by R. Lee Smith
“And that is the grace and the glory of God!” cried Amber, reaching out to catch at him. “And you know it, Meoraq! You are the master of your clay and you know I am not your enemy! I’m your wife! I’m the woman you were born into this world to find, remember?” She grabbed a handful of her own hair and shook it.
He hissed, but shakily, then turned his head and looked at the braid that wrapped his bicep. He flinched, spat dazedly in the direction of the crying baby, then looked at Amber again. One hand rose, hovered in the air, and dropped again. He rubbed distractedly at his cock, not masturbating, but only an exhausted man kneading at a deep, overused ache. She reached out to tug his loin-plate loose and he watched, frowning, as he retracted.
“You are not your clay,” she told him, lifting her hand toward his face. He flinched back twice before he let her touch him. “You are Uyane Meoraq and you would never hurt me.”
He opened his mouth and hissed silently through his teeth, through her fingers.
“Take six breaths,” she said. “Count them off with me. One. For the Prophet.”
He inhaled in hitches.
“Two for his brunt. Breathe with me, Meoraq. Three for Uyane.”
He grunted.
“Four for…for…” God, he’d been counting all winter long, why didn’t she know these? “Mykrm!” she blurted, praying she was right. “Five is for Oyan—”
“Ash,” he said, in a voice like char itself. “Stained. Leaf.”
“Six is for…is for…”
“Thaliszr.”
Recognition came like dawn behind the clouds of this world: dim and colorless, but steadily growing until its light was complete. He stood up, and it was Meoraq who did it, the real Meoraq. He looked around, seeing this place, seeing her at his feet. The yellow stripes stayed high and bright on his throat, but he sheathed his sword and held out his hand.
“Please be okay now,” Amber whispered, and took it.
“I’m burning,” Meoraq said curtly, pulling her to her feet and releasing her at once. “But I see you. I think…I’m here.” He looked back at the baby again, then at Xzem, who had not moved in all this time, and finally at his other sword. It seemed to surprise him to see it lying on the floor. He had to check his belt and see that it wasn’t there before he went over to pick it up again. “Stay close behind me,” he ordered, and headed for the door.
“Wait!”
Meoraq watched her limp across the room with distracted concern, but it wasn’t until she bent down and picked up the baby that he seemed to realize what she was doing.
“No,” he said.
“I have to.” Amber hugged the baby closer and pointed at Xzem. “Tell her she can come with us!”
“I will not.” Meoraq glanced swiftly down both sides of the hall and came back in, reaching out his hand to her. “There is no time for this! The enemy is all around us! Now come!”
Amber bit back her first impulsive words on the subject of how much time he’d had on his hands when the issue at stake was sex. That wasn’t his fault and they sure didn’t have the time to fight about it. She said, “I’m not leaving without this baby.”
“I did not come here to liberate the whole of this camp!”
“Are you sure?”
His hand lowered.
“God doesn’t give you what you want,” said Amber. “You tell me that all the time. God sends you where you need to be.”
“If we try to save them all, we will surely be taken,” he said, not arguing, but only stating a fact. “We must leave them. Come. They will not harm their own.”
Amber stalked over to Xzem and put her hand on her shoulder. After a tense, shivering silence, Xzem sighed and loosened her shielding arms enough to show him Rosek.
Meoraq looked at that for a long time. Then he looked at her. And at the ceiling, not in his exasperated are-you-seeing-this-too way, but in an uncertain frown. He stayed that way for a while, probably praying. “So be it,” he said at the end. He beckoned to Xzem and she rose, her neck bent and silent tears still falling, to follow him.
“Wait,” Amber said. “I think there’s another way out.”
Meoraq glanced in the direction of the stairwell, which was suspiciously quiet, then followed her pointing finger to the ground, where dots of blood marked the path taken by the panicked raider she’d passed on the way in. He took a few steps in that direction, keeping his sword at the ready as he searched the darkness. “Do you know where it leads?”
“To the well-room,” Xzem said softly.
