by R. Lee Smith
Murmurs.
Amber tried and again failed to make any kind of useful contribution to her own defense and the effort left her so wiped out that she had to close her eyes and rest.
“If we’d had a guide, we’d have reached the mountains long before the snow. We never would have gotten stuck up there for so long and we never would have come down so close to that city! We’d have had food the whole time! And water! And fire! No one would have gotten hurt, no one would have gotten killed, and you, Nicci, you wouldn’t have spent so many nights with a scaly cock shoved up your trap, now would you?”
“I wouldn’t have had yours either!” Nicci hissed. “And believe me, that’s the one I regret the most. This is not Amber’s fault! It never was and you know it, you and all your ignorant fucking sheep!”
Scott slapped her. His Manifestors murmured some more, angry now, but they were angry at Nicci. On the ground, her eyes still too heavy to open, Amber made a loose fist and grunted.
“Come on, both of you.” And that was Eric, doing his let’s-be-reasonable thing. She couldn’t see him, but she could picture him clearly enough: both hands raised, eyes moving cautiously back and forth between the main opponents, and well out of range just in case the punches started flying. “Nicci, just give us some space for a sec. And let’s think about what you’re saying here, okay? She saved our lives.”
“I had everything under control until she charged that giant porcupine and got herself torn open. What she’s doing right now is endangering our lives, just like she did before. Don’t you see that? Don’t you realize? This is all about keeping us away from the skyport? If it hadn’t been for her, we’d be on the ship right now, all of us, and on our way home! The way I see it, Amber Bierce is directly responsible for the deaths of thirty-six people and that makes her an enemy of the state! Why are you defending her?”
That didn’t sound good. Amber pulled her eyelids up in time to see the blurry smudge that was Scott raise Meoraq’s kzung—not in a menacing way, but more like a young Arthur who had just pulled it from the stone as proof of his right to rule. “What do we do with enemies?” he called to his Manifestors. “What do we do with tumors? Do we give them a comfortable place to sit and grow, to infect the rest of the body? Or do we cut them out?”
“I’ll kill you if you try it!” Nicci shouted. “Do you hear me? I’ll kill—”
Scott pointed Meoraq’s sword at her, silencing her so suddenly that Amber thought he’d stabbed her until she backed up. “I’m going to put it to a vote,” he announced, turning back to his Manifestors. “All in favor, say aye.”
A solid wall of ayes went up.
“In favor of what?” Crandall asked coolly. “If you’re so damn sure it’s the right thing to do, why don’t you want to say out loud what it is?”
“And if you’re so opposed to it, why don’t you say nay, Mr. Crandall?” Scott countered. “Say it so we all know where you stand. Say it or shut the hell up.”
Amber sucked in a painfully deep breath and croaked, “…nay.”
One by one, they all looked at her.
Amber pressed her noodle-weak arms to the mat and forced herself up a mountainous few centimeters. A light, chill sweat broke out all over her body, washing her briefly back into winter. She glared as best as she was able while gasping and shaking. “Nay,” she panted and for good measure, added, “Mother…fucker.”
Scott cocked his head at her in that eerily lizardish way. “You don’t get a vote, Miss Bierce. You are not a member of this colony. Your rights as a colonist and a citizen are revoked.” He turned that same stare on Eric. “Get out of my way.”
Nicci clutched at Eric’s arm. “Don’t,” she begged.
Eric looked at her, then back at Dag and Crandall. Neither of them moved to join him. He looked at Scott again. The wind flapping lightly at the leather walls that surrounded the camp and the gentle crackling of the fire were the only sounds…until Meoraq’s, “What in Gann’s unholy name goes on here?”
People who had been sitting sprang up. People who had been standing jumped back. Scott dropped the sword and hid his empty hands behind him, trying to look in all directions at once.
Meoraq came out from the shadowed opening between two overlapping walls and stood over his kzung where it lay in the trampled grass. He looked at it without expression as his throat slowly lit up. He took six breaths in the absolute silence and then said, “You had my sword in your hand, S’kot. In your naked hand.”
