by R. Lee Smith
Of course she hurt! She opened her mouth…and thought about it, damn him.
“Not like before,” she admitted. After all, she was just lying here, not sprawling in a gasping heap, half-conscious. If the weather wasn’t so piss-awful, she’d still be walking. She ached a little on her hip where she’d done some serious splits on her way down the slope the other day, but unless she actually poked at a bruise, even those didn’t bother her too much.
She didn’t hurt. She wasn’t tired. She wasn’t even all that cold, thanks to Meoraq’s tent, plenty of furs, and the clothes they’d spent all winter making. She hadn’t been hungry in more days than she could count.
“No,” she said, surprised. “I guess it’s not that bad.”
“And when it is over, it will be over forever. You will have a bed all the rest of your life, except on those nights when you have mine. You will have servants. You will sit at a table and eat from a plate.”
“You say the most romantic things. You sure you want to risk letting other guys see me?” Amber asked. “Apparently, I have this overwhelming sensuality.”
“Your servants will be women.”
It took a few seconds for that to register all the way.
“Hang on.” She pushed herself up a little so she could see his face. “I thought you said women didn’t work on this planet.”
“We don’t pay them,” he explained. “And most of them only care for their own households, so no one sees them. It’s only if a man has too many daughters or a barren wife set aside that they end up working in House Uyane.”
“What?”
“It’s a big House. It needs a lot of tending and my father never had daughters. I don’t think he even had sisters. It’s the lord’s responsibility to see that all those within his holdings are cared for, so why not put them to work? Besides, they’re rarely out where we can see them. It’s mostly the extra boys that do the running around and cleaning.”
“Extra?”
He rolled one hand idly through the air. “Orphans and bastards and such. If they weren’t born under the sign of the Blade, they’re the responsibility of the lord-steward.”
“What happens to them?”
“Farmers and cattlemen can always use more workers, but they have to be old enough to be useful. I’ve seen boys as young as six in the fields of other Houses, but my father waited until they were ten or so.”
“Practically grown,” said Amber sarcastically.
He grunted agreement. Several more minutes passed while Amber tried not to fidget as she thought about his place in Xeqor and whether or not she was supposed to help take care of all these extra kids. Meoraq just dozed. Suddenly, he tensed and roused himself, saying, “You will do no more work when we are home, woman. Swear your obedience!”
“Okay.”
He eyed her mistrustfully and settled back down.
“So what kind of work are we talking about, since the kids do all the cleaning?”
“Eh.” He yawned, rubbing at his eyes. “They cook and do the washing. In a House Uyane’s size, that’s a lot of work. I suppose they must do the heavy things a boy can’t, like haul water. I don’t know, really. Mostly, they stay below, out of sight.”
“Why?”
“It’s where the work is. Besides, if they come up, someone other than my father might see them.”
“And?”
He raised his head up to look at her, as if he thought she might be joking. When he saw she wasn’t, he laughed a little anyway, his spines flexed forward. “If a man saw them, he might want to have sex with them. Unless he were born under the Blade, that would be a crime. And even if he were, it’s still trouble.”
“But if your father saw them…?”
Meoraq shrugged and lay back down. “He was lord-steward.”
Something dark and cold and incredibly heavy shifted in her stomach, not quite waking up all the way. “How is that fair?”
“Eh?”
“When women sleep around, they’re possessed by the devil, but it’s okay for men to get with the help? What kind of half-assed laws are these?”
“Not men,” said Meoraq, in warning tones. “The lord-stewards, who are masters over all their households. And Uyane is not merely a House under the sign of the Blade, it is the Blade. Its stewards are highest in God’s eyes. He wants them to breed.”
‘Even you?’ She couldn’t say it, since the answer was so stupidly obvious. Why wouldn’t he sleep around with all the pretty little lizardladies that were sure to be cluttering up the house once they got back and she wasn’t the only woman on the planet anymore? But she had to say something, because the two words she couldn’t say were choking her, so instead, trying to pretend it was all still hypothetical, she said, “What about what the woman wants?”
“She is permitted to struggle,” he said off-handedly. “There is no sin in conquest.”
“Wow.” It was all she could think of. It wasn’t nearly enough. She said it again. “Wow. That’s easily the most sexist, pig-headed thing you’ve ever said, and I have to be honest, Meoraq, there’s a lot of competition on that list.”
He didn’t answer.
Amber listened to the silence, torn between her strong desire to apologize for what was admittedly a bitchy comment and her equally strong desire to provoke him with another one. She knew he’d been with other women before (and like the men she knew he’d killed, she suspected the number to be not merely high, but actually beyond counting), but the thought that he might go on being with them had never occurred to her. Funny, how she could laugh at his insistence that they were married right up until the prospect of adultery came up.
‘And this is how I deal with it,’ she thought disgustedly, rolling her eyes at the tent wall. ‘Calling him names. Yeah, that’ll encourage him to stay home with the wife.’ Aloud, she said, “Hey.”
He grunted.
“They say we’re not supposed to go to bed angry, so I’m sorry.”
“Eh? I’m not angry.” Meoraq shifted onto his back and tucked his arms behind his head. “I was thinking of my father.”
