by R. Lee Smith
Scott was still whining for his ship, so Meoraq looked that way, because if his journey was to end here, at least it would end with Scott dead and he meant to watch. If there was no God, there was no sin in spiteful pleasures. But the sword—Meoraq’s own sword—never left the belt where it hung.
“Let them play,” a raider said, ducking his head deferentially as his leader threw a cold glance his way. “We take them away now, they’ll sour. Let them break their toy first. What’s another day?”
Their leader hissed and rubbed at his throat, his head tipped back, eyes shut. “All right, all right. Fucking little pests. One more day. Druud, if you want to play with your toy, you do your work first. If I have to tell you to get away from it one more time, I’ll strap you to the top of it and set it on fire! Slaves, out! Eshiqi, go wait in my tent.”
She went. Meoraq watched her for as long as he could see her, then dropped his head back onto the ground and closed his eyes. The hollow dark closed in around him once more. The cold took away his heart. He could hear the sound of boots, striding heavy and insolently slow, coming closer. He listened and did not count his breaths.
“Zhuqa had her,” the raider said finally, after he had stood over Meoraq for some time. “Did you know? Did she tell you she had been his slave?”
The words passed over and through him and were gone.
“I saw her once, sitting naked on his thigh with his fingers inside her, holding his cup. She didn’t fight.”
Beyond this little room, the rain fell lightly on the roof. The trees of Gedai whispered in the wind. The ocean rolled and groaned.
“Do you know what he told me, Sheulek? Eh?” Leather creaked as the raider hunkered down, not quite within reach. “He told me she oils up when she cums.”
The rain. The wind. The sea.
“She hasn’t cum for me yet,” the raider said. “The day she does, I’ll let you know. But she’s not fighting me. That, you should know right now.”
Meoraq grunted and said, without opening his eyes, “All this time, I thought I killed your Zhuqa, but I didn’t, did I? She did. You’ll have to tell me how she did that someday, eh? Tell me how bravely he died, your raider-lord. Did he piss himself and beg for his life like all the rest of your pack?”
A long silence, broken only by the weather and by Scott, shifting on his feet nearby. Meoraq waited, bracing himself for the blow. The first kick caught him in the gut, turning his breath to bile and his belly to lead. The second and third hit wherever he could not defend against them, but he scarcely felt them against the backdrop of so much pain. He retched and had to lie in it, gasping and light-headed, feeling himself roughly jostled as he was dressed and bound and finally hoisted into the air again.
The raider’s leader hadn’t even stayed to watch him suffer. Two of his men lingered in the doorway, hands on weapons, but they were looking out into the courtyard, overseeing humans. The only one left to see him in defeat was Scott himself, standing before him now with a look of smirking satisfaction on his flat face. Meoraq hissed wetly through his teeth and let his heavy head drop to his chest.
“I’m going home,” Scott whispered. “I’m going to save those people and I’m going to be a hero, and you and your fat whorebitch Bierce are going to die right here. Yeah. So there’s just one thing I want to say, lizard, and there’s one more thing I want to do and then I’ll leave you here to think about how it could have gone if you’d shown me some respect. Okay? Here it is.” Scott circled around to Meoraq’s back before easing closer, close enough that Meoraq could feel the heat of his breath. “I was right,” whispered Scott, “and you were wrong.”
Scott patted his shoulder and crept the rest of the way around him until he was in front of him again. He grimaced hugely, showing all his teeth, and then he swung his arm with an animal howl and slapped Meoraq in the snout. Coming as it did from Scott, the blow hurt his straining shoulders more than his face. Meoraq dangled, silent, swaying gradually to a stop, his eyes fixed on the enemy and his throat throbbing.
“I was right,” Scott said again, backing toward the door and the two sentries who were now watching him with amused contempt. “I found a transmission tower and a ship and a skyport and what did you find, lizardman? Huh? Nothing! There’s no God here! There never was!”