Amber licked her lips several times, braced herself for another deep breath, and rasped, “Meoraq, don’t.”
He pointed at her to shut her up without taking his eyes off Scott. “Var’li S’kot,” he said, making each word distinct, “son of Var’li Reshar, you have broken the Third Law and taken up a bladed weapon. The law of my caste requires that I ask, but to say truth—” He bent down and plucked the kzung out of the grass, straightening up with a smile and a hiss. “—I don’t give a clay fuck if you pray or not.”
Amber gripped at the ground and tried to sit up further, but her arms collapsed. She hit the mat and an elephant stomped on her stomach and she let out a scratchy scream that, weak as it was, finally got Meoraq’s full attention. He crossed the camp in just three long strides, shoving Eric and Nicci out of his way before he dropped to his knees at Amber’s side. He stabbed the kzung into the ground and put his hand roughly on her forehead, pressing her flat; the other carefully peeled back the bandage on her belly.
His spines came slowly forward in a silent, oddly graceful flare above his otherwise expressionless face. “Oh my fearless Soft-Skin,” he said after a moment, without readable emotion. “I could just slap you.”
“It’s not what it looks like,” Scott said quickly.
“I do not hear you. Await the sword of Sheul’s judgment.”
“It’s not,” Amber said. “It was a kipwe.”
“I see that. I say stand where you are, S’kot,” Meoraq added, no louder and without seeming to have even noticed Scott’s silent attempt to disappear behind his Manifestors. He bent further over her, peering into her eyes and then prying her mouth open, of all things, before looking under the bandage again.
“It didn’t look that bad to me,” said Crandall, watching him. “Once we got the bleeding stopped, I mean.”
Meoraq didn’t answer, which was about the worst response he could have given. At length, he replaced the bandage and covered her over with the blanket. He put his hands on his thighs. He bent his neck. He took six breaths. Then he brushed the backs of his knuckles across Amber’s brow and said, “I forgive you, Soft-Skin. Rest now. You are in our Father’s sight.”
The little comfort this gave her lasted just until Meoraq gripped the hilt of his kzung and stood up, ripping it from the wet ground and spattering Amber lightly with grass and mud. “I’ll try not to enjoy this,” he said, seizing Scott as he bolted for escape. “But you haven’t made that easy.”
“Meoraq, don’t!”
“I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand,” Meoraq replied, calmly towing Scott toward an opening in the walls. “Rest. This will not take long.”
“Let him go,” said Amber. The words were bitter as ash.
Meoraq stopped walking. He stood silent, staring straight ahead at the leather wall while Scott gasped for air at the end of his fist. The color striping his throat throbbed in time with his pulse. But for that and the heaving of his chest as he breathed, he did not move.
“Please let him go,” said Amber, hating herself for feeling the mean hope that he would ignore her and kill Scott anyway.
He turned and came back to her, dragging Scott with him, perhaps entirely forgotten. The color was bright enough almost to seem to be glowing in the firelight and his eyes were starting to glaze. “He broke his faith with God, if he ever had it, and as His Sword, I have no mercy to show him and would not even if I did! If I could not spare you, why in Gann’s name would I spare him?”
“Becaus
e we’re all that’s left. That…has to matter.”
“More than the Word?” Meoraq demanded. He struggled visibly with his temper, then lost it, roaring, “More than your life? What do you think he meant to do with my sword, fool woman? If I had slept tonight, if I had stopped even once to rest, you would be dead now! Dead and…and buried!”
She stretched out her hand toward his boot, palm up, trembling.
He looked down at that as everyone watched and Scott twisted and gasped in his unmoving fist. At last, Meoraq’s neck bent. His burning eyes shut and opened again, calm. He studied Scott for a while in silence, then released him and let him drop in the muddy grass. “I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand,” he said as Scott scrambled back, clutching at his neck. “I am a true son of Sheul, by whose laws you are judged unforgiveable. You are welcome no more among men. However, exile is permitted as a lawful alternative to execution and so I offer it. Shall you stand and submit to my sword, Var’li S’kot? It is a far easier death and, for my wife’s sake, I will even burn you when it is done. Gann will give you no such mercy.”
