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Amber had not flagged in her determination to teach him the crude speech of her people, although she seemed amenable to learn dumaqi as well, inasmuch as her physical defects allowed. As the days passed and she continued to mangle the simple words he gave her, he could see her frustration mounting, but he refused to resort to humani. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word; his many meditations on the First Law had brought him no clear answers, only the same vague feeling that these were people, and if so, then Sheul had deliberately made them in this mold, with the deformities that made dumaqi impossible for them to speak, and if that were true, how could he, Meoraq, born of clay, judge them for being as God made them? Nevertheless, it remained true that he must hold to the admonitions of the Prophet and speak only Man’s tongue. He could see that Amber understood his words far less than he did hers, but she had made some progress already and could only make more. With Amber, Meoraq found he could be at least a little patient. With the others…
Yet for all the aggravation of tending them, it was not so terrible an ordeal. He’d never kept a pet before and keeping close to fifty of them all at once in the wildlands was not how any man ought to begin, but he seemed to be having some success at it and he had to admit, he liked having someone to talk to, even if she couldn’t talk back.
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But they did test a man and every now and then, it was either walk away from them and their constant neediness or slap them until either his hand or their heads fell off.
So it was that the end of a very long and trying evening found Uyane Meoraq, twelve years a Sheulek in God’s service and honest victor of hundreds of trials, outside the vague boundary of the humans’ camp, hiding in a tree.
He knew he was hiding. He could even see the humor in it, in a sour sort of way. A Sheulek was the master of his clay. He knew no fear and no hesitation when he stood in the arena in the sight of Sheul, and yet here he was. Not so far away that he could not leap down and defend them if the humans drew some danger into their midst, but hopefully out of sight. The coming winter had caused most of the leaves to brown and a few to drop, so he was not as invisible as he would have liked, but corrokis couldn’t look up and perhaps neither could humans.
It was surprisingly pleasant up here. Meoraq was not a man fond of heights under most circumstances, but today he found the scope of the view soothing to his eye. The evening air was cool but dry for the moment, and there was enough light yet that he could see small herds of saoq moving in the prairie, and the larger dark dots of corrokis grazing among them.
He supposed he had time enough for a short hunt before the sun was gone, but he had brought one meal into this camp already today and that would just have to be enough for the greedy bellies of his humans. He himself had most of two bricks of cuuvash yet and he didn’t mind eating some in front of them. For now, he was content just to feel the edge of his appetite as he meditated with his eyes open, clearing his mind of all thought but open to the will of Sheul on the slim chance that He should speak, and just watching the world while he still had it to himself.
It was peaceful.
But it didn’t last.
It began with one human, the one called Scott, trudging noisily through the trees and yawning against its hand with no apparent purpose to its wanderings until it leaned itself up against the very tree in which Meoraq sought refuge and opened its breeches.
Meoraq had no intention of watching the human undress, but before he could avert his eyes, the human reached into its clothing and drew out a short, thick tube of discolored flesh. The human held this limp and repulsive appendage in its hand as it scratched sleepily at its hair, and after a moment or two, out arced a steaming sluice of bright yellow fluid.
It was pissing. Standing up.
But through what? It hung, finger-length and flopping, beneath a short thatch of dark hair, much darker and curlier than that which grew on Scott’s head, and above a second distended lump of flesh Meoraq presumed to be its bladder, externalized by some quirk of human design. The appendage itself seemed to be boneless and had no real distinguishing characteristics that Meoraq could see at this height, apart from its loose outer skin which could not quite cover the dark, bulbous tip from which its urine endlessly poured. That stream, as well as the coincidental placement of the appendage between the human’s legs, made it seem unca
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It was pissing out of it.
It was pissing out of its soft, blotchy, malformed cock.
Two more humans were coming. The one called Scott glanced in the direction of their noisy approach as his stream slackened, then actually waggled the flabby spout of his organ to shake free the last drops of urine before folding itself back into his breeches. The humans met and grunted greetings. Scott retreated; the other two opened their clothing, muttering to one another, and drew out two more floppy cocks to piss through. They differed somewhat in size and color, but that was all.
So they were uncontestably males. Which meant that there were also females. Amber would be a female. He had suspected that from the first and he felt absolutely nothing at having his suspicions confirmed because it did not matter to him if a human were male or female any more than it mattered if, oh, if a saoq were male or female. Animals were animals, and in a purely animal sense, the only question worth pondering was whether some or all of those human females might at this moment be breeding.
Meoraq forced himself to look down, to study the limp things the human males had and ponder the breeding of humans. He had no experience with the husbandry of animals; if there was a way to look at these creatures and know how quickly it made young or how many it could drop in a litter, Meoraq did not know what it was. He thought he’d ought to know too, because whether or not they were breeding at the moment, if they had opposing gender, there would be offspring eventually. If the swollen teats of their women were anything to measure by, those offspring might already have been recently birthed, but they were not in evidence now, which could mean the females would soon be ready to conceive again.
He had to think of Amber then, much as he had been fighting it. Amber and her silly spear. Amber, who spent so much time sitting at his fire and taking the little bites he fed her (right from his hand) and trying with such spectacular unsuccess to mouth his words. And yes, Amber, who was female, not that this mattered, and who might be breeding (he caught at his snout to stop the hiss that shot insensibly out of him) as she damned well should be (Meoraq swung himself down and out of the tree’s fork, moving fast from branch to branch until he dropped with a curse to the ground) instead of ru
“Although You have made no law against this,” Meoraq acknowledged, glancing heavenward as he aimed himself for the humans and their camp. “And I admit I like better to see her at her foolish hunt than to see her N’ki doing nothing but waiting to be fed in proper female fashion.”
Nicci did everything in proper female fashion, come to think of it. She sat quietly, kept herself largely invisible and showed obedience to male command, since now he knew Scott to be male. Amber did none of these things, really. She talked almost constantly when she was with him, even reaching out to touch him if she did not think she had enough of his attention, and she let her frustrations show plainly on her ugly face. She kept apart from the rest of her kind, but was quick enough to argue with them if she thought they gave her cause. As for obedience, ha! He tried to imagine Amber as a proper female, to picture her in her father’s House (it greatly resembled his own in Xeqor) kneeling meekly, her neck bent and hands turned to heaven…
He couldn’t do it. Perhaps she had been feminine once, but no longer.
He liked her better like this anyway.
There had to be something wrong with him.
It was not far into the evening, and yet the humans were bedding themselves down in broad rings around the fires when he returned. Amber was still sitting up, wrapped in the shiny skin of her blanket, watching the other humans gnaw on saoq bones and talk at each other while she sat alone. She did not look at him until he had been standing over her for quite some time and she did not smile when she finally did.
She. So he had been thinking of her all this time, but he wanted to be sure. He needed to be sure. Just why he needed to be sure this instant, he didn’t know and did not explore. He simply hunkered down and started drawing in the dirt.
She watched listlessly until he had made two images, featureless blobs with arms and legs and hairy heads. She knew they were human and said so, tapping at them without enthusiasm even as her attention wandered back to the fire.
He caught her chin and made her look at the drawings as he, not without an internal wince, carefully added twin curves to one image and a short line to the other.
She studied the pictures in silence, her mouthparts slowly turning up at the corners. “Yeh. I ges we ki’indaskipt tht’biht. Man,” she said, pointing at the male figure. And at the female: “Woman.” And then she patted herself on the chest, right above the swellings of her—yes, her—teats. “Woman.”
‘If they are people, it is not a sin,’ he thought vaguely, and his belly warmed at once. ‘If they are people, she is a woman in your camp, under your protection, and she owes you every obedience.’