by R. Lee Smith
Nicci said nothing, did nothing, just let the minutes tick out. At last, she reached out and gently closed the cupboard door, leaving Amber in the dark to listen as her baby sister walked away.
* * *
The remainder of the day passed in relative peace, although given the chaos surrounding his awakening, anything short of a direct attack could be considered relative peace. The humans kept their distance, wisely. Meoraq’s headache had lost its sharp edges over the course of the day, but it still sat heavy behind his eyes. He had drunk four pots of tea and his throat still felt scratchy and tasted like a long lick up Gann’s slit. He was aware that all these things made a light penance for the sin of chewing phesok, but it still made for a deeply unpleasant day.
He meditated as much of it away as possible, rousing only to attend his or his woman’s most basic bodily needs. When he wasn’t meditating, he sat at the table and stared at his humans, making a game of herding them from one wall to the other by his looks alone. He made no patrols, no hunts. When he decided he was hungry enough, he ate half of the previous day’s stew, cold. If Amber had asked, he would have stirred himself to heat the rest for her, but she claimed a weak belly and took nothing but tea all day. As for the other humans, they could eat cold stew or starve for all that Meoraq cared.
All days end, as he had reminded his wife that morning. In the last quiet hour before dark, his day’s idleness bit back at him in an entirely foreseeable manner: He was not in the least tired.
His humans were already settling in for the night, sharing out the remains of the stew and throwing sullen glances at him. That cheered him somewhat, but it really was a poor show of his true character and he’d ought to pray about it. In the meantime, however, there was Amber.
Although she had been dozing most of the day, she did not share his restlessness now. She was sleeping soundly when he woke her to tend her wound. The maggots had done their work well; the flesh looked pink and had a strong knit going where the beetle heads had been placed. He washed the wound twice with tea and licked it thoroughly, ignoring Amber’s informative mutterings as to how ‘gross’ he was.
But with this done and the wound wrapped again, he had nothing else to do. If he were in the city, Meoraq could simply light a lamp and read the Word or take the rooftop or find some other way to entertain himself, but he was loathe to waste what little lamp oil he’d brought with him out of Chalh. In their winter’s camp, when he had spent days on end confined to a cave, he’d always had the option of rigorous sex to exhaust himself before bed. He didn’t know what he was going to do with himself tonight.
“Are you tired?” he asked, without much hope.
“Yeah. Why? What’s up?” She visibly rallied herself to appear alert. A good woman was always thinking of how to lessen her man’s burdens and see to his needs. Meoraq’s selfish heart burned a little, but not enough to keep him from undressing and crawling into the cupboard with her.
“We going to fool around?” she whispered when the door was shut. Her hands were brazen on his back. Her little teeth nipped at his shoulder.
“No,” he said. “That would be unforgiveable.”
“Oh.” She drew away and nestled herself into the bedding. “Good. Because in all honesty, I had maggots in me all day and I’m feeling about the most unsexy I’ve ever felt in my life. Want to talk?”
He did, but she was so obviously weary and he didn’t have anything to say anyway. “Just sleep.”
She did—the only command he’d ever given that she’d followed without question—and he lay with her in the cupboard for a time, resting in the hopes that he might sleep as well, but it was not to be. He could hear the humans bedding down, their low chat giving way to grunts and shuffling, and then to the growling breaths of heavy sleep. Meoraq tried to meditate, but his mind was as restless as his clay and in the end, he rose and pulled his breeches on, then climbed to the surface where he couldn’t disturb anyone.
The night was warm and windy, but dry yet. He basked a short while in the pleasant sensation of standing against the wind and what a fierce, masculine picture it must make, and then heard the clumsy tread of a human footfall on the stair behind him. Nicci, he saw. He reminded himself to be polite.
“How is she?” Nicci asked quietly.
“She rests in Sheul’s sight,” he replied, moving aside in case she wished to go past him and out to the fleshing pit to urinate.
