Her fingers touched something. Desperately, she latched onto it, for there was nothing else to sustain the hope that dwindled with the last of the oxygen in her burning lungs. She grappled with the unseen thing, and finally was rewarded as Reza’s lifeless form came free from the inverted ridge of ice where he had been trapped by the slow but irresistible current.
Perhaps infinity was a concept best not dwelt upon by a young warrior still untested in battle, but Esah-Zhurah thought she came to understand it well as she struggled through the water toward the surface. Distance and time merged into numbing agony and fear as she fought for every stroke against the current that had helped her find him, but that now threatened to doom her to the same fate. She clamped her arm harder around Reza’s chest to keep his armored body from sinking like leaden ballast. She turned to look at his shadowy outline, wondering if he could even still be alive.
No matter, she told herself. She was determined not to leave him behind. Not ever.
The flame that had burned so brightly within her, the power that had somehow shown her where to find him, was flickering like a candle flame surrounded with mist. Her heart was beginning to slow as her body temperature fell, and the numbness in her limbs was overshadowed only by the intense burning in her cramping muscles as their strength swiftly ebbed.
A hideous apparition suddenly flew at her face from the darkness, teeth bared behind savagely drawn lips, ebony eyes bulging from its unearthly face. Claws appeared, reaching for her…
Esah-Zhurah almost screamed into the frigid water at the sight, but her panicked brain understood – barely in time – that it was only the corpse of her magthep. Its struggles against the water now over, its ragged shell was bound for the ocean that lay far beyond the great wastelands.
Just then, her head shot through the water into the frigid air above, and Esah-Zhurah gasped at the shock of it, the taste of life in her mouth. She fought to get Reza’s head above the water, even though she knew he was not breathing, and had not been for she did not know how long. She tugged and pulled with her legs and free arm, propelling herself toward the craggy outlines of the ice rim.
But it was not enough. Just at that moment, her struggling legs failed.
As her head went under for the last time, her free hand touched something, and instinctively she grabbed hold of it.
The rope!
Biting her tongue, the pain forcing one last surge of adrenaline into her arteries, she managed one more kick, pushing her head above the water.
Managing to loop the rope around her free wrist, she screamed a last command to the faithful beast above before the water jealously pulled her back. “Goliath, drakh-te ka! Pull!”
Nothing happened. As she began to sink, her legs having given their last, she sucked in one final breath before her head went under
Her arm was nearly pulled from its socket as the slack in the rope suddenly vanished. Obeying the command that Reza had once taught him as a useful trick, Goliath hauled them out with his mammoth strength, running headlong away from the fissure. Esah-Zhurah clung desperately to Reza as the two of them swept through the water like porpoises, leaving a rooster tail of icy water showering behind them.
Ahead of them loomed a wall of ice, the edge of the collapsed ice dome through which Reza had fallen. The top of the ice was nearly a meter above the surface of the water, and Esah-Zhurah visualized the two of them being smashed senseless against it as Goliath pulled them blindly onward.
She opened her mouth to tell Goliath to stop, to slow them down before they hit. But a monstrous roar drowned out her voice as the entire ice dome around them collapsed into the water. They were now surging toward a part of the fissure that was in the shape of a V, spearheaded by the rope that had sawed through the thinner ice under Goliath’s power. A tidal wave crashed over them, and then they were smashing through sheets and blocks of jagged ice. Frantically rolling to one side, she tried to use Reza’s armor as a shield for her own body as they scraped and bucked over the razor-edged floes. Had her arm not been entwined with the rope, she would have lost her grip and fallen back into the water.
Then they were free, their bodies plowing through the snow as Goliath pulled them at a full gallop. Esah-Zhurah let him go for a while until she thought it might be safe to stop.
“Goliath,” she called wearily, hoping the animal would hear her through the still howling wind. She had visions of herself and Reza, frozen to death, twirling on a rope behind the animal until it, too, finally died of exposure. “Kazh! Stop!”
The rope went slack.
