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They obeyed. Grunting, straining, with Scott calling officious encouragement at them, the humans dragged the crate out of the mud and onto the slope, where they managed to drag it about halfway up before the first man’s feet slid a little too close to the edge. The ground gave, not much, but enough to throw a start into the heaving humans. Men tumbled over each other with cries of alarm and the one man who did not let go of the rope let himself be yanked painfully down the slope to land head-first against the crate, once more resting in the mud at the bottom.
Meoraq leaned out and watched until he saw enough movement to satisfy him that there were no real injuries, then turned and looked at Scott. “I want my rope back. And I want it cleaned before it’s coiled.”
Scott glared at him with color in his face and complete incomprehension in his eyes. He turned to his men. “We’re going to try that again,” he a
Meoraq bent his neck for a few deep breaths, rubbing at his brow-ridges.
“But first we’re going to get some branches or something to use as poles. Some people can stand at the bottom and push with the poles—”
“I cry,” Meoraq said.
Scott looked at him. “What?”
Meoraq dropped his hand and shrugged his tight spines. “I cry,” he said again, simply and without anger. “I have stood for truth in three hundred trials and surely struck down two hundred more of Ga
“What the hell is he saying?” Scott asked, puckering up his flat, ugly face in an expression of a
“You had best find her,” Meoraq ordered, pointing right into Scott’s face with the whole of his hand. “Because I have a few thoughts and if I ca
Scott moved unhurriedly back, saying, “I don’t know what the hell he’s saying. Go ahead and let’s make camp. We’re done for the day. Someone find Bierce before I forget how useful this thing can occasionally be.”
Meoraq grunted and went to gather up his emptied flasks, reminding himself at every step that this was a pilgrimage, there were supposed to be ordeals, and they were called ordeals because they were not endured easily.
Even without a sandglass or bells rung at every hour, Meoraq had always had a good sense of time. A man who spent so much of his life with nothing to look at except the sun (or the light of the sun, according to Master Tsazr), learned to read it almost unawares. Meoraq knew that they had left the fast-flowing stream behind perhaps two hours ago, and although he also knew it would not take nearly so long to reach it again, he was not prepared to find himself standing at its edge as quickly as he did.
Two hours…and here was the stream.
Meoraq did not fill his flasks. He shouldered them instead and, in a fouler mood than ten days’ rain outside of Tothax had been able to inspire in him, kept walking. He marked the sun as he went. By his judgment, he reached his destination and returned in just a little more than an hour, stopping only once to fill his flasks at last.
He came back into the humans’ camp, ignoring those brave few who dared to express their disappointment that he had no meat with him. He set his water down beside his pack—calmly, a Sheulek was the master of his impulses—but kept the one object he had taken from his walk tight in his fist and went in search of Amber.
He found her sprawled on her back on a heap of the wrapped cushions, which, judging from her flushed face and rough breath, she had only just finished hauling up to the top of the rise where Scott had put this camp—the first show of common sense the man had demonstrated. Her clothes lay over her in damp, rumpled folds that emphasized, rather than hid, the wasted hills and valleys of her exhausted body. Her eyes were shut; the flesh around them, dark and hollow-looking, like sockets in an empty skull. There was still a stain of blood in her hair.
Anger he had struggled all day long to contain faded somewhat. He opened his mouth, grappled with and was defeated by the sinful nonsense of her name, and turned instead to Nicci, who sat on the cushions close by, wrapped in one of their metal blankets, watching him.
He gestured uncomfortably at Amber. “Is she sleeping?”
Nicci spared the prone human beside her a glance. “Looks like it.”
Meoraq grunted and beckoned to her. “Leave her. You mark me well enough. I require my words carried to your abbot. Come.”
Nicci reached out to nudge at Amber. “Wake up.”
Amber’s eyes opened, but the impossible green of them was dulled into something greyish. Dead. She looked at Nicci, who was wrapping herself up again, then at Meoraq, who was battling the urge to slap Nicci right out of her shiny metal blanket.
“Hey,” Amber muttered. She visibly gathered her strength, then rolled onto her side before pushing herself into a seated position. Her arm trembled as she raised it to rub at her face. “I can’t believe I actually crashed like that.”
Crashed. Not a word he’d ever heard for rest, but one almost painfully apt. She had not been sleeping, not lying that way under the open sky with rain pooling over her eyes. She had crashed, like the ship she claimed had carried her here.
