“Eh?”
“I just stood there.” Amber looked at the torn scales under her hand and then at the dark blood staining her rag. “I just stood there and watched you get hurt.”
“I’m beginning to take that personally,” Meoraq said, tilting his head to a dangerous angle.
“What do you call it when you get stabbed with hundreds of bony spikes?”
“Shameless exaggeration.”
“So, what? You’re going to stand there and tell me that thing wasn’t dangerous?”
“Anything can be dangerous under the right conditions.” Meoraq held up his hand to stop the bath and went to move the roasting kipwe off the hottest part of the coals. When he came back, it was to lie down in the grass at her feet. He gestured vaguely at himself and tucked his arms up behind his head, closing his eyes. “You seem to think yourself a coward for not leaping at the thing wi
th your naked hands. Whereas I would think you a fool if you had.” He snorted, then added, “For all the rest of your life.”
Slowly, Amber knelt down beside him and began to clean around one of the fresh scratches on his arm.
Her fingers made a rasping sound as she moved over his scales, a sound that made the gooseflesh pop out on her arms and her stomach want to shiver. “Does this hurt?” she blurted. “When I touch you?”
He was quiet for so long, she thought he’d dozed off, but then he said, without opening his eyes,
“My flesh is not fragile. A Sheulek feels no pain even when he is broken. When he is not, he feels nothing.”
H
e had more quills stuck in him. She could see two of them now, tucked up under his armpit—just two nubs, scarcely discernible against his uneven skin. They had been lodged deeper than the last one and both took some work to worry loose, but Meoraq neither moved nor made a sound when she told him they were out. She looked at him, but he ignored her, lying splayed and by all appearances asleep, and after a while, she put her hands on him again and began to sweep them in small circles over his body, washing with one hand while the other quested ahead for more lost quills. The
shush-shush
sound this action produced summoned a tangle of images too dim to grasp, but she didn’t try to alter her rhythm. Her hands kept moving—her hands on his body—over his shoulders, over his chest, up along his throat and down again.
The quiet was crushing her, filled with nothing but that sound and the reality of his flesh under hers. How could she be thinking like this? Now, of all times!
Looking at him stretched over the ground so silent and still was like seeing him dead and it could have happened, regardless of what he thought, it could have happened just like that and then she’d be out here alone, which she deserved to be, because she just stood there and didn’t do
anything
.
A sob rose in her throat and she had to cough it out, but she swallowed the rest of them. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe herself calm the way she’d seen him do so often, but it didn’
t work for her. When she opened her eyes again, all she could see was Meoraq, sleeping.
There was
another spine between two of the long plates of his abdomen, so tightly lodged that she had to bend over (
please stop thinking please stop not here not now not me
) and bite it out. His blood tasted bitter on her tongue and had a smell curiously like cloves. She had to fight not to bend down again, fight not to press her lips against those scales that couldn’t feel her anyway, fight not to lick the way he’d licked at her neck once. She wanted him to put his arms around her. She wanted to be all right, dammit, and to know she was all right just once more, just
once
!
“
You saved my life,” she heard her voice say. It broke on the last word. “Again. I keep…making you…
save
me.”
She stopped, gulping air to keep herself from openly
crying, but he did not reply. His breathing was deep and even; his body beneath her hand, perfectly relaxed.
“Are you asleep?” she asked, now in the plaintive, scratchy, sing-song way that said tears were coming no matter how hard she tried to breathe them back in. “Meoraq?”
Nothing.
She patted his stomach timidly, found a quill and pulled it out, then looked at the bloody sliver pinched between her fingers and
that was it. Her mouth cramped. Her eyes swam. Her head began to pound and her chest began to heave. She folded over, choking on breaths that wanted to be sobs, until she was curled against Meoraq’s warm side in a small, shaking ball. She had become an expert in the fine art of quiet crying; the only sounds she made beyond a hoarse
huh-huh-haaaaah
were intermittent mousy squeaks and they weren’t enough to wake Meoraq.
At length, the storm passed,
but she huddled there for some time anyway. Her eyes were open, but unfocused, processing nothing beyond light and shadow, grass and sky. When she finally raised her head and looked, Meoraq was still asleep.
Amber picked the cloth out of the grass and
washed her face. It was cold. She dunked it in the stewing pouch, now the bathing pouch, and tried again, but the wind took away the heat before her skin had time to really feel it. She dabbed at Meoraq’s bloody scales some more; he couldn’t feel her or the wind or the cold.
She finished cleaning him up,
then made one last pass for quills, not so much because she expected to find them, but just so she could keep touching him. The tough old Amber who didn’t need anybody was dead and buried; the weepy, useless Amber who was left needed to be touched tonight, even if all he did was wake up and grab her wrist and tell her to keep her hands to herself.
But she found one last quill buried in his hip.
His blood had blackened it to the same color as his scales and it had broken off right at the surface of his skin, making it easy to miss and hard to get out. She spent several minutes trying unsuccessfully to pinch it between her fingernails before she had to give up. “I think I need to borrow your knife,” she said.
No answer. His chest rose and fell slowly. His eyes stayed shut.
“Meoraq?” She patted hesitantly at his stomach.
He did not respond.
Amber hesitated, then closed her hand around the bone-hilt of his favorite knife and pulled it from the sheath slung across his chest. He did not move. The tip slid in under the quill, slicing easily through even his tough scales. She sucked in a whispered curse, but Meoraq never flinched. Fresh blood welled up and trickled out around the quill; she eyed it and him uncertainly, then cut the wound a little wider, just enough to get her fingernails on it. She had to twist at it a long time before she had enough to bite, but she did eventually get it out and he slept through the whole thing.
Amber dabbed unnecessarily at the wound, which had already sealed itself. His blood was hot on her fingers, but cooled fast, darkening to black in the open air. The scent of cloves wafted up. Meoraq slept.
