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“He didn’t call you anything,” Amber replied. “He just said he doesn’t work for you. And…something about God, I’m not sure what. And I think that bit at the end was him telling you to quit arguing with him.”
“I’m not arguing with him! He’s arguing with me! Look, Meoraq,” he said, turning briskly to face him even as he edged out of easy striking reach. “I can appreciate your concern and I share it. If it was within my power to expedite our progress, I would.”
“You could carry something,” Amber remarked in a dry tone.
“Your input is not requested, Miss Bierce,” said Scott without looking at her. “If you can’t act as an interpreter without inserting your uninformed opinions, I will end this discussion right now.”
She opened her mouth.
Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning and squeezed it. Miraculously, she silenced herself, even if she had to roll her eyes first. “I am prepared to hear you, human,” he told Scott. “But so far, I have heard only your insolence and a lot of human whining. I will not carry you all the way to Xi’Matezh!”
“It isn’t his decision, Miss Bierce!” Scott said loudly once Amber had repeated this in their own rumbling tongue. “It’s mine! And you can tell him that we aren’t going to be walking forever! Someday, we’re going to have to make a permanent home with a permanent infrastructure! These things are essential to our ultimate goal and, regardless of how he thinks this inconveniences him in the short-term, we’re keeping them!”
Meoraq cocked his head. “He has a tendency to use longer and stranger words when he thinks he’s losing an argument, have you noticed?”
“Oh boy, have I noticed.”
“Don’t talk to him!” Scott snapped, glaring from one to the other of them, his face coloring up high in the cheek. “You’re just the translator!”
Meoraq acknowledged this with a grunt and did his best to address Scot without sarcasm. “If the things you insist on carrying are vital to your settlement, I will allow you to hold them for now, but the weather is turning and I will not be caught by it.”
“How bad is it going to get?” Amber asked, frowning.
“If this day is anything to measure by, the mountains will be hip-high in ice before we come to cross them,” he told her, then gave her a hard rap on the brow with one knuckle. “Speak my words. And tell him that he must prove these things to be truly needful before I allow them to anchor us further.”
“It’s all necessary!” Scott barked before she had hardly begun to obey. “Every single item is absolutely imperative to our survival in the new colony—”
“Oh Christ, not this again,” sighed Amber, rubbing at her eyes.
“—except you!” Scott finished, rounding on her.
“I’m the translator,” she told him. “And the translator would like to know what fantasy you’re living in where half a filter pump and fifteen bags of concrete is useful.”
Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning. “My words, human. Give this fool my words now and have your own arguments later.”
“What did he just call me?” Scott demanded. “Did he just call me an idiot?”
“Oh, that you understand, eh? Then understand this.” Meoraq moved Amber aside and pointed at Scott with the whole of his hand in undisguised contempt. “I do not ask your will. I declare mine. Open the crates and I will judge them for myself.”
Scott looked at Amber.
“He wants to see what we’re carrying,” she said.
Scott’s face filled with color. “No!”
Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. He folded his arms, lay his first fingers along the hilts of his sabks, and calmly said, “I would be very clear, human. Do you answer her or are you defying me?”
“It would be pointless!” Scott insisted, backing away. “He couldn’t possibly understand anything we showed him!”
Meoraq drew his samr and looked at Amber. “Did he just call me a fool?”
“Oh come on!” Scott was now retreating rapidly, trying to shield himself among his people except that they kept moving out of his way. “Look at him! How am I supposed to explain a solar generator to a…a…”
“Lizard?” Meoraq hissed, advancing.
Scott bumped his back end into a crate and scuttled around it at once. “It’s highly sophisticated technology and you…that is, your species…You’re not very advanced!”
“So now we are all fools!”
“Meoraq.”
He looked back at Amber, catching at Scott’s clothing to keep him close. His samr remained in his hand, raised and ready to use. He grunted an inquiry, but kept his spines flat, a silent warning that he was not of a mood to entertain foolishness.
“I know this is going to be hard to believe,” she said, “but he’s not insulting you on purpose. We really do have stuff in there that…that you probably won’t understand.”
He eyed her while the human in his grip held very still, and at last, not without some reluctance, the truth she spoke found resonance in him. He was not Sheul, after all. It was not for Uyane Meoraq, born of clay, to know the infinite workings of the world and all things in it. So it may well be that the land which had vomited out such creatures as these humans had also allowed for the making of many equally unknowable things.
Meoraq raised his spines with some effort. He let go of Scott’s shirt-front. He prepared himself to abide by another’s judgment and gestured roughly at the crates around him with his samr. “Do you say these things are necessary then?”