She joined him at the doorway, but that was all. Her eyes went to the horizon, to the distant black line before the mountains that was Praxas. She gazed on it in silence and without expression.
Meoraq groped for something to say as the moment stretched itself indefinitely outward. “What do you want?” he asked at last.
“Nothing. I can’t sleep.”
He grunted, thinking she might manage a better effort were she lying down with her eyes closed. Of course, so could he.
“I’m sorry I, um, attacked you. Earlier.”
He glanced at her, then back into the trees. “I forgive you.”
He waited for her to leave. She didn’t.
“Am I bothering you?” she asked.
Meoraq tipped a brooding eye upwards at the heavens where Sheul sat in judgment over every lie and told one anyway. “No.”
“Can I stand with you?”
He grunted again.
She moved a little closer to him. There was no polite way to step back, so he stood there and did his best to ignore her. After a very long, suffocating silence, she said, “You saved our lives. All of us. I thought I was going to die in that cage.”
He was uncomfortable responding to this in any way—to agree was to take the credit for Sheul’s hand upon him, to deny seemed to dismiss her suffering in that place—and so he said, “Sheul’s judgment shall fall upon Praxas in His own time,” and tried to leave it at that.
“I know.”
There was an answer he had never anticipated. “Do you?”
“If He hadn’t been with me, I never would have survived at all,” she told him, and watched his face closely.
He turned into the wind, aware that he was frowning, unsure exactly why. It had certainly been a good answer…but he could not shake the feeling that it had not been an honest one.
“Will you take a walk with me?” she asked after another grueling silence.
“Why?”
“I’m restless and I don’t want to go anywhere alone.”
Sensible answer. He did not want to agree, but this was Amber’s blood-kin, and if blood ran true in no other manner, doubtless it would do so now and she would stride out into the wild without him upon his refusal.
“A short walk,” he said, and set a course for the stream.
She followed obediently, beside and a little behind him, with head bent and hands meekly clasped before her. It was deeply disturbing to him, and after a moment’s thought, he knew why: It was the respectful walk of a well-bred dumaq woman at the side of her man. Realizing that, he tried to put some distance between them. She reached out and caught his hand. It took all his will not to pull out of that flimsy human grip, but only to walk, staring straight ahead and leaving his hand limp and unfeeling in hers.
It had never been so long a distance to the water. He had actually begun to think he had somehow lost his way when he heard it ahead of him in the same place it had always been. He checked for tracks out of habit, but no sooner had he hunkered beside the muddy bank than she was kneeling next to him, resting her hand upon his thigh. A light touch, surely. A thoughtless touch, perhaps. He could think of no good way to throw it off and so he stared fixedly into the ground with his damned thigh on fire under her unwelcome hand and wished he knew what the hell she was on about.
Of all his wishes, that was the one Sheul chose to grant.
Nicci kept her hand where it was, then turned toward him and placed the other with deliberate intent into his breeches and beneath his loin-plate. The tip of her wind-chilled finger slipped along his
slit, seeking entry, but only for a moment. The world crashed back into focus; Meoraq shoved her violently away, slapping one hand to his groin and actually rubbing, as if her touch came with some polluted grease. Such was his horror in that moment that if she’d come at him again, he would have drawn and stabbed her.
But she didn’t. She sprawled across the bank of the stream and began to run water out of her eyes. “It’s okay,” she wept, trying to smile at him. “It’s okay. I won’t tell. I know you want to. It’s fine.”
He took two swift backwards steps, well out of her reach. “I don’t want this! I don’t want you!”
“I’m just the same as she is!” she pleaded, wiping mud onto her face with every swipe of her hand. “We look the same! We sound the same! You can do anything you want to me and you can…you can take care of me!”
And there it was. Shock died at once, crushed by the weight of his sudden disgust. “Take care of you.”