They both looked at her.
“There is a second stair,” she told them, stroking Rosek’s swollen head. “But the door is always locked and only Zhuqa and his most trusted hold the key.”
“I’ll go get it,” said Amber, and turned to flee.
Meoraq caught angrily at her arm, but looked at the baby and released her, unsure.
“I’ll be all right,” Amber promised, not at all certain this was true, but knowing she could get to Zhuqa’s room and back faster than grieving Xzem could be coaxed to follow. “Stay with her! I’ll be right back!”
His spines flattened. He took the baby and shifted it to one arm, gripping his kzung tightly. “Run, then.”
She tried, galloping through a haze of pain much faster than her hip wanted to hold her, and conscious of every second as it slipped by. There were two bodies on the landing, two more sprawled over the stairs, but no one was waiting there to cut her into pieces. They all knew better than to fight in the cramped, dark shaft, she supposed. And just the fact that it was this dark meant that they’d shut the access door. It couldn’t be blocked from the outside, so if they’d shut it, it was to keep Meoraq blind to how many men were waiting for him on the other side.
‘It could be worse,’ thought Amber, forcing herself down the stairs as noisily, in her own mind at least, as a rhinoceros. ‘They could be getting ready to drop a bomb down the shaft.’
She ran faster.
Zhuqa’s door was yawning open just as she’d left it. She bulled through and limped around him to the heap of his clothes, and thank God he’d actually undressed for his little game tonight, because he’d never done that before and she’d been so badly beaten up between one thing and another that she honestly didn’t think she could have rolled him over to get the keys. Amber got them, looked around, and then—what the hell—limped over to get her shift because it was bound to be cold and rainy outside and there was no point escaping from raiders just to freeze—
Amber froze.
She thought, ‘I didn’t see that.’
She thought, ‘No, I did see that and I just think I didn’t.’
She thought, ‘Please, let me have seen that.’
She turned around.
On the floor between her and the table, Zhuqa lay naked in a thick, black clot of blood with his eyes open and a few splinters of what were probably his teeth strewn loosely in front of his mouth.
The floor directly next to the table was empty.
Well, not entirely empty. She could see the hilt of Zhuqa’s knife lying where she’d dropped it. And she could see, a little ways away from it, the broken blade that she sure thought she’d left buried in Iziz’s head.
It wasn’t even all that bloody. Just a little smear at the very tip. There wasn’t anything at all on the flat end, where she reasoned he would have had to grab it to pull it out, if…if she’d really hit him.
“I hit him,” she whispered, staring wildly all around her at the stubbornly empty room. “I know I hit him.”
And she had hit him. She’d hit him so hard, her hand had gone numb. So hard, the blade had broken. So hard—
—she’d knocked him out.
Oh God.
She’d only stabbed him through the scales. She’d hit the bone of his skull and broke the knife. She hadn’t killed him. She might not have even hurt him all that much.
Iziz was still alive.
‘Well, by all means stand around,’ Bo Peep i
nvited. ‘You can apologize when he comes back.’
She shuddered once, hugely, as if physically shaking free of the hold that empty patch of tiled floor had on her. The first step was still hard. After that, she turned and bolted down the hall like her hip had never been hurt at all. It had been and it let her know it, but by God it didn’t slow her down.
She tore up the stairs, her bare feet banging out echoes they must surely be able to hear wherever they were waiting to ambush them. Meoraq ran to meet her, hugging the baby under his arm like a football, so that her first words on reaching him weren’t anything to do with Iziz at all but a shrill, “Oh for Christ’s sake, lizardman, what’s wrong with you?!” She gave him the keys, took the baby, and smacked him in the side of the head, all in the same half-panicked movement.
His arm swung hard enough to make the air howl, but he caught the blow before it hit her. They both stared at his fist, cocked and shaking in the air—he, with glazed eyes and yellow flashes at his throat; she, in open-mouthed astonishment. He recovered first. Without a word, he turned around and ran the other way.
