by R. Lee Smith
“Okay. Put up the tent, gather poop, start a fire, make dinner. Anything else?”
He caught the sarcasm and paused long enough to pick up his pack and toss it to her. “Wash my clothes,” he said and cocked his head, daring her to challenge him.
Amber cocked her head back at him. “How about I leave the laundry for tomorrow and wash you instead?”
He grunted smug assent and started walking. “I’ll be back before dark. Be ready for me. And be rested.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She waited until he’d put a little more distance between them before adding, “Sexist scaly jerk,” but she said it quietly. He didn’t hear her, which was good. She didn’t really mean it. Well, she sort of meant it, but not in a bitchy way. And she did like the idea of having the camp to herself while she took a bath. Privacy was something they’d had all too little of up in that cave.
So she put his tent together, started a fire and cut up some kipwe to warm on it, filled the flasks at the little stream nearby and put the heat-stones in the coals, then sat on the hide-cushioned sled to watch the clouds roll by while the water got hot. She had no itchy feeling between her shoulders or that prickly sensation at the back of her neck that people talked about when they said they ‘felt watched.’ And if she had, she would have only thought it was Meoraq, swinging by to look in on her before continuing on his patrol. After all this time, even hearing Meoraq talk of cities and other traveling Sheulek and even the various sinners who had been exiled to die in the wildlands, it simply never occurred to her think she was anything but alone.
She wasn’t.
It really wasn’t very windy today. The smoke from her fire made a strong, obvious arrow in the sky, pointing right at her camp. These raiders had come a long way from their usual route to investigate. There were only five of them now; the other six remained with the slaves they had acquired at the nearby city of Praxas, where they had traded bundles of dried phesok for the cast-off daughters of those who had them to spare. The raiders were certainly not above attacking Praxas (two of their number even now had been taken as young boys during such raids), but when trade was good, it behooved them all to use diplomatic measures.
Now they had spied a potential new target and so they came, crawling on their bellies as soon as they were near enough to see the lone silhouette at the glowing coals, blades out and ready. They had expected a warrior—it was always wisest to expect the worst, although far more common to find instead some fool youth who fancied himself a hunter or, ha, a raider—and they were ten body-lengths from the fire before they realized, almost in unison, that they had no idea what sat at camp before them.
They stopped, exchanging questioning glances in the silent way of pack predators. The man who was their leader considered for perhaps eight heartbeats. Then he gestured with his sword and the crawl resumed. The essential meat of the matter had not changed. Regardless of what form it took, this was prey. That it was also strange might or might not mean greater profit, but one could only know that once the prey was taken.
So they took it.
Amber didn’t hear them; the light breeze hissing across the grass covered what nominal sound they made on their approach. She didn’t see them; the fire before her occupied all her attention. She had no warning whatsoever…and yet, for no reason, she looked back over her shoulder.
Her eyes locked at once and without immediate comprehension on the eyes of the raider’s leader. Her first thought, after the eternity of the split-second that followed, was that he had all Meoraq’s same features and still really looked nothing like him.
Then she dove for her spear, snatched it and a handful of skin-slicing grass off the ground, and swung to face him.
Their need for stealth now moot, they rose and fanned out without speaking, flanking her, herding her from the fire so expertly that she didn’t even know they were doing it until they had her away and closed in a ring around her.
‘Woman, they’re going to have you dead in about three seconds,’ Amber thought, stunned and a little embarrassed by this development. She had to do something fast, something unpredictable.
She lunged forward with a howl, then spun around and blindly stabbed. Her first feint, she thought vaguely. A damned effective one. The raider before her—now behind her—had drawn up his arms and crossed his blades to block her strike; the raider behind her—now before her—had rushed right on to the point of her spear. A good thing, too. If it hadn’t been for his strength and the power of his swift attack, she never could impaled him so deeply.
They stared at each other with what was left of the spear between them for what felt like hours and could not have been more than a single second. He said something in a tight, confused voice, but even though they were words she surely knew, Amber’s shocked mind could make no sense of them. She twisted vainly on the spear to try and free it, but succeeded only in making him belch blood all down his chest and hers, so she snatched the short, hooked sword out of his hand instead and shoved him back.
He fell, but the others closed in even tighter, and she had been reduced to the reach of her own arm and the dying man’s sword.
They eyed her as the man on the ground groaned and kicked, and Amber stood with the point of the curved blade jerking from one target to another.
“Ease off,” one of them said, and that time her brain made the translation without effort. He sheathed his sword and unhooked a short length of cord from his belt, weighted at both ends with bell-shaped lumps of metal. He began to back up, swinging this fun new toy in tight circles at his side, watching her. “Weapons down. I want it alive. Aqizu, stay behind it.”
She snatched a glance behind her, slashing at the lizardman’s throat, but he was too fast for her.
“I think it heard you,” one of them remarked.
“I think it understood you,” another added, more meaningfully. “That’s no animal.”