“Yes,” said Scott.
Meoraq turned all the way around and stared at him until Scott backed away, tugging at his clothing and turning various shades of red. Meoraq looked at Amber again. “We have a long way to go and the weather has already begun to turn. We will never make the crossing into Gedai at a quarter-span’s travel each day. You must understand this. If the things you carry are indeed so vital as this cattle’s ass insists, you will have them, but if they are not, you must give them up. I will carry tools, human. I will carry shelters. I will carry any instrument of your profession that will help to settle you at our journey’s end. I will not carry sentiment.”
She sighed and rubbed at her face.
“What’s he saying?” Scott pressed.
She looked at him and then rubbed her face some more. “Scott, we have to leave some of this stuff behind.”
“Out of the question!” Scott turned an extremely unwise sneer on Meoraq. “This discussion is over!”
“Is it now?” he hissed, raising his samr.
“I don’t want to fight,” said Amber. “I’ve been hauling a sixty-pound bag of frigging concrete around just so I wouldn’t start a fight, but for God’s sake, enough is enough. Maybe it used to be the cutting edge of colonizing technology once upon a time, but it’s all junk now, Scott! The only really useful things are the crates themselves and only if we empty them out and use them as shelters!”
“I don’t know whether you’re really this stupid or just short-sighted, but in either case, if you can’t see the big picture, it is not my job to draw you a new one, Miss Bierce. I’m done talking to you,” Scott declared, turning around. “Both of you.”
Meoraq had been right on the verge of sheathing his samr until he heard that. And although he managed not to run the pompous little piss-licker through the middle when he did hear it, he had reached the end of his patience with these negotiations. He stormed over to the nearest of the crates, jammed his samr into the topmost seam, and pried the thing open to look for himself.
He didn’t know what he expected to see. A Sheulek did not involve himself in the menial task of guarding those infrequent caravans that traveled between the cities and he had not the smallest notion of what was involved when households moved themselves. He supposed he had anticipated furniture—Scott’s furniture, no doubt, which he would recognize by its overwrought and garish making—and he had even the sour tickle of a notion that he might find rich food or wine or something of that sort too luxurious to share out with the likes of those who served him. It might have been works of art or chests filled with official robes or coffers of coin or anything at all.
Anything but this.
Meoraq ripped his samr free and leapt clear of the thing in the crate. It did not move. The light of the fading day gleamed dully off its metal hide, showing him a square body, armless, faceless, motionless.
“Meoraq, it’s okay,” Amber said.
He swung on her, pointing back at the crate with an arm that actually shook. “You knew about this?” he demanded. “You?”
She wrinkled her soft brows at him.
“Where did you…” His samr trembled again. He shook his head to clear it and aimed his blade with force at Scott instead. “Where did you get this?”
“Okay, well, he’s obviously decided to freak out,” Scott began, rolling his eyes. “So as soon as you figure out what he’s saying, come and get—”
“Stand and be judged!” Meoraq roared. “I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand and I will cut you down if you do not answer just as if you answered for Ga
“Meoraq, what’s wrong?”
Her voice, so timid that it might have been Nicci’s instead, somehow fell on him as a hammer, knocking the wind from his lungs and the bones from his body. He dropped his arm limp at his side and stared at her, his thoughts in such storms that even he didn’t know what he was thinking.
Perhaps they had only stolen it. They weren’t using it, after all. It had been crated all this time. He’d never even seen anyone near it, except to sit on it. A man could pass through the old ruins without offending Sheul, open those doors, fill flasks at those pumps. He had himself read by the light of those ancient lamps without a twinge of conscience. The only unforgiveable sin…
“Did you build it?” he asked her. “Say truth.”
“No, but why?”
“Why? How can you…” He backed away from her, shaking his head harder and harder. “How can you ask? How can you pretend not to know?” He fought with words and his temper, then lost both and shouted, “How can you bring that…thing into my camp? How dare you stand against the Word of God in a Sheulek’s camp!”
“This is exactly what I was afraid he’d do,” Scott said from the distance he had taken during this distraction. “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing so he…he thinks it’s a demon or—”
“I think it’s a machine!” hissed Meoraq, never taking his eyes from Amber’s. His chest hurt. He wished he’d killed her the day she’d first dropped gasping at his feet in the thornbreak than come to this moment, this betrayal. How could she dare to look at him like this, as if she did not know what he was saying? “And you must tell me the truth. Is it one of the Ancients’ making or your own?”