by R. Lee Smith
He ascended and passed out of the overhanging hut, but stopped there to take a deep breath of Sheul’s air and let the wind cool his temper. He could hear their voices muttering, and although he knew he should rejoice in the sound and celebrate the miracle of their survival, he could not help cursing Praxas in his heart, not for the terrible crimes they had committed against these humans, but for harboring them at all.
“What the fuck was that?” Crandall demanded below. “Now I’ve got to ask the lizard’s permission every time I use a fucking cup? What am I supposed to do, drink off the fucking floor?”
Eric answered, too low to be heard, followed by Nicci: “I told you he’d get mad.”
“Shut the fuck up, lizard-bait.”
“Leave her alone.” Amber.
“You can shut up too, woman. Lie there and bleed or something. The big boys are talking.”
Meoraq breathed. One for the Prophet…
“Come on, man,” Eric said. “Lay off her. She’s hurt.”
“Oh yeah, she’s hurt. I’d completely forgotten, seeing as she’s spent the whole damn day bitching and moaning about it.” Crandall’s voice skewed up into a shrill mewling, grotesque to hear. “‘Please, Meoraq, put me down! Oh, please stop, I can’t stand it!’ Like you had such a hard day when we were the ones hauling your fat ass around.”
“It’s not fat,” said Amber, her irritation clear even though the cupboard door.
“Whatever, woman, I saw you naked. You’re putting the belly back on you.”
Saw her naked? Meoraq put a hand on the hilt of his kzung and closed his eyes, trying to come up with just one reason not to go right back down those stairs, haul Crandall out into the rain and cut his ugly head off. Amber had reasons, or thought she did, but Amber’s reasons were not, in this moment, good enough.
“Stop trying to shut me up!” Crandall shouted suddenly, breaking Eric’s low murmurs. “I’m not his fucking dog and I’m sure as hell not yours! Hey, woman!” A rapping of a human hand on wood. “Am I disturbing you? Why don’t you cry some more? You’ve gotten awfully good at that, Miss I-Don’t-Need-My-Hand-Held, Miss I-Don’t-Need-A-Man. Let me tell you something, I’m not spending the rest of my life getting slapped around by your scaly dickman! You and your scale-bait sister ought to remember that not everyone can fuck their way to the lap of luxury on this planet and show a little goddamn respect to the guys who are picking up your slack!”
Enough. Meoraq swept his samr from its sheath and turned around, but he had only just put his foot on the first descending stair before the scrape of the cupboard door silenced the human below. It was Amber’s voice that rang out next, slurred but strong and filled with fire: “You want to thank your God and his that I am a girl, Crandall, because it’s my girlie squeamishness at seeing a man sliced up the middle that’s keeping you alive right now. You don’t like it? Feel free to go back where we found you! Otherwise, shut the fiddling fuck up, and if you say one more word about my sex life, I will knock every tooth out of your ungrateful mouth, so help me, God. There’s only one person who calls me ‘woman’ and gets away with it and buddy, you aren’t it.”
Silence. Not even mutters. The cupboard door scraped shut again.
‘She doesn’t like them,’ Meoraq thought sullenly, tapping one finger along the hilt of his sword. ‘Why does she want them with us?’
For answer, the memory of her exhausted, broken voice: We’re all that’s left. Please. That has to matter.
It did. Of course it did. Did the Prophet love all those he brought into Sheul’s light in the days after the Fall? No, no more than the Ancients deserved to be saved from the wrath their great sin had brought upon them, but the Prophet understood what apparently Uyane Meoraq only gave voice to: Life is the most precious of God’s gifts. When so few of the Ancients survived the Fall, Prophet Lashraq did not judge this or that one unlikeable and therefore unworthy to seek God’s forgiveness. No. He forgave them all their past and welcomed them, every one.
Meoraq glanced upward through the rough roof of the lodge’s storeroom, properly chastened, and sheathed his blade. “I hear you, Father,” he said. “Not so clearly as my wife, but I hear You and I am humble to Your will.”