“When was the last time you saw an animal in clothes?” their leader asked in his calm, intent way. Without taking his eyes off her, without even seeming to move, he suddenly interrupted the steady shush-shush of his weighted cord with a throw. Amber darted aside and back, slashing wildly, but she was not his target; the weighted bell on the cord’s end crunched into the groaning man’s forehead, leaving a sickeningly bloodless hollow where it had landed. He pulled the line back with a zip and a flick of his wrist, resuming its steady circles without any sign of effort or interest in the fate of the man he’d just killed. “Keep your guard up. Do not hurt it. Go, Vek.”
She sensed more than saw the attack and swung around to meet it, slicing at the grasping hands and the face behind them indiscriminately. The blade of her sword skidded along his scales, then came down just right between his two middle fingers and sliced his hand in half all the way to his wrist. He let out a shriek right about the same instant the weighted cord wrapped itself around her arm.
Amber grabbed the sword from her trapped hand and let his zip-flick-tug take her right to him, but he was as fast as Meoraq and caught her wrist with a good six centimeters between the quivering tip of the short blade and his throat.
“Easy,” he said, almost singing it, the way another man might try to calm a stray dog. One hand pushed her weapon aside; the other swiftly reeled in the slack on his weighted cord until the chance to break his hold was good and gone. “Easy, little one. No one here will hurt you.”
“I mean to fucking hurt it!” Mr. Split-Hand snarled, bent double over his gushing arm. “I mean to hurt the damn thing plenty!”
“Quiet, Vek. Don’t fight me, little one. Your tiny bones look easy to break. For the moment, I want you whole.”
She struggled anyway, fighting a losing battle for just one chance to stab…but with the first flagging of her strength, he suddenly swept her arm around and pulled, letting her momentum carry her stumbling forward into the space he had just been, and then she was on her knees with him swiftly tying her wrists to her elbows behind her back. So she screamed, as point
less as that was, but wherever Meoraq was, he wasn’t there to hear her.
Maybe they’d found him first.
“Fierce little thing,” the leader grunted, planting his knee in the small of her back for the necessary leverage to catch and hold her legs together. She heard the shu-u-up as he pulled his belt off one-handed, a sound that had always meant Meoraq in an amorous mood, and Amber screamed again, uselessly.
“What are you going to do with it?” someone asked, nudging at her with his boot.
“There has always been coin for oddities. This is odder than most. Up, little one.” He pulled; her shoulders creaked in their sockets and she arched instinctively backwards, helping him pull her to her bound feet. He bent, his grip firm and impersonal, and tipped her up and over his shoulder.
She bit him, her teeth grating over two or three scales before she found a gripping place and dug in, scissoring her jaws together with all the strength she had left in her. Hot blood gushed into her mouth. He barked and flung her forwards again, inadvertently helping her rip away a scale so that she could spit it defiantly at his knees when she landed at his feet.
“God’s teeth,” someone remarked.
“Sharp teeth, at any rate,” the leader answered dryly. He checked the damage, which was nominal but bled heavily without any scales to help seal it, and as soon as he was finished shrugging off his harness and cinching it tight again with a bandage beneath it, he hunkered down before her and smiled. It was a gentle smile, disturbingly sincere, and it stayed that way as he showed Amber his open palm, drew it deliberately back and then slapped her hard across the mouth.
She hit the ground, sucking dirt up her nose and into her throat, so that all the involuntary brays of pain she made after that were choked. Now she could taste her blood, too, and feel the great, spreading heat of hurt where her lips had been mashed. But when his hand came down to cup her chin and turn her toward him, Amber exposed her bloody teeth at him and hissed through them, just like Meoraq did whenever he was good and pissed.
Several lizardmen stepped back.
The leader glanced tolerantly down at his chest where her defiant hiss had sprayed him with blood. He touched a few droplets, rubbed his fingers, then put out his hand. “Give me your belt, Vek.”
Split-Hand glared at the leader, then at Amber, then stomped over to his dead friend and took that belt instead.
The leader accepted that (not without a dark and watchful stare), then made a loop of it, waited for Amber to stop coughing, then fit it over her tossing head. She clamped her teeth together. He pinched her nostrils shut. She bucked and flailed and finally had to breathe, whereupon he worked the belt between her screaming jaws and pulled it tight.
“Now we try this again, little one,” he said conversationally, sweeping her up and over his shoulder. “But you had ought to know that if I have to pull every fang out of your fierce little head to ensure your good behavior, that is exactly what I will do. Mind yourself. Let me see it, Vek.”
Amber could see nothing beyond the leader’s backside and the ground as Split-hand presumably presented his injury. She wriggled, chewing at the belt until her lips bled, and finally fell slack, gasping wetly around the leather. She was caught; she felt that she could keep fighting, at least for a few more minutes, but she knew she couldn’t break free. She wasn’t ready to give up yet, but she had to have a better goal than making him mad enough to kill her. She had to wait. Another chance to escape might come along, but until then, she just had to wait.
“No good,” someone was saying. “It has to come off.”
“I know it has to come off, cock-rubber! Fuck Gann!”
“Not here. I have no reason to think there is only one of these.” The shoulder she rode jostled with a meaningful shrug. “Get what there is and get away.”
The raiders got to work rifling through the packs around the fire. There wasn’t enough to occupy all of them. One of them came strolling around to look at her instead, fingering at her hair.