“Why?” And in spite of her determination to let this go, out it came: “Did he have a lot of sex-slaves?”
“Servants,” he said distractedly. “Yes, he did. But he never used them for sex.”
“How scandalous.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he said after some reflection. He frequently had trouble telling when she was being sarcastic. “But it was odd enough that I noticed. There is nothing shameful in the fires given to a steward of the bloodline, and his bloodline is that of Uyane. The females of four hundred households bow under his protection and would be…would have been honored by his conquest.”
“There’s another one for that list…”
“But he reserved his fires for my mother. Even at inconvenience to himself.” Meoraq lapsed into quiet, but tucked his arm around her shoulders. “I think he loved her.”
“Oh. Well…that’s sweet.”
He didn’t answer. That dark thing in her stomach shifted again, lifting its head.
“Isn’t it?”
“There must have been a reason…something I never saw. Did she talk to him when they were alone together? Comfort him?” His fingers flexed lightly on her arm. “Argue with him?”
“Wouldn’t that be a weird world?”
‘Goddammit, Bierce, shut the fuck up.’
“She was special to him,” said Meoraq. “I could never understand why.”
“I’m sure she knew you loved her,” said Amber after an uncomfortable silence.
“No, she didn’t. Because it wouldn’t have been true. I saw every private touch they shared, touches no less than these—” Meoraq squeezed her shoulder, his thumb running lightly over her scars. “—as a personal affront to the dignity of our House. It embarrassed me to see them together and it embarrassed me even more after she died to see my father mourn her. I feel…”
She waited, but in the end, he on
ly blew out a rude snort and said, “I don’t even know what I feel, Soft-Skin. It was his own House, and I made it impossible for my father to share an honest touch with his wife without fear of consequence. What an insufferable little prick I was.”
“Okay, what’s that mean?”
“What?”
“Prick. That wasn’t your language, that was mine. What’s it mean?”
“In dumaqi? Eh, it’s the thing…the two things that fit together that make it possible for a door to swing open and closed. Why? What does it mean in your speech? I’ve never been able to puzzle that out, exactly. I only know that it’s a curse.”
“It’s another word for this.” She gave the smooth mound between his legs a pat.
“Another one? How many words do you need for that?”
“This from the man who can say gann eight different ways,” Amber remarked, gently kneading.
“Twelve. You are amazing,” he said seriously.
“Hey, I’m just getting started, lizardman.” She rubbed her thumb along the moist edge of his slit, cupped the hard bulge she felt just below the surface, and squeezed. “But hold that thought, because I’ll want to hear you shout it a few times.”
Meoraq arched his neck and grunted. “Woman, I was just speaking of my father. This is hardly appropriate.”
It wasn’t, was it? But that thing was in her gut and if she didn’t do something to get back to normal, it was going to eat its way out of her right through her mouth. “A woman should always be ready to receive her man’s fires,” she reminded him.
“To receive, yes, but not kindle them.” He caught her wrist up and pinned it to the bed above her head, rolling atop her in the next moment to nuzzle aggressively at her neck. “And I’m not the one who does the shouting, am I?”
“You make your share of the noise.”
He hissed at her, but the teasing light of his eyes suddenly died, replaced by an unnerving somberness. He frowned at her, his face very close to hers, all that she could see. After a few false starts, he suddenly said, “I love you, you know.”
Her stomach clenched once, hard enough to hurt, and then slowly, finally, relaxed. She told herself it didn’t matter, she wasn’t one of those girls who needed to hear flowery shit like that, but…but he said it. He said it to her.
“I can’t believe I’m saying that to a woman,” he remarked, looking at the wall of the tent above her in an unfocused way, just like there was a window there to stare through. “But there it is, and it is the only word. I love you. Huh.”
She gave him a few uncomfortable moments to come to terms with that, and when he only continued to lie there on top of her, staring at the wall and keeping her wrists pinned above her head, she finally put on her best state-paid counselor’s voice and said, “And how do you feel about that?”
“Bitterly ashamed.”
She stared.
His spines flicked as he gave her a sheepish sort of look. “Not of you. Of myself. It can be nothing less than a gift of God to know love…and I made my parents hide it. I would give anything…” He thought, frowning. “Almost anything,” he amended, “to go back to just one day, one hour, and unmake the insufferable little prick that I was.”
“Almost anything, huh?”
He met her smile with another of his terribly serious looks and brushed his knuckle across her brow. “I would not give you. My blood. My blades. Even my name, but not you, Soft-Skin. You are mine. I will give you up to our Father and no one else.”
Amber sighed and patted the side of his snout. “Say that again, but try not to sound like such a stalker when you do it this time.”
He leaned in to nuzzle her, scraping the end of his snout forcefully and deliberately up one side of her neck and down the other, inhaling slowly the whole time. He finished with a hard bite to her scarred shoulder, not quite hard enough to break the skin. “You belong to me,” he murmured. “You will always be Soft-Skin under Uyane. In life, in death, and in the Halls where we reside after. You are mine.”
She couldn’t help smiling any more than she could help saying, “You don’t know what a stalker is, clearly.”