Sheul’s hand touched his shoulder as below him, Crandall muttered something uncouth and kicked the walls of the underlodge that sheltered them in the wildlands where Gann ruled. Meoraq sighed, feeling the bitterness and anger in his mortal heart until he had mastered them and could set them aside. Then he turned away from the humans in his keeping and went out into Gann’s world to hunt.
6
It did not take much work to make the underlodge habitable for a lengthy stay. Cleaning, of course. The crafting of various tools. The mantle shelf needed repairs, which Meoraq could manage, and half the cookware he was able to find had been broken, but the ways of working clay were unknown to him and they would just have to make do without. The one metal pot he’d found and his own stewing pouch were more than enough for his needs. If his woman were well and at his side to help him, the lodge would have been fit and comfortable by the second day. As it was, he had four lazy humans who seemed to think the job of improving their camp to be a show he enacted for their pleasure each day, and Amber, who would be only too willing to help and tear open her wound in the effort. So it all fell to him.
Nevertheless, it gave him something to do and so Meoraq worked. He fixed the shelf. He manufactured a simple grass sweep to get what had already come in out again. He found a way to turn one of the leather walls of his unneeded windbreak into a curtain so that the humans had ‘their’ half of the lodge and he didn’t have to look at them as much. They were all much happier with that arrangement.
To further keep himself out of slapping distance, Meoraq took lengthy patrols, familiarizing himself with this land of hills and forests. He hunted when he had to, but one mimut each day was more than enough to sustain his small party, even after he relented and allowed the other humans to share his meals. He searched daily for medicinal herbs, but found no more healershand, only a little iseqash, and a small patch of wild phesok. He stared at this last discovery three days, meditated three nights, and then went back and took it, for despite the plant’s dangers, he knew Amber would need it.
She had showed many encouraging signs of recovery in the first days. She drank as often as he gave the order, and although she required his help to make her way up the stairs and out to pass her waters, she did that often as well. She could not stand very long and had twice collapsed from the effort of climbing out of the cupboard (against his orders), but she rested well when sleeping and seemed alert when awake.
And all these things were very good, but Meoraq cleaned her wound at the start and close of each day, and he could see the infection growing in her. At first, it was only that yellowish crust around the edges of her wound, easily wiped away. Then the viscous pools of pus welling up around the beetle heads. Her skin swelled and grew hot. She needed more iseqash in her tea to sleep at night and began to ask for it during the day. As the pus thickened and took on a greenish tinge, her lethargy and confusion grew until she did little more than lie in the cupboard and stare into the fathoms. Then came the night he woke to her moans, struck a light and found her shined with sweat and insensible beside him, impossible to wake. When he opened her bandages, he could smell rot.
So be it.
Meoraq put his palm over her burning brow and bent close, his mouth against her flushed cheek. “Sheul has been with you, Soft-Skin,” he told her quietly. “Believe that He is with you now. And so am I.”
She moaned.
He covered her over with his blanket and left the cupboard, closing it gently behind him. It was early, well before dawn. The curtain that halved the living space was closed and the only sounds to be heard beyond it were the growling breaths Amber called snores. Moving quietly, so as not to disturb them (and Amber said he wasn’t ‘nice’), Meoraq cut the sleeve off one of their spare tunics (if the owner did
n’t want it cut, he shouldn’t have left it on the floor), tied a knot in one end to form a crude sort of bag, then went up the stairs and out into the forest.
“O my Father, guide me now,” he said, but he did not need Sheul to find what he was seeking. He had laid the bait for this most particular prey himself.
Near to the stream where he had brought his mimuts to be butchered lay a small, reeking heap—wet flaps of skin cut from the belly where winter’s fat was thickest, tailbones and the sagging pouch of the anus, intestines, feet, ears. It was too cold in these early hours for the carrion-beetles to crawl droning over his offering, but he could hear their countless bodies grinding together deep in the rotting flesh.
