Think.”
“If it will put your mind at ease, I’ll meditate upon your words.”
“Meditate.” She covered her eyes with another slapping sound. “I don’t know why I bother. You see God in everything.”
“Sheul is in everything.” Meoraq sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “You are so good at seeing evidence. How can you not see that?”
She dropped her hand to her thigh. That also made a slapping sound. “Because it’s ridiculous. People happen, Meoraq. People make babies. People make the rules. And then people make up gods so they have someone else to blame when things don’t go right.”
“No,” he said simply. “All things fall according to His ultimate plan.”
“Oh for…Listen to yourself! Listen to what you’re saying to me!”
“I hear it.”
“Do you? Do you really? So, according to you, God wanted you and me together. With the infinite power at his disposal, he made a planet clear across the fucking galaxy and then he allowed it to get completely trashed so that we would have a reason to leave it, and then, oh yeah, he killed my mother just when the technology to leave the planet came along, all so he could put me on that ship and then lob a meteor at it, so it would break just enough to go careening out of control through space but still stay together long enough to land, killing all the apparently superfluous people—Do you know who those people were?” she demanded suddenly. “Do you know who your killer God chose to wipe off on the surface of your fucking planet like a booger on a bathroom wall? They were the families, Meoraq! They were the children! They were the pregnant women who supposedly conceived with his very fucking temporary blessing. There were also thousands of them, but hey, at least I got to walk away and meet you and then lose all the distracting other people God had no use for, including my sister, and all this, Meoraq, all this so that you and I could make a baby?”
“Yes,” he said.
She stared at him for a moment and then flung out her arms, shouting, “There is no baby, lizardman! There’s never going to be a baby! There’s no baby and no God and the only reason we have sex—you might want to write this down—is because it feels good and we like it! You can call it God or Gann or the Great Gadzooks if you want to, but it’s just two people fucking!”
She sat glaring at him in the bed, her breath as hard in her chest as if she had just run to him across two spans of rough road.
Meoraq studied her at great length, but she seemed perfectly sincere. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “You escaped the fall of your family’s House by seeking passage on the first ship of its kind ever to sail in the sky…and this was not Sheul?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, it wasn’t. It was just me making a bad decision.”
“The ship was struck in the sky, yet sailed on…and this was not Sheul?”
She glared at him and got out of bed, snatching at her clothes as if she honestly meant to dress and go out at the mid-hour of night.
“The ship broke open over Gann, yet some survived its ruin…and this was not Sheul? At its ultimate burning, you and your fellows were yet spared and this—” He flipped onto his feet and caught her arm as she stalked past him for her boots. “This was not Sheul?”
“Let go of me!”
“What is it you think, woman, that all these things were an accident?”
“You’re a zealot!”
“And you’re a fool!” he countered, exasperated. “He has sent you a warning, a boat and a…a…I can’t say it, but you know damned well what He sent you! And were that not enough, He sent you me!”
She drew back and stared at him.
“You may not know to see His hand upon the hammer, but I do. It is not for me to question His reasoning and neither is it for me to deny Him when I hear His voice in my heart!” Meoraq paused, inviting the will of Sheul. His will was immediate and undeniable. “And He says there shall be sons. Get back in that bed.”
Her human brows descended fetchingly. “We’re still fighting, Meoraq.”
“No.” He began to undress what little she had managed to don. “We are not.”
She smacked at his hand. “I’m still fighting, with or without you!”
“I conquered you once.” He drew the knife of his fathers, cast about briefly for a place to stab it, then settled for tossing it back onto the bed. “I can easily do it again.”
She gave him a few token cuffs as he carried her to the furs, but by the time he lay her down, she was only glaring. When he nipped at her chin, she even put an arm around his neck, however grudgingly. “You really are a zealot,” she sighed, wrapping his hips in the welcome weight of her legs.
“And you,” he said, “truly are a fool.” He swept the hair away from her shoulder and bit lightly at his mark. “Burn with me now, my fool.”
“Your pillow-talk needs a lot of work,” she told him, but she burned and when she finally slept, it was smiling with his hand over her belly where his new-sparked son surely grew.
2
The mountains were not wide. Meoraq assured her the crossing should only take four days, six at the absolute most. Then it would be back on the road, one with a beach at the end of it, no less. It was too much to hope that it would be a warm, sunny beach, but still, Amber had never been to one (sleeper-dream of mama cigarette smoke screaming seagulls but o the sunset and the waves coming in) and when she had it in her to hope for things, she did hold out a little hope for one nice day at the beach.
She’d thought she was prepared. No matter how sedentary her winter routine had become, her memories of the endless march across the plains were never far. She knew it would be tough. She knew she’d be cold and hungry and exhausted all the time, but she knew she could take it and keep moving. She was ready. Four days.
Except that Amber had quite naturally twisted her ankle on those fucking snowshoes within the first stupid hour of the first day after leaving the cave.
Except that on the second day, she’d also tumbled a good fifty meters down an icy slope into a slushbank when the ledge that had supported a hulking lizardman’s weight and that of two sleds lashed together (Amber was no longer pulling hers because of her ankle) without any complaint whatsofreakingever gave way under her fat ass.
Except that on the third day, it had started snowing again that night for the first time in days and days and motherfucking days and now they were in it up to their knees again, which meant she was also back in the damn snowshoes.
Amber did not believe in God, but if ever there was some supernatural force trying to send a sign, Someone was screaming it. And Meoraq, who saw messages from God in plants, caves and even plops of animal poop, pretended to be oblivious. No matter what fresh slice of shit-cake got served, he just bandaged her up and kept going.