Esah-Zhurah wanted to lay there in the snow and rest for a long while, but she knew that to do so would have brought Death calling. Reza lay next to her, his body still. She had to act quickly. She gained her feet, staggering like a drunkard, and was met by Goliath’s steamy muzzle. Petting the beast with dead hands, she worked her way to the saddle and grappled with the lashings that held the shelter, slashing the frozen bindings free with her talons. It fell into the snow. The small brown roll, about the diameter and length of her thigh, immediately began to grow, quickly assuming a hemispherical shape that was nearly as big around as Goliath was long. A tube extruded itself from one end as the whole thing changed color from a leathery brown to a heat absorbing black. As an afterthought, Esah-Zhurah pulled the saddle from Goliath’s back, leaving him free to seek his own shelter.
She pulled Reza into the tube, the shelter’s sphincter-like entrance dilating open to accept them as if they were crawling back into the womb, then closing behind them. Groping wearily in the darkness of the vestibule with her numbed fingers, Esah-Zhurah cut away Reza’s frozen armor, the ice shattering as she peeled it away like the hardened chrysalis of some exotic species of insect. She tore at his clothes, quickly throwing everything to one side in a frozen heap. Then she dragged him into the main part of the shelter and turned him on his stomach. Doing what he had once shown her, she straddled his back and began forcing the water from his lungs with her hands, pushing down with all her weight on his back.
Beneath her, she could hear the sickening gurgle of water as it gushed from his mouth onto the floor of the shelter. Push, release, push, release, until the water fell to a trickle, then stopped. Then she hurriedly turned him over. She bent down, putting her ear to Reza’s naked breast, listening for a heartbeat through the pounding of her own that reverberated in her ears. For eight beats of her heart, there was nothing. Then, she heard a faint lub… dub through his flesh.
The sound energized her with the power of hope. She bent over him, praying that she could remember the things he had taught her when she was learning to swim. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” he had called it in his native tongue. She had laughed at him at the time, finding the thought of doing such a thing to another Kreelan – let alone a human – repugnant.
But the humor of that day was now replaced by desperation as she took his head in her hands. With one hand cupping his head and the other clamping his nose, she put her numbed mouth over his and began to force air into his waterlogged lungs. She took another breath, then blew again. Her body shook from sheer exhaustion and cold, and her heart beat so fast that she knew it must soon burst. But she refused to give up.
Suddenly, he began coughing. He spouted water everywhere as his lungs received a signal from his dazed brain that they were to begin functioning again, and they sought to clear out the last of the offending fluid. Esah-Zhurah shuddered, praying her thanks to the Empress.
After a few minutes, his breathing became ragged but steady. Undoing her own armor and shedding her clothing, she held him close, wrapping her quaking arms around him. Beneath them, the shelter absorbed the icy pool of water from Reza’s lungs. It left behind only a soft, dry bed that already had begun to warm them, reflecting their flickering body heat inward.
Cradling his frigid body to give it what little warmth her own had to offer, she spiraled into a dark, dreamless abyss.
* * *
Tesh-Dar stood at
the great window in her quarters, watching as the muted light of day faded into the cold clutches of deep winter’s night. She did not need a thermometer to tell her that the temperature was plummeting, and that any organism directly exposed to the night’s ministrations would not long survive.
“All of the tresh are accounted for, save Esah-Zhurah and the animal,” her First reported quietly. The task they had been given had been a simple but vital one, carried out by generations of tresh for eons as a service to the priestesses of the kazhas. The journey to the city and back, even in deep snow, should have taken only three-fourths of the day’s light. But dusk was now upon them, and the young pair still had not returned. “Perhaps,” she went on in the silence left by Tesh-Dar, “the human did something…”
The priestess waved her hand impatiently, dismissing the First’s veiled accusation. “Had he wished to do something in that vein,” she said, “surely he would have done so before this day. No,” she said, turning away from the window, “it is not that. Perhaps they remained in the city through good judgment. I do not know.”
