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“No? Then why—” The exarch’s head cocked, still revealing nothing but paint and shadow and now the pinpoint gleam of one eye. “—do you seek Xi’Matezh? What would you ask of Sheul that requires so arduous a journey?”
And rather than tell this man his prayers were for Sheul alone, Meoraq said, “If it is Sheul’s will that I am retired to Uyane, so I will serve Him.”
The exarch dipped his head once, acknowledging, expectant.
“But I do not wish to spend all the years of my remaining life bound to stewardship if it is not His will!”
“Is the House so hateful?”
“The House?” Meoraq looked over his shoulder where, as only seemed right and natural, the lessons room had opened into the rooftop courtyard at the fore of House Uyane. He could see the stone couch his father favored beneath the drooping branches of a ribbonleaf tree, and the wide steps where he himself used to sit when he was at lessons (or when he was hoping to steal a glance at the servant girl who scrubbed the courtyard tiles). “No,” he said now, puzzled. “It is my father’s House and has all my love.”
“Not all, it would seem, if you would travel to the end of the very world to escape it.”
“It is not the House I wish to escape.”
“No?”
Meoraq looked again, but now the courtyard had become his father’s i
Meoraq averted his eyes fast, but the sounds persisted. His father’s deep, steady breaths. His mother’s feeble, mewling cries. The stealthy rasp of scales moving together. The wet pull and suck of sex in its second round.
The stranger was watching, his long hands steepled beneath his chin. “This embarrassed you.”
Meoraq did not reply and did not look again.
“Is it not a lord’s responsibility to preserve his bloodline? To sire sons of his loyal woman?”
His loyal woman. Meoraq’s jaws clenched.
“Surely you do not question Yecedi’s loyalty?”
“I am sure she was ever faithful to my father,” Meoraq said curtly. And he was. Yecedi had passed directly from her father’s own House to Rasozul’s and did not leave it until the day she died.
“She was a good woman.”
“I suppose so.” Meoraq shrugged his spines, wishing the sounds of sex would stop or at least that his mother’s urgent moaning would. “She was a perfect high-born wife, obedient and invisible and able to produce three strong sons upon command.”
The exarch looked at him. “Do you think your father gave it as his command?”
The sounds died away suddenly, swallowed up by the lessons room wall. Meoraq glanced that way, saw dark stone and students, and shrugged again.
“Of course, when you bore that night your reluctant witness, your father had already done his siring,” the exarch mused. “What embarrasses you most, I wonder? That you saw your father in Sheul’s fires, or that you saw him with your pregnant mother instead of some pretty young servant?”
“My father had no business taking her to his bed!” Meoraq burst out.
“Is it not the duty of a loyal woman to answer all her man’s desires?” said the exarch with the faintest hint of sarcasm.
“No, it is the duty of a loyal woman to sit in her damned room and grow her son! What was she even doing in that part of the house that he saw her?”
“Perhaps she was invited,” the exarch murmured, steepling his fingers again.
“He could not have passed fewer than three other women if he went to fetch her out. Any one of whom would have been honored to receive his fires!”
“Do you think so?”
“But, no! He had to have gone all the way to her room and back and for what? Sheul does not give a man sexual urges so that he can spend them with a woman already carrying his child!”
“The bond between man and woman is sacred even in the eye of Sheul. Nothing they took as their pleasure together offended Him.”
Meoraq snorted.
“When you take up the stewardship of House Uyane, will you not want a woman such as Yecedi?”
Meoraq tried to snort again but it came out as a hiss. He rubbed at his snout, then his brow-ridges, and finally his throat, where he could feel anger throbbing.
“A good woman. A loyal woman.”
A mewling little breed-pot, forever shackled to Meoraq’s wrist. He would have to live with her each and every day, unless he were away defending his House or his city’s honor, and he would not be permitted to send her out until after he had at least two grown sons to guarantee his continuance. Or unless she were barren, in which case he would have to replace her immediately with an entirely new mewling little breed-pot.
“Is it so impossible to imagine you could be happy with a woman?”
“I am frequently happy with women,” Meoraq snapped.
“With one woman.”