The words slapped harder than Scott’s freakish little hand, but even so, it was a slap, not a stab. He looked at the machine and the machine was a dead thing, just another decaying piece of the past. Scott could call it what he wanted, but he was still only pissing out of his mouth. Perhaps Meoraq had not heard Sheul’s true voice, but Scott hadn’t found a ship either, so there was still justice in the world, even if there was no God.
No God. The slap of those words struck even harder and so Meoraq brought them back and stared them down. The holiest shrine of all the world was empty. The Prophet Lashraq had been the leader of a band of foul-mouthed raiders. The Great Word was a book of lies and the fires of Sheul were a symptom of sickness.
Truth. All truth.
But did it really mean there was no God? If a blind man says the sky is grey—
Except that the sky wasn’t grey. Meoraq raised his head and looked up through the hole in the warped panels of the roof, at the little piece of the world that existed for him beyond this room. The clouds were grey, but he had seen the clouds open, however briefly. The clouds were grey, but the sky was green, and all the blind men in the world did not change that.
Scott left him, laughing, reveling in whatever suffering he imagined he had caused. Left alone, quietly and futilely hating him, Meoraq suddenly realized that somewhere along the winding road that had led to this moment, he had come to believe in Earth. He believed in this other world, this impossible blasphemous thing, and he believed that Scott and Amber and every other human, seen and unseen by him, had traveled through the sky between their two worlds in a ship. He believed the tower of fire he had mistaken for the very arm of Sheul was indeed the fire of that burning ship. He believed in all these things.
But he still could not believe that ship had come here by accident.
It was not the faith he’d had in his life before entering Xi’Matezh. It did not come with the name of Sheul or the certainty that he was seen by some greater eye as he hung here in Scott’s power, but it was still a comfort. His clay would perish, yet he had a soul and that, somehow, would go on.
Meoraq closed his eyes and stretched his toes toward the ground to take some of the weight off his screaming shoulders. He took deep breaths. He did not count them.
He waited in the dark to die.
13
They passed the day at Xi’Matezh and it was, for many, a good day. Scott had his moment of triumph, complete with a ship to show to his surviving men as proof of his superior leadership. The raiders encouraged his speeches and even called for a few when things threatened to get quiet; the delirious joy of the humans for what must seem to them just another relic in the ruins made it a day of rare entertainment. For Amber, it was a day in Purgatory. Not Hell itself, but only its cold grey antechamber—the waiting room where there was no time and no relief from the awful weight of anticipation.
Iziz kept her close, kept her servile, but did not allow her to work. The other humans hauled wood and water, and answered whatever need any raider had, whether it was for tea or stew or sex, with plenty of time to stand around their ship and daydream. Amber could only kneel with her hands below Iziz’s boot, aching with the strain of staying small and quiet, feeling his stare cold on the back of her head. She had nothing to do except think and when she wasn’t relentlessly playing out every possibility that began with getting a weapon away from Iziz (and ended with going through the broken wall and over the cliff more often than not), her mind brought her back to the same questions:
What was that thing in the garage where Meoraq hung? What was that thing that Scott and his Manifestors were all but praying to? Was it a ship? Was it really?
Or was it a boat?<
br />
She thought it was. She really did. And worse, she sometimes found herself thinking of it as proof that the helicopter was coming too, a thought that grew less and less comforting the longer she had to listen to Scott. He still hadn’t figured out how to open the door (as far as Amber knew, he hadn’t even identified which panel was the door), but he was completely confident that he could fly it home. Funny, how faith could look like crazy when she saw it on someone else.
She could try to fight. Iziz had plenty of weapons on him. Unfortunately, the only one she had any hope of getting at down here was the dagger in his boot, whereas he was in the perfect position to lop her head off.
‘He won’t do it,’ Bo Peep said sleepily. ‘He wants the baby.’
But he could still kill Meoraq.
‘He’s going to do that anyway. If you make him mad, at least he’ll kill Meoraq quickly.’
Nicci had died quickly. That didn’t make it easy.
‘If you do nothing, he’ll definitely die hard.’
But if she waited, she’d have more time to plan and maybe stumble into a better opportunity to take one of his swords.