She crawled toward him in the muck, fumbling at her clothes, the shadows of her face in the moonlight such that it seemed a skull leered at him and it took every measure of his will not to draw his father’s blade and ram it through her throat. “I can be good,” she was saying. She might have been weeping or laughing as she said it, he could not tell which. “You can do everything you like that you’d never ask Amber. You can hurt me if you want to. You can—”
“Get away from me!” he roared, and that at last stopped her. She huddled at his feet, poised upon her knees with her bare chest exposed to him, motionless and watchful while he paced the urge to slap out of his body. When he wheeled abruptly and came back to her, she did not cringe, only lifted her head a little higher and reached out her hands.
He caught her by the wrists before she could touch him and pulled her roughly up before shoving her back. He eyed the growths on her chest with disgust and turned away. “Cover yourself.”
She did, silent and small.
“She is my wife and your blood-kin,” he said tightly, facing furiously into the wind. “This is incest! Blasphemy before Sheul!”
She uttered a high, shivery sound. He was fairly certain it was a laugh, but a laugh such as the damned must use, once death and eternity had driven them mad.
“Do you think you’re any different from them?” she asked, scorn like knives in her querulous words. “Do you really? God makes it happen, remember? It’s not a sin because God made them want me, right? So if it’s God’s will, what are you afraid of?” She came toward him, her mouth a black and ghastly crescent of a smile, to put her hands on him again. “What does Sheul want you to do with me?”
“Kill you.”
She flinched back, her smile lost at once. The wind smeared water across her cheeks. “I’m just the same as she is,” she said in her fragile voice.
“No,” said Meoraq. “You are not. And if you ever touch me again, I will see you judged for it. Hear me, N’ki, and mark the word of a Sheulek. It is for her sake alone that I do not cut you down right here. When she hears of this—”
“Don’t tell,” she whispered. “Please, don’t. She’ll hate me.”
“She should!” Meoraq spat, but then took a slow count of six and cleared his heart of Gann’s grip. “This once. Because she is weakened…and so happy to be with you again,” he added in a bitter rush. He breathed some more. “Go.”
She slipped away like a shadow on the grass. Meoraq did not watch her. He took six breaths and six more and then knelt on the wet bank to pray until peace found him. He stood, breathed, and knelt again, this time to ask for healing for his good woman and the strength and patience to tend the humans with whose care he had been charged. He stood, breathed, and knelt a final time, wetting his fingers with mud and painting his naked chest. He prayed, and in that silent prayer were thoughts of black gratitude that Sheul had held him fast against Nicci’s hand, because for a moment…
He stood, brushed the dried flakes of mud from his scales, then returned to the underlodge alone. He did not look for Nicci among the sleeping humans at the wall. He went to his cupboard. His woman roused halfway to raise the bedding and let him come beneath, then snuggled close and began to growl softly in her sleeping breaths, the way she claimed not to do. He held her, loving her, hating Nicci—Gann and Sheul each with a hand on his heart—and lay awake for hours.
7
Being hurt sucked.
It wasn’t the pain. The pain was extremely present, but Amber could handle pain. What she couldn’t handle, at least not with any good grace, was the boredom.
Amber knew how it felt to recover from whatever had bitten her that day back in the prairie. She remembered the weakness—needing to be carried, to be fed, to be tended like some…some sick person. But she also knew that it hadn’t lasted long. She’d been pretty out of it for a while, but once the fever broke, she was on her feet and walking in just five more days. Maybe not at her full speed, but walking.
But five days after Meoraq washed the maggots out of her side, Amber felt no better. She wasn’t walking, full speed or any speed; she still needed help just getting upstairs to pee. The pain gradually subsided, but she was always cold, always dizzy, always tired. She wasn’t getting better.
“Nothing’s happening!” she moaned as Meoraq carried her outside on Day Eighteen. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You lost a lot of blood,” he replied. “Sheul can heal your flesh, but blood takes time to renew.”
“It’s taking too long.”
“Stop whining. Try to see this as a time of leisure. Enjoy it.”