“This is easily the most bizarre thing I have ever seen,” he said.
The leader grunted—Meoraq’s grunt, the one that meant he acknowledged the comment but didn’t feel any strong need to converse.
“You mean to sell it?” the other man said once she was done. He was still touching her hair.
“Might.”
“To who?”
“To me!” Vek snapped. “Hear me, Zhuqa, if you put that thing on the block without telling me, I will put a hook on the wrist where my fucking hand used to be and put the hook in your fucking head!”
“If I sell it, I’ll give you due warning and a cut of credit besides. Now calm down and remember who you are speaking to.”
“It’s mine!” Vek spat, but he spat it without shouting. He came stomping around to the leader’s back to glare at her, holding the bandaged lump of his ruined hand. He flared his open mouth threateningly, then dove forward and cracked his forehead into hers. She heard him stalk off muttering as she swayed near the grey area of unconsciousness, and finally, with a mental sigh of defeat, she fell on through.
* * *
Just as the raiders had not been able to tell human from dumaq at any great distance by the full light of the fire, so Meoraq could not tell dumaq from human by moonlight at the hour of his return.
He had been in a fair mood most of the evening, wandering far and observing the animals of Gedai that were ostensibly his reason for this patrol with only half an eye. He prayed as he walked, silently at first, then aloud, and soon was singing some of his favorite hymns at full voice. Amber wasn’t there to mutter in her throat or heave her pained sighs or slap at her face. He loved his wife—more and more, that word felt true and right and real—but they had spent too many days this winter riding about in one another’s pockets. He liked her company, but he missed his solitude and he meant to enjoy it as much as possible while he could.
At length, even as he saw the sun low to the mountains and knew his time was ending, he found a friendly jut of stone and sat himself to meditate, but his first moments in that welcome stillness were unquiet. He could do this back at camp, couldn’t he? And truth, he supposed he could, albeit with Amber pacing restlessly somewhere at the outside edge of his perceptions. She’d want to talk at him or involve him in some way in the domestic things she did or maybe just pull him into the tent for sex. Meoraq was opposed to none of these things, but once in a while, a man just liked to meditate.
Still, that vague sense of unease persisted. A tickle of wind, the rough edge of the rock he sat on, the distant call of some unknown beast—every little distraction woke him wholly to his clay until he resorted to a child’s trick, lying flat on his back with an arm crooked over his eyes, chanting the Prophet’s Prayer over and over until meaning bled away and it was all just sound. Sound and blackness, yes, but still not peace. In its pursuit, he not only failed to truly meditate, but also entirely lost track of time. He believed that he spent perhaps an hour in that fruitless endeavor, but when he finally cried surrender and opened his eyes, it was full dark.
Amber must be terrified. No, strike that, she was furious. And in either case, she was just fool enough to come looking for him if she believed him lost or injured.
Cursing, he hurried back to camp, but ‘hurry’ was a relative term after dark. There was enough of a moon behind the clouds to show him his backtrail at first, but the wind which had been so calm all day now stirred itself up, soon erasing all sign of his passage until he followed nothing but a hope that this lesson in the cost of man’s pride would end at his camp and not in a nest of ravening tachuqis.
But it had been his own camp in the end, although he glimpsed it from well to the east of where he’d thought it was, and he thought it was Amber sleeping there when he finally came to it. There was no tent and no fire and this he at first presumed with a mixture of resignation and annoyance was her way of telling him he was a scaly son of a bitch for leaving her so long, which was spiteful and childish, yet he
would apologize because he was Sheulek and a Sheulek took the higher path.
Then the clouds above him thinned so that the little light from the crescent moon grew stronger and all at once, what had been Amber became a dead man. It seemed Sheul gave him hours outside of Time to see this, to feel it, and only when he fully understood did the weight of the world crash back into his clay.
His feet took him forward without conscious thought. He reached only to stab the corpse—he had drawn his kzung, it seemed, how curious—then staggered away, staring wildly in all directions for Amber—where was Amber?—and seeing nothing, only the night—why had he left her so long?—and the wind whipping at Gann’s back.
He cupped his mouth and howled for her. Not with words, but just a cry, a dumb animal baying that he had never before imagined any dumaq could make. The wind alone answered, changing its course to drive him back. His boot struck the body. He looked at it and, with a sudden savagery he did not feel until it was upon him, he wrenched his kzung from the corpse and hacked at it again.
The head came free at his first blow. The chest cracked apart at his fourth. He took the left arm. Bisected the rib. The right arm. He struck until it was meat and bone and two legs. He struck until he had no wind and no moisture in his mouth but the clotted blood splashing up at him from the ground. He struck until he fell to his knees in splintery gore and leaned back, gasping.
He listened then, as he should have listened hours ago, but Sheul had nothing to say to him now.
Amber.
He dragged himself up, shaking on legs like water, and pulled his blade free of the mess on the ground. How long? The blood that touched his tongue had cooled, but was yet warm. The raiders might be close still. He looked and saw nothing, no sign but dumaq blood in spatters across the trampled grass. An hour ago, he would have seen their trail leading away, before the light failed and the wind grew strong.