‘Or lose it,’ said Bo Peep’s ghost. ‘If you see the chance, little girl, you take it. Maybe there is a God and maybe there isn’t. Maybe He helped Scott cross the wires that raised that boat and maybe He didn’t. Maybe this and maybe that, but you know damn well He isn’t going to drop out of the sky and put a gun in your hand, so you forget all about good opportunities and better ones. If you see the chance, you take it.’
Fuck it. Amber made a grab for the dagger in Iziz’s boot.
Iziz yanked his foot up and then slammed it forward, catching her in the chest and sending her skidding backwards through the mud until she collided with one of the Manifestors. He kicked her too, and Iziz leapt up and slapped him. “You touch my Eshiqi again and I’ll whip you bloody! Geozh!”
“I’ve got him. Urgath, get over here, what’s wrong with you?”
Amber spat mud, raised her head to catch a glimpse of metal—the shine of a buckle on the side of Iziz’s boot—and dropped it again, knowing it was all over now. Meoraq was dead; she’d helped to kill him.
Iziz stood over her a long time without speaking. “Get up,” he said at last.
“Fuck you,” Amber replied. The enormity of her risk and the self-disgust behind her failure combined to make her feel a little drunk. “Kill me on the ground, motherfucker.”
Several raiders hooted, hearing this. Several more wandered over to watch.
“Get up,” said Iziz again. Over his shoulder, he added, “Bring me the Sheulek.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him to fuck off again, but she knew this might be the last time she saw Meoraq, the last time he saw her. She didn’t want to be lying in the mud for that.
She climbed to her feet as they dragged Meoraq into the courtyard. He did not appear to be conscious, but they took no chances; his wrists were bound behind his back and then tied to his belt.
“That’s far enough,” said Iziz, and the raiders holding him let him drop. He collapsed face-down, but proved he was at least alive by rolling slowly onto his side and spitting out a mouthful of mud.
Iziz let her stare, but at her first hesitant step forward, he caught her by the arm and pulled her back. He studied the ground, gauging the distance between them and Meoraq, and took her with him all the way to the outer doors of the shrine. “He looks dry,” Iziz remarked, keeping his grip on her arm. “Lkonu, give the Sheulek a drink.”
With a snort, one of the raiders beckoned to the human acting as a serving slave.
“No,” said Iziz. “He looks very dry. Make sure he gets a long drink.”
Lkonu got up and took one of the big travel flasks from a sled. He needed the help of two others to stand Meoraq up to pry his mouth open. While they held him, Lkonu stuck the neck of the flask all the way into Meoraq’s mouth and began to pour.
The first few swallows must have been good, but they kept coming. Meoraq choked, tried to turn away; they held his head and kept pouring. He began to struggle, violently enough that they had to put him on the ground, but Lkonu stayed with him the whole time and kept pouring. How much did those flasks hold? Two gallons? Three? Amber saw his chest heave, water spewing from around the neck of the flask. She heard the sound that Nicci had spoken of—that bubbly shout that people make when they’re drowning.
At last, Lkonu came to the end of it, holding the flask up by its bottom and shaking to get the last drops. Then he took it away and the raiders pinning Meoraq to the ground let him go.
He kicked once, feebly. His mouth yawned. His head swiveled slowly side to side and then, in near-perfect silence, a great torrent of water erupted out of him. Most of it went spilling back into him and then came out again as foam. The raiders found this uproarious.
“God and Gann,” said Iziz, watching her, only her. “They come together out here. Understand that…and pick a sword.”
She looked at him, tears and mud drying stiff on her face, frozen to her heart. “Are you going to make me kill him?”
“I can’t make you do anything,” he replied evenly. “We all have a choice. My mother told me that. Didn’t yours?”
“No. Wasn’t really her style.” She looked at Meoraq again, lying on his back and choking on the froth of his own watery vomit, still too weak to roll over. “She was always a victim.”
“Sword, Eshiqi.” Iziz spread his arms, inviting her to take her choice—all of Meoraq’s and his own besides. “You wanted it enough to risk his life and yours, so don’t flinch now. Take it and swallow the consequences.”