Enjoy it. Amber’s experience in the cave in the mountains should have prepared her for a lot of lying around doing nothing, but what she’d failed to consider was that, in the mountains, she’d hadn’t done much nothing at all. She and Meoraq had managed to keep busy most days, and on those rare occasions when they’d run out of busywork, there was always sex. These days, sex was as far out of the question as walking up the stairs.
All she could do was lie there.
Meoraq kept busy, because he was sadistic like that, but he refused to let her out of the cupboard. He got to bustle around the underlodge doing minor repairs and arranging things in their limited space until it was almost homey. He got to do all the cooking and cleaning and hunting. He got to scrounge up pieces of wood and carve them into various utensils, which he did in a yellow-striped state of high piss-off and which he would not allow her to do for him, even though there was no good reason why not, unless he thought she was going to maim herself some more. She told him as much in one of her surlier moods. He shut the cupboard door on her.
And that was how the time passed. Meoraq hunted, gathered, patrolled, prayed, built, repaired, replaced. Eric and Dag and Crandall had occasional spasms of productivity, doing whatever small tasks Meoraq assigned them without complaining, or at least complaining in a laughing way. Even Nicci, who did little and said less, wandered in and out whenever her odd moods took her. Amber lay in the cupboard and grew blood.
Meoraq washed and licked her wounds twice each day, and while he often told her she was healing well, he never said she was going to be as good as new. The kipwe’s claws had left three broad furrows in her side, which Meoraq’s bug-based first-aid had twisted into a godawful mess. The baby-new skin growing there was pink and shiny and unbelievably sensitive; the scar tissue knotted up in it, thick and white and dead. Sunk in the middle of this was a narrow depression, slightly askew, like a second, drunken belly-button.
She hated to look at herself under the blanket, so much so that every time Meoraq left the underlodge, she snuck out and put her tunic on. For Meoraq, wearing clothes in bed made about as much sense as wearing them in the bathtub—something which was not merely unnecessary but a little bit crazy. He’d come home and take them off her. She’d sneak out and put them on. After a few days of this, he made some ridiculously mild remark she couldn’t even remember now and she’d burst into tears and cried until she got a headache. He immediately handed over
her clothes, which made her cry harder.
And that was something else, the emotional stuff. Like a playground seesaw with tears on one end and throwing up on the other, as her bouts of unplanned puking slacked off, the equally sudden crying jags picked up. She felt like a crazy person and she had no one to talk to about it.
“You’re pregnant,” said Nicci, the one time she’d tried to bring it up.
“Oh bullshit.”
“When was your last period?”
“I don’t know.” But she knew it had been in the cave where she and Meoraq had spent the winter. And she knew she’d finished not too terribly long before they’d left.
“When were you supposed to get it?”
“I don’t know! Quit talking like that!”
Nicci did, but now the thought was there, itching under her scales, as Meoraq would say. It had been thirty-two days already by that time. She knew because the interior walls of the cupboard were made of bricks, cut from some sort of chalky stone, aged to a dark grey, but which left nice white lines when chipped at with the sharp tip of Meoraq’s kzung. Thirty-two days and change since Crandall had watched her bathing and decided she was ‘putting the belly back on’. Thirty-two days and change plus however long she’d been with Zhuqa, plus the six days it had taken to climb down out of the mountains, plus however many days it had been since she’d finished her period. And that was way too long.
Never mind. It didn’t mean anything. She’d get it when it was time to get it and she sure as hell wasn’t in any hurry for that to happen before she could at least walk herself out to clean up.
She waited. That was it. That was all she could do.
So she did it.
* * *
Amber woke up to the cupboard door sliding open. She kept her eyes shut until she heard the familiar sound of his strikers scraping together, but after he got the lamp lit, she raised her head to watch Meoraq go through his usual morning stretches with her usual morning depression. He caught her looking, paused mid-flex, then abruptly stopped and got dressed.