Meoraq knelt and brought out his makeshift pouch. He lifted a rancid coil of intestine, unleashing a plume of steam and fresh stink into the air. The beetles burrowed deeper, leaving their offspring to squirm together, exposed to morning’s chill.
Nauseating. He did not hesitate. He ran his open hand along the rumpled surface of rotting offal, taking exquisite care not to crush the larvae. He could not feel them in his hand, but seeing them there was bad enough. No matter. He shook them gently onto the sleeve and reached down for more. It took some effort to target only the larvae and not the mess they were feeding upon, but he had all he needed in just a few more passes and soon returned to the underlodge with the churning mess of them unpleasantly secured in the sleeve.
Amber had not moved, save to throw off her blanket. He let her alone for now while he arranged a fresh compress and bandage for her. Last of all, he took a dried leaf of phesok from the pot by the hearth and put it in his mouth. The taste was golden, surprisingly sweet, not at all what he’d expected. He chewed resolutely as he returned to his wife’s side and cleaned away the old, soured dressings.
She moaned, but turned toward him when he put his hand on her cheek. He spat juice into her mouth. She sputtered, swallowed, panted, all without opening her eyes.
Meoraq watched her for a time, then grunted and brought out his carrion-beetle larvae. He shook out half of them and waited for them to burrow into her heat, spitting juice for her to drink when it overfilled his own mouth, then shook out the rest and covered them loosely with the compress. He was beginning to feel light-headed. Never mind. A Sheulek must be above the distractions of his flesh. Most distractions.
He sat in the cupboard with his woman, chewing and sometimes spitting, and ultimately beginning to sway just a little. Amber’s face seemed to soften, blurring into new lines only to throb itself back into sharp focus. His Soft-Skin. His good woman. His wife. She was so unbelievably ugly.
He started to laugh, choked on a mouthful of juice, swallowed it, then laughed again because that was such a stupid thing to do. But a Sheulek does not make mistakes. Sheul is always with him. So there. He spat some juice into Amber and swallowed another mouthful (deliberately, this time), humming to himself as the colors began to shift around in the air, but humming quietly because the other humans were sleeping and he was so nice. Amber would be proud of him. His ugly, ugly Amber.
“I love your ugly face,” he told her, then bent down to move his mouth parts against hers. Horrible, unsanitary thing to do, and it left her bleeding a little besides. Never mind.
“I love your ugly fur,” he said, taking up many long, damp strands and spilling them through his fingers. It seemed that they kept on spilling for a very, very long time. The phesok was almost out of juice; he swallowed what there was and chewed harder.
Amber shifted below him in the bed, pushing more of the blanket away so that her bare chest was exposed. The sight attracted his staring eye and then his hand. “I love your ugly teats,” he mused, stroking at them. His hand moved up. “And I love your beautiful shoulders.”
Such beautiful shoulders. Smooth and pale as sculpted stone, perfectly rounded, perfectly sloping upwards into her scrawny neck and downwards into her skinny arms. Even the gross distortions on her chest seemed flawlessly balanced beneath those amazing shoulders.
He sucked hard on the pulp in his mouth, held it a moment, then bent reluctantly and spat it into Amber. She mewled a protest, but swallowed it. Her soft mouth, very lightly bleeding, parted for her panting breath. He could see the pink glisten of her tongue. Without warning, sexual urges swept over him, more dizzying than even the phesok in its strength. Meoraq loosened his belt, but his organ would not extrude. The urge died, leaving him with a confused re-discovery of her fevered face and the dressings at her side. It was unforgiveable, even to a Sheulek, for a man to lie with a woman on her sickbed; Sheul, in his wisdom, had prevented it. He spoke a shamed thanks, but already his eye was moving on, becoming fixed on the oddly graceful whorls and ridges that ringed her ear. He sucked on the phesok pulp again, but it had no more juice to give him. He spat it into his palm instead, shook it off into the other room, then closed the cupboard door and lay down beside his woman. He supposed he’d ought to pray, but couldn’t quite focus on what words to say.