Amber could take all the punches the universe could throw, but waiting for the punch to hit was killing her. On the fourth day, the day they were supposed to be out and which found them camped in the middle of the same goddamn nowhere with the same goddamn ice storm crusting up the side of the tent, Amber gave up and said it for him: “You told me so.”
Meoraq raised his head out of the pillow of his pack and rubbed sleepily at his face. “Eh? Was I talking?”
“You told me it wasn’t time to leave and I made you.”
He looked at her, spines flexed all the way forward, then laughed and dropped back into his arm.
Now that stung.
“I did!” she insisted.
He made a very bad effort at smothering another laugh. “I forgive you,” he said gravely.
Amber took that for as long as she could and then she threw the blankets back and kicked free of them.
Meoraq groaned and rolled onto his side to watch her grab her mat and pull it to the other side of the tent in noisy heaves. “Please yourself. I don’t forgive you. Shall I have you whipped, woman? Would that make you happy?”
She dug down through the layers of their bedding for the xaut fur in the middle and yanked it free.
“Where do you think you’re going with that?” he asked, cocking his head.
“It’s mine!” she said, wrapping herself furiously in its itchy warmth. “I made it and it’s mine!”
He dropped onto his back and rubbed his brow-ridges. “Deep breaths, Uyane,” she heard him mutter. “Deep and slow. So.” He moved his hand and gestured to her. “What is it you want to say?”
“If you’re mad at me, get mad at me!”
“If I’m not mad, can I just go to sleep?”
“Stop making fun of me!”
The slap/rasp of his hand rubbing back on his brow-ridges. The steady rise and fall of his broad chest as he breathed six times. Then he threw back his blanket and before she could untangle herself from the xaut fur and get out of his reach, he’d gripped the edge of her mat and yanked her against him. He stripped the fur away and made the bed again: blanket, xaut fur, blanket.
She stopped fighting halfway through and just let him tuck her in, her eyes burning with humiliation, staring at the top of the tent until it blurred into new colors. When he was finished, he lay back down and snugged an arm around her, grunting comfortably against her shoulder. He seemed to fall asleep.
The storm blew and blew. It never stopped here. Never.
“Shall I guess?” Meoraq murmured against her ear.
Amber pressed her teeth tight together and did not answer.
“I say…” His hand slipped up to rest between her breasts. It was his favorite place to touch her. God alone knew why. “It’s just a little weather. And you say…it’s weather that could kill us.”
She shivered and tried to roll away from him. He waited until she was done and simply spooned up against her back. “And I say we rest in God’s sight,” he continued. “And you say, stop acting like it doesn’t matter, lizardman.”
She felt the breath catch in her throat almost like a laugh, and gritted her teeth even harder because it wasn’t fucking funny, no matter how he said it.
“And I say, tell me what you want me to do about the weather. And you don’t say anything at first, but you get that look. And so I say, tell me plainly what the matter is. And you say something inexpressibly foolish, such as how this is all your fault. And so I tell you how foolish it is to say that, which is a reasonable thing to say, and you become impossible to deal with. So.” He nuzzled at the side of her neck. “I will say none of these things. It is absolutely no use trying to talk with women.”
“Sexist son of a bitch.”
“Ha.” He snuggled closer under the blankets. “I win. So just say it, Soft-Skin, before you choke on it.”
“We were supposed to be out of the mountains today.”
“Shit happens.” His language, her phrase. They were both doing a lot of that.
“And it is my fault. You can make all the smart-ass comments you want to.”
“Lo,” Meoraq intoned, “even his ass be wise.”
“Jerk.”
“Mm.”
Wind blew, cracking the ice forming on the side of the tent.
“When I was a boy,” Meoraq murmured, “and my training masters wished to give me the most severe punishments, they would set me to copying books. And the book that every boy most dreaded to see was Master Darr’s book of maps, because every line had to be perfect, you see. Every hill, named. Every be
nd of every river, just so. I must have copied that book ten times, end to end.”
Amber waited, gritting her teeth, but curiosity won out in the end. Meoraq could make the most random crap imaginable sound profound when he said it in that slow, meditative way. “And?” she said finally, surrendering.
“And when I first left Xeqor,” he went on, “I thought I knew the land, because I knew those maps so well. I had no hesitation when I set off, for I knew where I would find the range of Aqcha and I knew where to find the city of Fol Ganis on the other side. It came as a hell of a shock when I climbed that first peak and saw more mountains.”
“And the moral of this story is?” asked Amber, and immediately regretted it because it didn’t sound tough and bored at all, just snotty.
“That everything looks small on paper,” Meoraq replied. “But in Gann’s world, shit happens.”
The wind died down, making the relative quiet seem much louder and heavier than it should. Meoraq’s body beside hers remained perfectly relaxed.
“I’m sorry for being such a bitch,” Amber muttered finally.
He patted her breast companionably. “Forgiven.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
She didn’t feel much better. How the hell could he lie there so still? “Are you really this sleepy?”
“Yes. Wait.” He raised his head. “Why?”
“Well, it’s only the middle of the day.”
“There’s nothing else to do.” He flicked his spines at her. “Is there?”
“Jesus Christ, really? How did you ever survive living with me as long as you did without having sex every other hour?”
“With God’s aid alone,” he said seriously. “It was a terrible time.”
“Just talk to me, okay?”
“It is absolutely no use,” he reminded her, but rolled onto his back and pulled her halfway onto his chest. “It hasn’t been so bad, has it?”
She thought it was a joke and started to laugh at it, albeit in a bitchy way, but then got a better look at him and realized he was serious. “For you, maybe. I am a walking bruise, lizardman.”
“You bruise too easily. But do you hurt?”