by R. Lee Smith
They walked to the ravine, hand in hand. The wind was warm and light. It was about as sunny as it ever got on this planet, which meant that it was visible as a smudgy disc behind the clouds. A nice day.
They peed, then climbed back to the top of the ravine and sat down. “Funny how girls can never go to the bathroom alone,” said Nicci, plucking absently at blades of grass.
“What did Crandall want you to tell me?”
“He wanted to know if you were pregnant.”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“Are you?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
Nicci shrugged and tossed some grass away. There wasn’t enough wind to carry it far. Most of it landed on her leg.
“It isn’t funny,” said Amber.
“I told him you throw up a lot when you get upset. At least you used to.”
It was Amber’s turn to pick at the grass. “I didn’t know you knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“You don’t like it when people think you have…you know.”
“Problems?” Amber offered with a listless smile.
“Feelings.”
That was ugly. The wind stayed warm.
“I used to figure that if you were bulimic, you’d be losing weight,” Nicci said after a little time had stretched itself out to the snapping point. “But you weren’t, so I figured you were fine. And then, at the end, when you were losing weight…I just didn’t care that much. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure it was.
The walls of the windbreak were coming down. Nicci twisted around to watch, plucking more grass. “Mom used to get morning-sick,” she said.
“Yeah, I know.” Most of the time, it was how she knew to go to the aborters.
“So did I.”
Amber closed her eyes and pressed at them.
“Want to see where they took it out?”
She didn’t, but Nicci leaned back and opened up her tunic to show the raised pink dash of the scar over her belly. It was surprisingly neat.
“They had something so I didn’t feel it,” Nicci said, rubbing at it. “And it kept me pretty high afterwards, too. It was nice, while it lasted. I don’t know how they knew I was pregnant. I wasn’t showing. But I guess they were doing these exams almost every day…and they’re not, you know, cavemen. They know what they’re doing. It’s amazing, really, what they can do without a real hospital. But when you stop and think about it…scalpels and needles and things…none of those are machines. Anyway, I guess they might have heard the heartbeat or something. I don’t know.”
“I’m so sorry, Nicci.”
“I’m not. I didn’t want it. It was one of them.”
Amber watched her little sister close her tunic and tie up her belt again, trying to make that make some kind of sense. “What do you mean?” she asked at last. “That…That it would turn out like…like Scott?”
“That would be pretty bad, too,” Nicci agreed with another careless shrug. “But I mean it was one of them. One of the dumaqs.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Whatever. I saw it come out of me. I know what it was.”
“But…But they’re aliens!”
Nicci picked some more grass and dropped it.
“It’s not possible!” Amber said, louder.
“Commander Scott said it was probably the Vaccine.”
“What?”
“It mutates, remember? So that we don’t catch any alien viruses. We just sat there in the Sleeper for God knows how many years, soaking in that Vaccine, letting it change…whatever it felt like changing. You know the only thing that stops us from catching pregnant from any old…you know? Stuff? It’s that our bodies don’t know what it is, so it doesn’t take. Everything has to match up, you know? All these, I don’t know, millions and millions of connections.”
“But—”
“But we had the Vaccine,” said Nicci in a thoughtful way, “and here’s what I think. You know how regular vaccines work, right? They’re little teeny tiny pieces of the virus that makes you sick, just enough so that you make the, I don’t know, the anti-virus. But our Vaccine works on all of them. How is that possible, Amber? You went to the seminars. You remember all this. How can one shot be made up of billions and billions of different diseases, even alien ones?”
“Because it…it changes,” said Amber. “It finds the bug and it copies it so we can make our own cure before we ever get sick.”
“Right,” said Nicci, nodding. “It finds the bug. And it copies it. It takes our cells, with our DNA, and it changes them.”
Amber stared at her.
“Well…every new drug has unexpected side-effects, right? Headaches. Dizziness. Insomnia.” Nicci looked back into the sky to watch the sun climb higher. “Ours just may cause lizard-babies.”