He rubbed his brow-ridges. “If that is Sheul’s will.”
“And so you travel to Xi’Matezh.”
“Yes.”
“To pray for Sheul’s guidance.”
“Yes.”
“That He may lead you to a good woman to take into your House.”
Meoraq hissed again and shook his head. “Yes.”
“Perhaps you could find one here.”
“Here?” Meoraq looked around the lessons room, at dumaqs and humans side at side, all the way to Master Tsazr, indiscriminately lecturing all. “There are no women allowed in the training halls!”
It was a dream, and his voice, which had gone u
“Uyane!”
He snapped to his feet at once, dream or no dream, and Master Tsazr came swiftly forward to slap him deservedly across his snout. It did not hurt in the dream, but it still staggered him some. Master Tsazr had a wicked hand.
“No women in the training halls, eh? Have you come to work your mind?” Tsazr inquired caustically. “Or your clay?”
“My mind, sir.”
“I have my doubts. Amber.” The human name fell perfectly from Tsazr’s mouth.
“Yes, sir.” The dumaqi words came perfectly from Amber’s.
“What is the day’s lesson? Remind Uyane.”
“We speak of the Ancients, sir.”
“Tell Uyane your lesson.”
Amber turned her soft, flat face toward him. The bad light of the lessons room made her pale skin seem wholly white, her dun-colored hair seem grey as ashes, and her nondescript training garments as black as the Abyss, but her eyes were still green as new leaves and deep as wells. She said, “Our numbers swelled until our cities covered all the earth. When we had no more land to cover, we built our cities on top of themselves and milled in them all together, like yifu. We took the holy gifts of medicine and science and used them in frivolous and dangerous ways. We made machines to give us comfort and used them until we poisoned all our earth and water and air. We made trade of sex and suffering and war. We mocked Sheul and we corrupted Ga
“The Ancients corrupted Ga
“Yes, sir!”
“Name the three acts of the Fall of the Ancients.”
Thank Sheul in His heaven for an easy question. “The first act was the punishment of wrath, when every man was consumed by rage and war enveloped all of Ga
“For how long?”
Meoraq stared for a moment, utterly thrown. Back came Master Tsazr’s hand, but it could not knock answers into him when there were none.
“Amber,” said Tsazr, turning around. “How long did the act of wrath last?”
“It is still among us,” she replied, which was the most nonsensical thing she could have said here, in Sheul’s world of peace.
But Master Tsazr grunted approvingly and walked away. “Speak on, Uyane. What was the second act?”
“The curse of blight,” he said at once, “when the land failed and the skies were filled with storms. The cities of the Ancients fell and famine and disease preyed upon the landless people.”
“For how long?” asked Tsazr, casting a cold eye back at Meoraq.
He looked at Amber, but she was bent over her slate, making human letters. In another moment, Meoraq was reeling from the dream-like painlessness of Master Tsazr’s blow. Amber’s voice drifted up from his side, the dumaqi words made haunting in her human mouth: “It is still among us.”
“Uyane.”
Meoraq straightened up and put his arms to his side, only to find that Master Tsazr had somehow been replaced by the strange exarch with the low hood.
“What was the third act of the Fall of the Ancients?” this figure asked in Tsazr’s voice.
He knew this one, thankfully. “It was the return of Sheul and the hope of His forgiveness. And it is still among us,” he added, anticipating the next question.
The stranger did not reply, but the silence that swept the lessons room proved more disconcerting than his hooded stare. Meoraq looked away and saw the prairie all around him; he looked back and there was Amber before him and they were sitting, face to face, in the dark of the humans’ camp.
“We built a ship,” said Amber. She raised her hand to make a wedged shape and passed it between them. “And it flew through the sky, beyond the clouds that covered our world, into the lights that shine forever.” Her arm arced up, graceful as the neck of a thuoch. Her eyes never left his and they were green, so green. “But the ship was hurt and it fell here, out of the storm. It broke open over Ga
Something in him shivered right down to the core of his soul. He tried to say her name, but the magic of the dream ended, it seemed, with his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, just as he always had, and shook his head with disgust. His next attempt was nothing but a hiss and a choke of meaningless sound.