Meoraq pulled the blanket up around Amber’s beautiful shoulders, then dropped a careful arm around her chest where it could not hurt her. ‘I am cuddling,’ he thought, pleased with himself. Then the dreams started, dreams of Amber beside him at Xi’Matezh reaching out to hold his hand when the doors hushed open, Amber sitting with him on the rooftop garden at home with the first of his many sons in her arms, Amber holding Nicci’s hand as they waited in a long line of white-garbed people before a great glass-walled shrine. Always it was Amber, sometimes with him and sometimes with her blood-kin, now creased with age and now half-grown, fighting and laughing and weeping and in every way alive. The dreams were glorious and it was a very long time before Meoraq, reluctantly, closed his eyes and slept.
* * *
Amber woke up first to the sounds of people talking none too damn quietly in the main room. Not even really talking, but actually hollering up the stairs to other people outside, just like it wasn’t first thing in the friggin’ morning, which it had to be because Meoraq was still sound asleep beside her.
Her annoyance was the first thing she was really conscious of. The second was a tickling sort of sensation in her side. She started to scratch at it, but was smart enough to stop herself as soon as her fingers touched the bandage. She really did not want to tear herself a brand new gash now that it was finally starting to heal up. And it must be healing up because that’s what things did when they healed, right? They itched? And even though this was more of a tickle, it tickled like six bitches in a bitch-boat, so it better be healing.
Ah, it was great to feel like herself again.
Amber smiled to herself without bothering to open her eyes. She sensed she could open her eyes if she wanted to, however, which was better than she’d felt all night. In fact, the last three days had been like trying to cross quicksand—sinking further and further the more she moved. Yesterday, she’d been absolutely certain she was going to die. The stench coming from her side had been so bad, she was amazed Meoraq could stand to touch her, but he didn’t even mention it.
And maybe he knew something she didn’t, because she felt worlds better this morning. Apart from a headache and an absolutely epic case of morning-mouth, but if that was what it took to wake up free of the fever that had been chasing her down, she’d learn to love it.
But the tickling…
Amber squirmed, as if shifting her weight could actually help. It didn’t.
Out in the main room, Dag was stomping around and bitching about having to go all the way out to the stream for water when it was raining.
“Coming down hard enough,” Crandall commented. “Could probably just stand outside with your mouth open and drink just fine.”
“Give it another hour and you could probably drown that way,” Eric added. “Sheesh, did the lizard die in there? What is keeping him?”
“Keep your voice down,” Nicci said. “They’re sleeping.”
“Sleeping, hell,” Crandall muttered. “They’re probably screwing.
”
Amber frowned, then caught herself reaching to scratch again. Dammit, this was going to drive her crazy!
He’d put some sort of plant in there that first day. She didn’t recall it itching—the pain had pretty much occupied all her nerve-endings at the time—but maybe that was the trouble now. He probably wouldn’t like it if she just opened up her own bandage and took his leaves out, especially since they might be working, but she couldn’t stand this and anyway, he was asleep and therefore did not get a vote.
Casting furtive glances at the alien snuggled up beside her, Amber began to extract herself from his uncharacteristically clingy grip. He slept on, oblivious, even when she picked his arm up and put it down again on her thigh. Next to go was the sweaty (and now smelly) blanket. She could see the bandage now. It wasn’t even tied on. Maybe it tickled because it was loose. Felt like a bigger tickle than that, though. God, it was all she could do not to get in there with both hands and just go to town.
She pulled the bandage off, already reaching with her other hand to gingerly pick away whatever voodoo he’d packed in there. For a moment, she thought it was rice.
For a moment.
Her breath caught, but she sucked it in and shrieked anyway, tearing up her throat like her screams were made of fishhooks. Meoraq bolted up, banged his head, and dropped back down with a snarl of sound she could not begin to process, much less translate. If she hadn’t been frozen by horror, she might have dug the maggots out then, but the split-second it took for her to act was all the time he needed to recover. When she did slap wildly at the boiling mass of their pearly little bodies, he caught her.
“The hell is going on in there?”
“Getthemoffmegetthemoffmegetthemoffme!”