Everyone was watching now. Raiders, Manifestors, even Eric, the newest slave of the bunch if you didn’t count Amber herself. Everyone except Meoraq, who didn’t do anything but breathe, and couldn’t do that very well.
The wind and the salt in the spray stung her eyes. She pointed at Meoraq’s samr, because she’d practiced with it before and because it was the heaviest and had the best chance of taking someone’s head off clean if…if that was where this was going.
Iziz drew it from the sheath strapped to his back and handed it to her. “All right,” he said, unclipping both kzungs and holding them, one in each hand, relaxed. “We’re going to play a game. You see your man there? If you can reach him—” The kzungs in his hands twirled in the careless manner of a trick played too many times to be considered showboating anymore. “—you can have him.”
“You lie.”
He shrugged. “I never said you could keep him, but I’ll give you one hour’s liberty. That’s fair, isn’t it?”
Raiders consulted one another and, after much serious talk and dramatic gestures, unanimously agreed. Very fair.
“One hour to do what you will with him. If you want to run or leap into the sea or just give him one last poke, that’s up to you. But you have to put your hand right on him, you mark?”
“And if you reach him first?”
“Probably won’t be pleasant. Just remember, it doesn’t end until you have him or until you cry surrender. If you cry, the game is over.” His head cocked. He smiled. “But if I reach him first, Eshiqi, you don’t get to cry anymore. You just get to watch. So really, the wisest thing for you to do is cry right now, before we get started.”
But she would never get another chance. Amber gripped her sword in both hands, holding it the way she’d trained during all those long, boring winter days.
Iziz snorted and slapped at his chest. “Let’s have it, then. Make me bleed.”
She stabbed. His sword smacked down on hers hard enough to sting her palms and numb her elbows. He could have disarmed her. He could have cut her throat on the backswing if he wanted to. He just stood there, his arms relaxed at his sides, his throat black and cool, waiting.
Amber stepped back, suddenly feinted left and swung from the right. He knocked her sword aside and slapped her with the flat of his blade.
The raiders cheered.
“Ease up,” suggested Iziz. “Your arms are too stiff and they’re telling me what you mean to do. A relaxed stance keeps secrets.”
She lunged, coming in low and slashing sharply up, but he was there to knock her sword uselessly aside and slap her other cheek. His men cheered again.
“You really are a fierce little thing, aren’t you?” Iziz murmured.
Amber feinted again, stabbing for his heart and then thrusting down with all her weight, hoping to nail his boot to the ground. His playful swat became a hasty leap backwards and she darted forward, slashing and stabbing and skidding in the mud. He let her come four, maybe five steps, and then he stopped parrying.
And started attacking.
Even as she scrambled to defend herself against the steady rain of blows, she knew he wasn’t trying to kill her. He was just thinning her nerves and wearing her out. And it was working. As she began to slow, so did he, until they were just standing and staring at each other once more.
“I can see your arms trembling,” said Iziz.
She stabbed. He knocked her sword aside and took a step forward. Amber backed away with her sword raised and yes, it was shaking. He took up every step she put between them until her back bumped against the outer doors of the shrine.
“So.” Iziz looked around, his spines relaxed and throat black, calm. “You began the game with fifty paces to claim and now have, what? Seventy-five? Do you cry, Eshiqi? You have to say the words.”
‘Say it,’ said Bo Peep. ‘You don’t have to mean it.’
True. She might even get that fabled better chance, but she had the sword in her hand right now and that might never happen again.
Amber screamed and lunged at him. All around them, raiders hissed and stomped, calling encouragement to her as she drove the smirking Iziz back. As he parried with one sword, the other played, flicking at her hair and cutting at the fastens of her girdle until it popped open and fell off. Her tunic gaped; the sight of her naked human breasts set the raiders to roaring, even louder after she shrugged out of the useless, flapping tunic and threw it to the ground. Bare-chested, she pressed the attack and Iziz agreeably backed up until he was maybe three meters from the place where Meoraq lay. There he stopped, content to parry her increasingly ragged thrusts and slashes until, with a snort of disdain, he clipped one of the kzungs back on his belt and gave her a shove.