Xzem was waiting at the end of the long hall, next to the fresh body of a raider. It might have been the same one she’d passed earlier; she couldn’t tell when he was lying face-down like that and didn’t want to look. Meoraq worked the keys and tucked it into his belt immediately, freeing his hand for his samr. The stairwell on the other side of the door was dark and silent, catching every sound and throwing it back in echoes. Meoraq listened, then closed the door to hiss, “If it goes badly, run and I will find you. If I don’t find you…go on to Xi’Matezh. God will send you on.”
Knowing there wasn’t time for words of comfort, even if she could have thought of something to say, Amber reached out and touched his arm.
And felt him stiffen. Shudder. And pull out of her grip. He started up the stairs without looking at her.
Suddenly, Amber’s hip hurt more. She let Xzem go ahead of her, watching Meoraq climb around the corner and out of sight without ever once glancing her way. The baby snuffled against her chest and reached out its tiny hand to pinch at her. She hugged it closer, dragging herself up one stair at a time, thinking, ‘That shouldn’t be much of a shock either, little girl.’
And the worst of it was, it really wasn’t.
The stairwell was capped, like the other stair, with an access door that opened into a covered building. This one had the look of a stable, long and not too narrow, with stall-like partitions indicated by wooden poles and plenty of harnesses and lengths of chain hanging on the walls.
It was a stable, built for raiders’ cattle, the two-legged kind. The only other door was at the far wall, where Hruuzk was yoking slaves together in a double line. He didn’t bother to look around when he grunted, “This is all there were in the pens. I didn’t stop to hunt up the rest of them. Where do you want me?”
Meoraq attacked. He did it without asking for prayers, without any warning at all. His boots struck three times against the planks before he leapt, and by then Hruuzk had already shoved the team of slaves away and was turning to meet him.
They crashed together, four swords and two bodies in a terrible riot of screaming women and spraying blood. Amber thrust the baby into Xzem’s listless embrace and darted forward, snatching up the first thing she saw that even looked like a weapon: a short length of chain attached to a heavy collar. She didn’t try to swing it—couldn’t have, not without hitting Meoraq, a slave, or Xzem and the babies—but she jumped on Hruuzk’s mammoth back the very instant he offered it to her and bashed him on the head as hard as she could. If she could knock Iziz out with a knife-tip, she reasoned, she could surely take Hruuzk out with an iron ring, or whatever the metal was.
Hruuzk did stagger. He also reached back and plucked her off him, swinging her on a short, violent arc over his shoulder to strike up against his chest with his sword suddenly at her throat. “Drop it or she dies!” he bellowed.
Meoraq lunged without expression, stabbing his samr under Amber’s arm and into the slave-master’s heart. She felt and heard the splintering of bone when Meoraq twisted and then wrenched the blade free. He knotted a fist in her shift and yanked her to him as the slave-master collapsed. She could feel the hot gush of his heart’s blood on her back, not quite shocking enough to distract her from the equally hot tickle of blood on her front, streaming from the little nick on her throat where Hruuzk’s sword had cut her.
She stared at him.
“Quiet that…Quiet the child.” He let go of her and moved on to the outer door, pulling Zhuqa’s keys from his belt.
The baby was screaming, tiny fists balled and hammering at the scaled arm that held it. Xzem gave it up wordlessly and stroked at Rosek’s swollen snout. She was still crying. Amber was dangerously close to joining her.
Meoraq cracked the door open and looked tensely out, threw the captive women an assessing stare, and finally gestured to Amber. She joined him at the door, not so numb that she failed to notice the perfectly chilling glance he sent at the baby now purring resentfully against her breast. But he moved aside, careful not to touch her, and let her look.
She didn’t try to count them. The distance and the dark would have made that difficult even if there weren’t so many or if they were holding still instead of prowling impatiently around the building where they thought Meoraq had to emerge. She could hear shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. Moving torches throughout the ruins told her they were making a search of the other structures, and sooner or later, they’d come here.