“You try so hard to convince me you are impossible to please, but I know better. Hold still.” He pressed his rough mouth carefully against hers, then withdrew and flicked his spines playfully forward. “Do you want to have sex yet?”
“Oh boy, do I.”
He grimaced and started undressing her.
“Wait. I…”
I what? I love you? Why? Just because he said it first? Sure, it seemed like the right thing to say, polite and expected and non-threatening, and who knew, maybe even a little bit true, although she refused to look at that too closely. Not right now. God, he was looking at her. Waiting, just like she’d asked him to. And she had no idea what she wanted to say, except that she knew it was still choking her out from the stomach on up.
And then she knew what she wanted to say, felt it whole and burning in her mind. It was just a question of whether she was too chickenshit to say it.
Amber Bierce had been a lot of things in her life. Chickenshit was never going to be one of them.
She reached up and caught Meoraq around his snout. He let her, although his spines came slowly all the way forward and just as slowly all the way back.
“When we get home,” said Amber, “you keep your hands off the servants, you hear me?”
His head cocked. She kept her grip on his snout and even squeezed a little.
“I’m your woman. That makes you my man. You better not make me fight for you unless you’re damn sure you want me fighting-mad.”
Balancing easily on one hand, he closed the other over her wrist and freed his snout. He studied her as she lay beneath him for several long, expressionless seconds. “I do,” he said at last. Then he grinned and dropped, rolling onto his back. He slapped his chest once. “You can even be on top.”
3
So in the end, it took six days to cross over into Gedai, which was, as Meoraq made a point of reminding her, exactly what he’d said it would be at the outside margin. She did not appreciate the observation.
There wasn’t much in the way of foothills on the other side, just a short series of long plateaus and steep slopes, almost like stairs. Meoraq took his time scouting each descent, which made them relatively painless once he’d finally settled on a path, although Amber still managed to go down two of the slopes on her ass. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), they went from the snowline to the ground in just one day.
When the sun came up the next morning, Amber and Meoraq were awake and watching from the top of the next hill over to see sunrise over Gedai for the first time. Holy Gedai, as Meoraq called it. Birthplace of the Prophet. The land where, in just a few more days, they would find the temple where Meoraq thought he was going to talk to God. Her first impression was that it looked a lot like the same brown grass, the same windy sky, the same open plains as they’d left on the other side of the mountain. Maybe a little more wooded, a little less flat, but that was all.
“What do you think?” she asked, studying Meoraq’s inscrutable face in the thin morning light.
“Looks like your hair first thing in the morning,” he replied. “Only it’s everywhere instead of just in my face.”
She didn’t appreciate that observation either.
They started walking again, but even though they were out of the mountains at last, their speed did not improve. The ground under their feet was hard, frozen, stone-riddled grass, which while indeed much easier to walk on than boot-deep snow and slush, made pulling sleds absolutely hellish. Meoraq took the heavy one with all the meat and he still went faster than Amber and the hides. He didn’t complain in so many words, but his spines got lower as the day wore on. When Amber inevitably hit the rock that tipped her sled and spilled all their gear to the bottom of the hill they’d spent easily twenty minutes climbing, he just patted her on the head and picked everything up.
“I th
ink we’ll camp early,” was all he said, slipping back into his sled’s harness.
“Oh come on! I hit one rock! I missed a billion others, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t say we were camping now,” he countered. “I said it would be early.”
“Yeah, but you meant now.”
“I did not.”
“When then?”
“When I judge it necessary.”
“And why would it be necessary early?”.
His glance was cool and uncompromising. “Because you’re tired.”
She couldn’t argue, so she did what anyone would do. She switched targets. “You chew with your mouth open.”
“I’m allowed to breathe when I eat,” he replied, glaring. “And you growl in your sleep.”
“It’s called snoring and I do n—”
She hit another rock, tipped the sled, and spilled its contents down the other side of the hill. They stood together and watched until the last bundled hide had finished rolling. When she finally nerved herself up to look at him, he was already looking at her.
“In my defense,” she said, lifting her chin, “there are a lot of rocks.”
He sighed and untethered himself from his sled to start picking hers up. Again.
When he decided it was time to stop for the day (early) and set up camp, he left the actual setting-up for her. He needed to make a patrol, he said. A lengthy, far-reaching, thorough patrol. Alone.
She made a token protest, just to let him know she was tough enough to do it, but he pulled out his You’ll-do-as-I-say-woman act and she let herself be bullied. Her feet hurt and she was hungry. If he wanted to crawl around for another mile or two after hiking up and down hills all day, he was perfectly welcome to do it. Still…
“And you expect me to just do all the work while you’re taking it easy on your evening stroll?”
“It is a wife’s duty and pleasure to lessen her husband’s burdens.”
“Says who, lizardman?”
“Prophet Lashraq, as written in Sheul’s true Word.”
“You mean a man wrote it.”
“But God spoke it.” He came to stroke at her forehead and she turned her face away. Undaunted, he nuzzled at her throat instead and patted her on the head. “Have food ready when I return. Use lots of meat. It’s not as cold here as it was in the mountains.”