Scott retreated another step, still breathing hard, then suddenly snatched up a rolled tent and held it before him like a shield.
Meoraq spat contemptuously and picked up one of the travel-sized waterskins, shoving it hard against Scott’s chest. “Take it and go, then. You and all your cattle. Go and let the Dark Father who shat you out, take you in.”
“Come on, men,” Scott rasped, gathering up supplies with shaking hands. “I’ve spent…enough time…with lizards…and their…whores!”
Meoraq’s head cocked. He looked at Nicci. “What does that word mean?”
“It means he’s leaving,” Nicci said.
“And you’re not…coming with me!” Scott declared, pointing at her. He waited, perhaps expecting some tearful plea to reconsider, but when Nicci only sat there, he finally sneered and turned around. He left, staggering as he went, either from the lasting effects of his throttling or under the weight of the many waterskins he’d taken with him. After a long silence spent eyeing the supplies remaining to them, the last of the Manifestors scratched up some food, some blankets and another tent and hurried after him. The rest—Eric and Dag and Crandall, his one-time loyal lieutenants—stayed.
Meoraq looked at them. The stripes on his throat were still bright, bright yellow. “Get out.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Eric, “and I know it’s not worth much, we never should have left her.”
Dag grunted, a disturbingly lizardlike sound, and Crandall, looking back over his shoulder at Scott’s retreating colony, agreed, “He was a fucking loon. What do you say, Bierce? No hard feelings?”
Amber smiled weakly. “Yeah, okay. We’re good.”
Meoraq stepped up and shoved Crandall so hard and so unexpectedly that Crandall lost his feet and nearly fell in the fire. “This is not her camp!” he spat, this time shoving Dag, who only staggered. Eric stepped back on his own. “It is mine and I forgive you nothing! You, who acknowledge you should not have abandoned her to die in the open plains—not apologize, but acknowledge—have nothing to say about the fact that you stood and watched S’kot raise a blade over my wife?”
Eric kept his wary distance, but didn’t flinch. “I tried to stop him.”
“He did,” said Amber. “Please, Meoraq.”
“No! I give you your blood-kin. The rest of them can go to Gann. Out!”
“Hey, he had a sword!” Crandall shrugged off Dag’s helping hands and bounded to his feet. “What was I supposed to do, take it away from him? Huh? So you could come back and find me holding it? Who the hell do you think carried her back here and bandaged her up? Isn’t that worth anything?”
“We made a mistake,” Eric added. “We made a lot of them, okay? We just want the chance to make it right.”
“It’s okay,” Amber tried to say and this time, Meoraq rounded on her.
“Stop telling them that!” he hissed. “You have no power to forgive them!”
“You do.”
He recoiled, spines flaring and flattening with a brittle snap. “But I won’t!”
“Please.”
“No!”
“I’m begging.”
“I don’t care!”
“Meoraq—”
“They don’t like you!” he bellowed, pointing at Crandall and the others with the sword. “This isn’t liking you, damn it! This is groveling for their worthless lives! Nothing has changed!”
“I don’t care if they like me,” she said, just like she’d used to say it to herself so long ago. Somewhere along the way, it had turned into the truth, but it didn’t make her feel tough or hard or strong, only tired. “But if I let them walk out there and die just because I don’t like them, then something’s changed, all right. Please.”
They all looked at Meoraq.
He did not say anything for a long, long time.
At last, he sheathed his sword and turned his head just enough to look at Eric and the others. “I am Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul,” he said tonelessly, “who was son of Ta’sed, who was son of Kuuri, who was the forty-third son of the line descended of the Prophet’s Uyane Xaima. I am a Sword and a true son of Sheul…and I forgive you all your pasts. But I do not take you in,” he added in a hiss. “You are not Uyane under me. You are not welcome in my House. We are not good.”