“If there is nothing else, my priestess, I shall retire for the night,” the First said, saluting before she turned to leave. “If the weather allows, I will send out search parties tomorrow to find them.”
“No,” Tesh-Dar told her. “If they are alive, they must find their own way. If they have perished, there is no need to risk the lives of others to find frozen corpses. Many lives has the winter claimed in this way, and I will not willingly add to its toll.”
“Then it is in Her hands,” the other woman observed. “Sleep well, my priestess,” she said, softly closing the door behind her.
Turning again to the window, a grimace kissed Tesh-Dar’s lips at the First’s parting words, for no sleep would she find this night.
Closing her eyes and straining to hear and see with senses far beyond what her body boasted, Tesh-Dar began to wander through the endless cold of the night, searching for her missing children.
* * *
Reza was not sure if he was awake or simply in some kind of strange dream. The world was cloaked in velvety darkness, and his skin tingled in a strange, yet familiar way. After a moment, he realized it was the sensation left by the healing gel as it worked its strange miracles. He lay against something warm and smooth, his face pressed against a firm pillow. His nose relayed a gentle smell he recognized as the alien musk to which he had become so accustomed, the smell of Kreelan skin. Esah-Zhurah’s skin.
“Esah… Zhurah?” he rasped, his tongue a flaccid lump of flesh in his parched mouth.
“Yes,” came her voice from somewhere in the darkness, accompanied by the cool touch of her hand on his forehead, gently brushing his hair back. “I am here, Reza.” When she had awakened from the nightmare that had finally come to pass, she had found Reza lying next to her, shivering and burning up with fever. The shelter had done as best it could to save the frostbitten flesh, automatically coating Reza’s skin with healing gel, but there was nothing it could do for whatever raged within his body. Esah-Zhurah had despaired for his survival as she did what little she could to keep his temperature down, comforting him in the few lucid moments the fever had allowed.
“Are you… all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she told him, her heart swelling at his concern for her. He tried to move, but Esah-Zhurah held him back. “Be still, my tresh,” she commanded softly, her hands holding him firmly in place against her side, his head cradled between her breasts. She put her hand against his forehead again, reassuring herself that it was only warm, and not hot. “Your body is yet weak.”
“Where is Goliath?” he asked.
She smiled. Reza was forever concerned with his animal friend. “Goliath lies buried next to us in the snow, keeping warm in the way of his kind. He, too, is well; complaining of hunger, but alive.”
“How long…” he asked. “How long have we been here?”
“The sun has risen and set twice since I awakened, and now it is night,” she told him. “I do not know how long I was unconscious before that.” She felt Reza’s eyes close, the brushing of his eyelashes a pleasant tickle against the skin of her breast. Thinking he had returned to the quiet of sleep, she said no more.
But he was not asleep, only thinking. “Esah-Zhurah,” Reza said, breaking the silence, “why are you still here?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled.
“The storm has long since passed, has it not?” Outside, the only thing to be heard was the muted sound of Goliath’s breathing and an occasional groan as the beast voiced its hunger.
“It is so,” she answered cautiously, unsure where his thoughts would lead.
“I was as good as dead, drowned in the river,” Reza went on, his voice a gentle but unrelenting probe, exploring her motivations. “You could have left me behind. You could have taken the shelter and Goliath and tried to make it on your own. Why did you not?”
She shifted uncomfortably beside him. “I shamed my honor with my arrogance by abandoning you,” she said, her voice low and measured, each syllable a self-punishment exacted by her conscience. “I could not abandon you again. You are strange, and not of our Way, but you… are special to me, in a way I do not fully understand.” She paused. “I could not bear the thought of losing you.”
His hand found hers. There was no need for words. She held him tightly, feeling the warm wetness of his tears upon her breast. In her heart there was a quiet jubilation that they were both alive, and that this day they were something more than they had ever been before.