Zhuqa. Zhuqa, over and over. It was impossible and she didn’t believe it and she didn’t care what Nicci thought or what she said she’d seen, but oh God, not with Zhuqa.
She looked back and saw Meoraq standing at the edge of camp with his arms folded, watching them while all the other lizardmen rolled the windbreak into bundles and shouldered supplies. Her heart ached once, as sharply as a stabbing, and then bled down into her belly.
‘He is never going to want to touch me again,’ thought Amber, almost calmly.
Then she bent over without warning and threw up again.
“Yeah,” said Nicci, watching her. “You’re just upset. That’s what I told Mr. Crandall. Come on. We’d better go.”
* * *
They walked the day out undisturbed either by men from Praxas or from Gann, not that there was much of a distinction. They had a stream to keep their flasks filled and good stony ground that would not show their tracks and always the cover of trees around them, so if that made a day good, it was a good day, but they made miserable distance.
Onahi’s men marched in pairs around the rest, relieving Meoraq’s burden considerably as he watched for the ambush that never came. The women were slow, still fearful of the open wilds and unused to so much walking, but they were obedient and not difficult to manage even so. The humans, now. Oh, the humans…
They walked as if they had only just learned how that morning, constantly staggering and catching at one another, constantly out of breath, constantly whining at his back. Meoraq wasn’t completely insensitive to their condition. He knew they had been penned all winter, ill-fed and ill-used. He knew they were trying. He let them rest an hour for nearly every hour walked and never said a word against it. Some muttered thanks, but not many. Some clustered around Scott and whispered, but not all. It did his bitter heart good to see that the polish was finally dimming on that gilded lump of ghet-shit, but he could still feel color itching in his throat all that interminable day.
So he halted them in the early evening after traveling less than two spans—less a call for camp than a cry of surrender—with plenty of good hours left in the day to hunt or patrol or just pray before night truly fell. The walls went up. Fires were lit. The women went to work brewing tea and heating cold kipwe, all but Xzem, who knelt with Amber in the mouth of a tent with the infant singing in her arms and Nicci close by to watch. Most of the humans rested by their fool abbot, but Eric went out to gather deadfall for the fires and Dag actually helped the women with the cooking.
Around the small camp, Onahi’s men—now men under Uyane, he supposed—kept watch. Their quiet talk eased him; not their words, which were exactly the sort of low garrison-talk one would expect, but just their speech. Dumaqi in male voices, relaxed and uncomplicated, with meanings he didn’t have to guess at. He didn’t think he was lonely and wouldn’t have believed it if someone told him he was, but the pleasure that came just to listen was almost enough to take even the ugliness of Praxas from his heart. How much better would it be, he wondered, to be home again in Xeqor, to hear not only familiar words but familiar voices? See his brothers’ faces? Sleep in his own bed?
He was ready, he realized. The fate that had been so damning when he first confronted it now seemed to him as welcome as Sheul’s own Halls. Home. Family. Rest.
Amber.
And there his gaze lay for some time, upon his wife and the infant she held to her heart. She sensed it, looked up. Their eyes met and Sheul’s fires, cooled but never entirely gone, surged at once to greater life.
Meoraq turned away and beckoned Onahi to him. He had to do it twice; the other man’s attention had been fixed and somewhat glazed upon Xzem. “Call your sentries in,” he ordered. “I want a private hour with my woman. No one is to leave this camp for any reason until my return.”
“I mark.” Onahi’s eyes traveled the camp, counting his men…but came back to Xzem. And lingered.
“These are women of my House,” Meoraq reminded him, trying not to sound as if he were also warning him.
“I will not dishonor your camp, sir.”
Meoraq grunted, now studying Onahi instead of Amber. The fires were insistent, but a Sheulek was the master of every impulse, even that one. “Have you seen women before?” he asked bluntly.