Crandall started to speak, but Eric stopped him with a warning glance. No one said anything.
Meoraq turned his back on them and knelt again next to Amber. “For you,” he said simply. “Hold on to me now. This will hurt.”
He lifted her. He did it slowly and even gently in spite of the color that was still so strong at his throat, but it did hurt and in spite of her determination to suck it up, she had to cry a little. But she got an arm around his neck and kept it there, anchoring herself to him while the rest of the world lurched and spun.
“I’m sorry,” she said as he took her into his tent. “This is a hell of a thing to come back to.”
He coughed up a humorless laugh and lay her down on his mat. “I asked God to bring me back to you. I left the details entirely to His whim. There is a lesson in that. Now rest. Tomorrow will be a difficult day.”
“You’ll have to remind me…when were the easy ones?”
It was a rhetorical question. Meoraq had never been good at recognizing those. “All things are relative,” he told her. “There are no easy days in the wildlands, but tomorrow…tomorrow will be difficult.”
5
Meoraq had run all night on nothing but a few bites of cuuvash, praying at every step that Sheul would keep his camp shrouded from the eyes of his enemies and tormented by visions of what he would find if He did not. He would have thought he had imagined every possible scenario. A kipwe attack—which he could not help but think of as roughly on a level with a mimut or a saoq attack—had never crossed his mind. It was the sort of thing he would have found laughable had he seen it in a play or a book—a tragedy on the indistinct edge of comedy—until it was his Amber lying there, as pale as a yearling…and as weak.
But she would not rest. Meoraq understood that she had not seen him in many days and that she wanted to know that Xzem and the infant had reached Chalh in good health. He understood also that the mood within his small camp was a dark one following Scott’s exile and she wanted to lighten it. And he understood best of all that she was hurt and hurts have a way of growing when there is nothing else to do except think about them. A Sheulek leaned early to embrace pain, to own it and sleep in spite of it, but Amber was not Sheulek.
In the end, Meoraq brewed her a strong cup of tea with a few leaves of healershand, chewed some more leaves and packed her wound with the pulp, then set the humans on watch—ha—and went out with his lamp to pray. Sheul brought him to a hive of soldier beetles; Meoraq caught twenty and wrapped them awkwardly in a fold of his tunic.
He returned to find Amber, as he’d hoped, deeply asleep. So was
Nicci and the other humans, who had, he saw, helped themselves to the rest of the tea. Just as well. He moved Nicci to the humans’ tent (as he knelt to set her on her mat, she mumbled and caught at his harness as if to pull him down with her. It took some effort to get away with waking her and even more effort to do it without hissing), left the rest of them where they lay and directed himself to Amber without distraction.
The medicine had done its work well by that time and the wound was bloodless when he pulled the bandage away. He washed the wound to clear it of clinging pulp. Amber murmured, but that was all, even when he pressed the severed edges of her flesh closed and hunted out the first beetle, holding it carefully by its shiny shell. Already deeply aggravated, it needed no encouragement to bite. Its massive mandibles punctured both sides of her torn muscle, squeezing them tight together, and at once, Meoraq pinched off its head. Its insect will was greater than death; it would hold its grip until its shell crumbled away.
Beetle by beetle, he closed her wounds and sealed it with a paste of healershand and honey. He examined every part of her for kipwe quills the humans had missed and licked every scratch. He changed out her bandages for clean cloth taken from his provisions seized in Chalh. After that, there was nothing he could do except sit and brood over the many wounds he’d seen sour in spite of the best surgeons and those that had healed cleanly with no care at all.
“She rests in Your sight, O my Father,” he muttered, rubbing at last at his brow ridges, and this was true, but she also rested in the wildlands. Between the threat of revenging raiders and hungry beasts (he counted Scott somewhere along this line) were too many dangers to defend against. The nearest city—well, the next nearest, as Praxas would be no shelter to him—was Chalh again, four running days at best, and in light of Lord Uyane’s last words to him, he was hesitant to take her there. If she was to have any chance at all of recovery, it would have to be somewhere else.