As their bodies melded together in the deepening cold, she found herself murmuring softly in a prayer to the Empress, asking if perhaps this human – just this one – might indeed have a soul and a place among Her Children.
* * *
When Reza again awoke, it was to a sensation of rampant thirst the likes of which he had never known. Esah-Zhurah had done her best to give him what fluids she could against the fever that had taken him, and had drained all of the shelter’s normal liquid supplies. But it had not made up for what he had lost, and the debt the fever had left in its wake had finally caught up to him. The inside of his mouth felt like it was sewn together from sun-baked leather.
“Water,” he croaked.
“Here,” she said, holding a small clump of packed snow to his lips.
He opened his mouth eagerly, but found the icy snow, taken from a small pile Esah-Zhurah had brought in for the purpose, to be like acid in his mouth. It burned in his throat as it grudgingly metamorphosed into its liquid form. Even so, his thirst was so overpowering that he began to suck on it greedily, and was rewarded with a fit of coughing as water found its way into his trachea, choking him.
Esah-Zhurah held him steady as his coughing subsided into ragged breathing. He was still terribly weak.
“Wait,” she told him, gently rolling him onto his back.
He heard her scoop up some snow from wherever she had it sequestered behind him, and then she was silent for a while.
“What are you doing?” he asked, staring into the darkness.
Then he felt one of her hands reach down to cradle the back of his head, lifting it up, while the other gripped his lower jaw and gently forced it open. With shocked surprise he felt her lips press against his, and then cool water was spilling into his mouth from hers. For a moment, he did nothing, disbelieving that she was actually doing such a thing – the rough equivalent among her kind of a human kissing a dog in the world he had once known – and wondering if he should be thankful or repulsed by her touch.
But then her lips pulled away, and he forced himself to swallow the water she had shared with him, having melted the snow in her mouth with the heat of her body. With a detached, almost shameful sense of curiosity, he found himself analyzing the water for any trace of her own taste that might be there, noting with mixed emotions the lack of anything unpleasant.
“More?” Esah-Zhurah asked. She had discovered that actua
lly carrying out the idea that had struck her had been… pleasant. It was not at all like when she had pressed her frozen mouth to his to force air into his lungs. In fact, it had excited her in a way. She wondered what it must have been like before the reign of the First Empress, when male warriors walked among her race, and there were no clawless ones, no sterile mules like herself. Did they perhaps lie quietly next to one another like this on cold winter nights, speaking only with the beating of their hearts and the touch of their bodies? This was the stuff of legend, of fairy tales, or so many peers thought, and undoubtedly it was so. The ancient tales and songs of those times struck a hollow chord among the Empire’s warriors. For they knew that the males of their race were nothing more than instruments for the propagation of their species, and it was hard to imagine they had ever been anything more. Some, like Tesh-Dar, truly believed the ancient legends as historical truth. But many had their doubts. Esah-Zhurah tended to believe that the legends were only stories. But something in her mind, a tiny race memory left in the wake of the long evolution of her people, left her thinking that perhaps the peers, the doubters, were wrong.
Licking the tiny bit of moisture that had spilled on his lips, Reza nodded in the darkness. “Please,” he begged, his thirst now completely awakened, a ravenous thing trapped in his parched mouth.
Esah-Zhurah repeated her performance four more times, until her tiny stockpile of snow was gone. She noted with a twinge of alarm that touching Reza this way was beginning to seem more than just pleasant. As she gave him the last of the water, the stream between their joined mouths now spent, she pulled away from him, pausing with her lips a hair’s breadth from his, her heart beating like thunder in her ears.
“Thank you,” he whispered, his lips brushing hers as he spoke the words, sending a jolt of emotional electricity through her. He reached out, running his fingers across her cheek, through her hair, before drawing her down to him. Like strangers whose destiny was to become fast friends and more, their lips touched in a gentle kiss that left them both breathless. When their lips parted, he only had time to utter her name before she kissed him in her own turn, carefully lowering her body onto his, her breasts pools of heat against his chest.
In Her Name Page 24