He wished briefly and with singular bitterness that he really had gone hunting after all. She looked terrible and what did he have to offer her but—
She saw the object in his hand and her brows pinched together. “What’s that?”
He looked at it himself, just as if he had not been the one to pick it up and carry it here. His anger returned, an ugly shadow of the good, clarifying fire it had been, but just as undeniable.
“I need you,” he said and curtly added, “To speak.”
“Yeah, okay.”
And she took his arm.
Reached right up and took it.
Meoraq held very still as she used him to climb to her feet, unsure where he should be looking. He was excruciatingly aware of everything around him: the wind whispering through the grass, the piercing warble of laughing humans, the smell of wet leaves and earth, Nicci’s silent staring eyes, and above everything, the warm press of all five thin fingers that gripped him.
No woman in all his life had ever…ever touched him like that. In other ways, yes. He tended to be permissive with his women, particularly if they, like the woman in Xheoth, came to his room more than once. Those he took in conquest after trial, like the flat-headed girl in Tothax, were permitted to struggle, but they rarely did and even they did not touch him like that—flesh to flesh, uninvited and unrepentant for it.
Then she let go and moved away, taking the short, limping steps of an old woman. “Oh Scott!” she called in that musical way.
At some short distance, surrounded by his generals, Scott turned around. “Miss Bierce,” he said without welcome.
Amber smiled. “Everly.”
Meoraq stepped between them.
“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, thrusting the object he had collected on his solitary walk—a plain stone, charred along one side—out before him.
Scott looked at it. So did Amber, although she had to come around the side of him to see.
“What did he say?” Scott asked in a tight, impatient way.
“He…wants to know what that is.”
Scott looked at her. She rolled her shoulders and shook her head. He frowned.
Meoraq waited.
“It’s a rock,” said Scott.
“And do you know where I got it?” Meoraq inquired.
Amber asked.
Scott’s brows puckered. “How the hell should I…? This better be what he’s really saying, Bierce, because if you’re just trying to make me look stupid—”
“You don’t need my help to look stupid.”
Meoraq gave the rock a terse shake. “Answer!”
Amber rolled her shoulders again, adding, “I hope to God you don’t want us to walk back and look because I’m done in, lizardman.”
“I took it from your fire-pit!” Meoraq bellowed, so suddenly that both of them—and quite a few of those around them—jumped. “We have been walking all day and for what? We are still in easy distance of your first camp’s fires! I could walk further on two broken legs!”
“What’s he saying?” Scott asked.
Amber ignored him, begi
“We have not gone half a span, human! Not even half of half! Do you know what a day’s shamefully idle distance is for me?”
“Do I care?”
“Five!”
She looked at him, then down at herself, and up at him again. “Look at me!” she said angrily. “Do I look like I can go any further than I did today? Do any of us?”
“I could,” said a human.
“Shut the fuck up, Crandall!”
“Well, I could. Hey, realistically, we did, what? Two miles?”
“It had to be more than that,” said Scott, looking alarmed.
“Uphill, loose terrain, bad weather, and of course, lugging the heavy stuff. It took us forever to get going and every time we took a break, we’d end up sitting around like two hours. I wasn’t going to say anything,” he added, rolling his shoulders. “I mean, I realize you guys aren’t soldiers.”
“But we could have done a lot better,” Eric said quietly.
“Well, you just tell him we need this equipment,” said Scott, turning back to Amber. “And while you’re at it, you might find a nice way of suggesting that he pull the stick out of his scaly ass or someone just might have to kick it for him.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? He understands English just fine!”
Scott frowned at her, then looked at Meoraq.
Meoraq slapped him.
“And we’re not slowing you up for the fun of it,” Amber told him as Scott staggered back. “This stuff is heavy.”
“Then leave it behind! I have never seen you so much as open those crates! How can they be so essential?”
“What is he saying now?” asked Scott, cradling his jaw just as though Meoraq had broken it.
“He wants to know if what we’re dragging around is important,” said Amber.
“What we’re dragging around is none of his business. His only job is to act as our guide.”
“No, human,” said Meoraq, darkly amused by the man’s audacity in spite of himself. “My only true task is to serve Sheul as his Sword and his Striding Foot, and in that pursuit, I am given all liberty. All, S’kot. To defy me is to defy Him, and the cost of that defiance is death.”
Scott continued to glare, although his brows creased above his snapping eyes with a human expression of confusion. “What did he call me?”