She watched him. After a while, she put her hands on him again, stained now with his blood and hers, and ran them gently back and forth as she stared into his face. She wondered if she would be able to tell him from other lizardmen, if she ever met one. She wondered if he were handsome, for a lizard. She looked at him, at her hands on his stomach, and then at the smooth place between his thighs.
Which was n
ot entirely smooth.
She waited to feel something, some flare of guilt or shock or somethi
ng, but didn’t, not even when she saw her hand travel down to the slight swell of his groin. She cupped him there, rolled her palm in just one gentle pass, then lightly squeezed. ‘Now his eyes will be open,’ she thought, and looked, but they weren’t. He slept.
She should have felt relief. She didn’t. If anything, she felt worse. Small and scared and lonely and…and human. The last human. The one human, and a weak, ridiculous one at that.
‘I’m useless,’ she thought. ‘I am a scared, weak, little human. I am a scared, weak, little
girl
.’
Tears stung. Of course. Girls were crybabies. Had she eve
r really thought she was tough? She would give anything,
anything
, to be held tonight.
Amber’s fingers flexed, kneading at his groin a
s if it were a woman’s breast, and discerning as she did so the solid press of something inside him. She could fathom little of its shape beneath his thick skin, only that it bulged out into a hard knot at one end. She moved her hand beneath this, exploring its dimensions, and when she squeezed him there, the scales of his groin suddenly split and extruded the blunt head of an organ.
She opened her hand. It slipped back inside him, leaving the wet shine of some clear, viscous, clove-smelling oil to show her where the opening had been. She looked at his eyes. They were shut.
You could press the mid-pad of a cat’s paw, she thought, and squeeze out its claws just like that. But he couldn’t feel it, not any of it. She rubbed low underneath that half-felt lump, then kneaded at him boldly in the same rhythm as her spike-finding caresses earlier until, with a heave, the whole of it came thrusting out.
It looked only just enough like a penis that she was sure that was what it was. Only just, and no more. It was scaled, like the rest of him, but the scales there were so fine that she
could see the veins throbbing just below its thin surface and did not dare to touch it. At the base, just where the edges of his slit wrapped around it, she could see part of the hard lump she’d probably been squeezing: a thick knob of flesh, swollen to a high shine and covered in dozens of small, blunt barbs, all of them oozing more of that spicy-scented oil. The shaft that sprouted from this dubious bulb was not smooth, particularly along the underside, where it formed pronounced ridges, the very sight of which made her shiver. At the head of his cock, a short, stiff nub curled slightly back toward his body, and even seeing it for the first time, some instinctive animal part of her knew just where it would strike inside her and how it would feel.
Her hand, firmly gripping at his groin, shook. She stared into t
he slick eye of Meoraq’s cock and saw herself, how it would be to shift her clothes and straddle him, right here. She’d put that alien cock inside her and maybe it would fill everything that was empty and not just the useless woman-part. It probably wouldn’t take long. He might sleep through the whole thing.
Her hand opened. His cock jutted stubbornly another few seconds, and then his body took it grudgingly back again. Amber wiped at the streak of oil left on his scales, then stood up, away from him. Eyes burning, she staggered
over to his tent and crawled inside, unrolling her bedroll and pulling his blanket over her head. Something big howled, not far from camp. Never far.
She began to cry without noise, without moving, like Meoraq when he slept. She slipped her hand down her pants and into urgent moisture. ‘Fear-sweat,’ she thought, rubbing. She came. She cried. She slept.
* * *
Meoraq
waited until Amber was quiet before he sat up. He pulled in his legs, rested his elbows atop his knees, and stared at the tent. His flesh was not fragile; neither was it stone.
He was not fool enough to throw
down his guard and sleep so soon, not with a dead kipwe in easy distance of his camp and hungry ghets prowling nearby, and he was genuinely surprised that Amber believed he would. She, who had seen death snap at her so many times, had seen it snap at him and it had made her…well, a woman. He had hoped giving her a domestic chore like bathing him would calm her down, but it hadn’t. Feigning sleep had seemed the polite thing to do, in part because it let her tears have some privacy, and in part because being bathed by a woman had a tendency to arouse him and those were Amber’s hands moving over his naked body and he was a horribly insensitive brunt who absolutely was not going to have sexual stirrings while Amber cried herself calm. So he’d shut his eyes and slowed his breath and meditated, trying to unhear her sobs with some success and unfeel her hands with somewhat less success, and he had just begun to wonder when he’d ought to ‘waken’ and maybe brew some tea when she put her hand boldly between his legs.
Of all the things she might do, that had never occurred to him. Not even in his darkest fantasies, on nights when Gann had given him a thousand burning thoughts, had he ever imagined she would put her hand on him. But she did and it was no accident. She wasn’t bathing him; she wasn’t searching for injury; she was cupping him just below his slit and gently kneading—so
shocking an act that he could not at first move…and then did not want to. A Sheulek must be a master of his flesh in every situation, but her hand moved and moved and Sheul Himself could not have unfelt that. He felt himself extrude and still he did not open his eyes. He only breathed, waiting in a kind of paralytic fever for what came next.
‘It’s not a sin,’ he’d reasoned, if one could call that shiver-white throb of heat in his brain a
reasoning thought. ‘It’s only a sin if I do it. There’s nothing in the Word that says she can’t do it for me.’
So
he’d waited, but she hadn’t. He could hear her breathing above him, feel the tremble in her hand, and then, by all the names of God and Gann, she took her hand away. She’d left him there, stabbing foolishly out into nothing, and put herself to bed and the only thing that had stopped him from leaping on her like a raging beast had been the sound of her soft tears. That, and the thin hope that she might come back if he only lay still enough long enough.