“At a distance.” Onahi managed with effort to look at Meoraq. “But no mother…apart from my own.” He hesitated, clearly battling the urge to speak further, and ultimately defeated by it. “I have gone to Gann, sir. I submit myself to your judgment.”
Meoraq’s spines snapped up. “Eh?”
“I have gone to Gann,” Onahi said again, his words all but bleeding in the air. “I have tried to pray. I have begged our Father’s forgiveness all this day and all last night, but I…”
Meoraq waited, beginning to feel restless now that the first astonishment of this incredible confession was fading. The fires in his belly burned and Amber was watching him. “You?” he prompted impatiently.
“It is unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother,” Onahi said and seemed to break. Without moving, his strained body became soft as clay. “It is unforgiveable. The taint of my city is on me. I must submit to your sword.”
Meoraq took a moment to puzzle this out. “You want a woman,” he said at last.
Onahi closed his eyes.
So did Meoraq, before someone could see him rolling them. He rubbed at his brow-ridges, took six breaths (without sighing and that was nearly an ordeal in itself), and said, “I do not see Gann’s hand on you, watchman. It is the fires of our Father you feel. Take a woman.”
“It is unforgiveable—”
“Take another woman.” Meoraq beckoned to his own and started to turn away. Sheul’s hand fell on him at once; he turned back and yes, Onahi was staring at Xzem.
There was something in this, he was certain, something he was meant to see…but whatever it was, it would have to wait. Intellectually, he knew no man had ever died of lust, but his belly felt as if it were filled with molten lead and his thoughts had begun to slip toward the same killing black that took him in the arena. If he did not take his woman soon, he thought it very likely that Sheul would take her in his stead. As for Onahi—
“Go to my tent,” Meoraq ordered. “Make your prayers and be prepared to submit to my judgment upon my return.”
Onahi saluted and went without question as Amber came near, looking back over her shoulder either at the baby or at Nicci. “I’m really worried—” she began.
“Come with me,” he said and left the camp.
Onahi’s watchmen raised their fists as he passed by, but he was beyond acknowledging them. He strode swiftly out between the walls and as soon as Amber had joined him, he took her roughly by the arm and walked as far as he could stand to go. He refused to rut with his woman on the ground where anyone could hear them. He could see a sturdy-looking tree twenty paces away, maybe thirty; it may as well be a thousand.
“Wait,” said Amber, pulling at him.
He grunted and kept going, dragging her with him, seeing nothing but that tree.
“I have to talk to you! Damn it!” And with a mighty yank, her hand was gone from his grip. “This is important!”
He turned on her, hearing the hiss that spat out of his throat, but unable to feel even a spark of shame for it. She was his woman, his wife! Why could she not give him her obedience for one fucking day?
Blackness took him for a heartbeat, no longer, but when it faded, he had his hand on her throat and his face biting-close to hers. Confusion swelled, overshadowing rage but not killing it. He shut his mouth, leaned back, and finally released her.
She stared at him, trembling and furious even with tears welling in her eyes. It made him think of Nicci, which made him think of the watchman in Praxas fucking her through the cage, which made him think of the tree he may not reach tonight. He had to turn around, facing into the chill spring wind, and took several minutes to breathe himself calm. One for the Prophet…two for his Brunt…three for Uyane…
He was Uyane.
“Speak,” he said at last.
“Aren’t you going to look at me?”
“No.”
There was quiet at his back. He did not hear her crying, not until she spoke again. The tears were in her voice and they cut at him, but he did not look at her.
“You have to get the baby out of here. This is taking too long and it’s getting weaker.”
“The humans are at their limits. They can go no faster.”
“Then you have to leave us behind.”
Us, she said.
“It’s too cold,” Amber said. “We barely got anywhere today and I know it’s our fault—”
Our.
“—but I can’t make us go any faster and you can take that baby to Chalh.”
“No.”