“For the moment, they still believe they are attacked by a band of men,” Meoraq told her, grimly watching the torches. “And they have not yet fully rallied. Once they do, or once they learn it is only one warrior who stands against them, it is done. Be silent, all of you!” Meoraq snapped, and the white-noise whimpering of the captives dialed itself down into sniffles. To Amber, brusquely, he said, “We will go out, that way, around the wall. When it is at our back, we run. Be aware, the wind will cover only so much sound.”
“It’ll be quiet now,” said Amber, holding the baby securely against her body.
He grunted, checked outside, and looked back at the women. “We will go as far as we can as fast as we are able, but it is three days running to Praxas.”
She didn’t think she had much of a run left in her, but didn’t dare to say so.
He grunted and moved away to unlock the women. Amber stayed at the door and watched the torches track slowly back and forth across the camp, listening to chains clink behind her as Meoraq gave everyone their orders. Amber’s hip ached. She shifted her weight onto her other leg and listened to the baby purr until Meoraq rejoined her at the door, brushing her aside to peer out. His body was hard as marble. He didn’t say anything to her. He waited, coiled and ready, then pushed the door open and moved out, sword in hand. The women followed, as tight in their formation as if they were still yoked together. Then Xzem, her head down and tears shimmering over her scales. Last of all, Amber, straining to limp at any kind of speed and praying the baby wouldn’t protest this treatment as long as it was her doing the jostling. By the time she got around the side of the stable, the only one she could see at all was Xzem, and only for a few more seconds.
She ran anyway, blind in the night, following the smudge of moonlight behind the churning clouds, even though it showed her nothing but the ghost of her own body. When Meoraq at last came lunging out of this impenetrable black, it was only her breathless exhaustion that kept her from screaming surprise.
He caught her arm as she staggered, and let her go again as soon as she had her feet solidly under her. He looked at the baby and his flat spines quivered against his skull.
“I’m not leaving it!” she hissed. “So don’t you even ask me!”
“You can barely carry yourself, woman!”
“Then leave me!” Tears of horror sparked, as if she somehow hadn’t known she was going to say it even with the words in her own mouth. She shoo
k her head, her arms tightening around the baby until it squeaked in annoyance. “Leave us both!”
Meoraq looked at her for a long time.
And then he turned around.
As Amber pulled in the shaky breath that would have become her first wail of despair, he dropped to one knee and made a gesture like throwing something over his shoulder. He did not speak. His back was very stiff and straight.
“Are you…praying?” she ventured.
“No!” he snapped back, and made the gesture again. “Hold on to me. Hurry!”
She couldn’t wrap her legs around his hips without a moan, and that moan became a wrenching cry when he seized her thighs and hupped her up higher. She dug one arm around his neck, kept the other tight around the baby, now riding squeezed between them and not very happy about it, and Meoraq began to run.
Even burdened as he was with her weight, he caught up to the others in just a few minutes and soon was running at their head again. Amber bumped along in agony on his back, clenching her jaws to mute the screams she could not stop herself from making, and just waited for it to end.
12
He could not run them all night, although he tried. Their pace slowed and slowed and finally, he was forced to cast it all in Sheul’s hands and set them down in a camp. He allowed them no fire. They had no food. He gave Amber the swallows that were left in his waterskin and she annoyed him immediately by passing it off to the slave-mother, who drank it all without thanks and resumed her silent vigil over her dying child.
The wind gave way to rain. The women huddled together to defend against it as best they could, miserable and making little secret of it. Amber sat apart from the rest of them and held the infant close to her heart. Meoraq knew she was watching him, but he could not make himself go and sit beside her yet. He made endless patrols in the dark, waiting for an enemy that never showed itself, and caught himself several times rubbing restlessly at his loin-plate. He had burned longer and deeper this night than he had ever even imagined, but the flames were still close. He wanted to find raiders in pursuit of them, wanted to give that blessed heat possession of his hands and heart and mind. Failing that, he wanted to lie with his woman, but not in front of an audience of six witnessing slaves.