“I heard those other guys talking. Even they know it’s going to die if…It’s just a baby!” she burst out. He could hear her slapping at her face, punishing the eyes that betrayed her with tears. “How can you not care about that? You said you forgave everyone! Didn’t you mean it?”
He glanced at her, but his troubled thoughts turned to flame and he faced back into the wind at once. “It is not for me to forgive the children born to Gann.”
“I don’t care whose it is!” she sobbed. “It’s just a baby! You can’t let it die because it’s Zhuqa’s! That’s not its fault! God, Meoraq, look around you! How can you even think of letting it die? In a world where so many of you have died, you should be doing everything you can to save it just because it’s alive!”
The words stabbed him twice—once for their edge alone and once because she believed them. It didn’t matter to her that the child was sired of her enemy by a slave. She saw only an innocent life, and where the right was hers to end it out of vengeance, she wept because she could not save it.
‘Yes, my Father,’ thought Meoraq, once more in the tribune hall at Tothax with the daughter of Lord Saluuk weeping at his feet. ‘I hear you.’
And he was ashamed.
“I will send it and the others on with Onahi in the morning,” he said at last, but the words were ash in his throat. Onahi may yet have kin in Chalh, but the gates would never open to a man who had ended his time at Praxas as barracks-ward, a man who came with a procession of fatherless women, unhooded, unveiled. It would be a Sheulek’s command alone that could open those gates and win welcome.
Her hand stole in to touch him—that fearless hand—weakly gripping at his arm just below his sabk. “Please look at me.”
He tried, but her tearful face inspired only greater heat and furious urgency in his belly, and that was obscene to feel when he knew a life waited on his judgment. He stepped away from her, clapping a hand to his throat to try and cool the color rising there. “I can’t,” he said. “Leave me. I have to pray.”
She did not. She stood silent at his back as he forced himself to kneel and, as he was taking only the second of his first six breaths, suddenly her hand came out of the wind and slapped him in the head.
“Are you breaking up with me?” she shouted, sobbing so explosively that she could h
ardly breathe. “Because if that’s wuh-what this is, I can tuh-take it! But don’t you may-ake me fucking wuh-wuh-wait for it!”
“What are you talking about? What’s broken? What—”
And then he thought he understood.
“Do you think I’m putting you aside?” he asked incredulously while his belly groaned and his loin-plate strained. “Why would you even think that, woman?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” she said, trying to sneer through her tears and succeeding only in sounding more pathetic. “You won’t touch me. You won’t look at me. You barely even talk to me and you’re always angry when you do!”
“I’m not angry.” His hand stole down to check the fit of his loin plate. He coughed out a bitter laugh, muttering, “I’m the furthest thing there is from angry,” but it didn’t feel true. The idea that Gann’s loathsome hand was on him came creeping in, as it had so often during these last days and burning nights—that he had breathed it in like a sickness somewhere in the raider’s camp or that it had rubbed off from the flesh of all these damned women…but not from Amber. Never from his Amber. Sheul could not give her back to him only to see her and him both tainted beyond redeeming.
“I’m not angry,” he said again, gazing into the darkening sky. “I just need time.”
“Time for what? Is it…Is it because I was one of them?”
That made no sense to him no matter how many times he turned over her odd human words. “One of what?” he asked cautiously.
She glared at him, flushed and trembling and miserable, and suddenly shouted, “A slave! Because I was their slave—his slave—and you’ve got a lot of goddamned nerve breaking up with me for that, you scaly son of a bitch!” The last words degenerated into fresh tears. She clapped her hands over her face and choked on them.
“You were never a slave. You were always mine! You are still mine!” He caught her wrists and forced them down, forced her to look at him through the wet shine of her tears. “Sheul Himself gave you to me and what He has bound, nothing breaks! How do you mark me, woman?”
She sobbed, if possible, harder.
“I will have an answer,” said Meoraq, beginning to be alarmed.