“No. I have never understood why either of you did that.” He glanced at her, then glared fixedly at his hands and pretended to care what they were doing to the hide. “I assumed they were human endearments.”
“What? No! My God, man, why would you even think that?”
Taken aback, he could only gesture with his scraper toward the other humans, attracting some attention, but only some. Scott’s sermon had spread to include a larger crowd. “I thought that was what you people did.”
“Why, because of Eric and Maria and all their kissy-baby talk?”
“They aren’t the only ones who do that and it always seems affectionate.”
“Trust me, when it’s Scott, it’s not us being cute. We genuinely hate each other.”
Meoraq grunted, unaccountably pleased, and then looked up again. “You think I don’t use your name because I hate you? I don’t hate you.”
“Yeah, yeah. You don’t hate me.” Even though she was smiling, the words struck at his Sheulek’s ears as a lie. He saw her again, sprawled in the mud with her bare foot thrust through the torn bottom of her boot, shouting that he hated her, that she was nothing to him but a nuisance, or words equal to that meaning. She might smile now, but there was something in her that believed it, something he knew he was to blame for, because he didn’t know what else to do but push her away…or bring her in closer.
“I don’t hate you,” he said.
“Okay, whatever. We can drop it now.”
He should. All the good feeling that had nested in him since receiving the lhichu had dimmed to coals and he could see the shadow creeping in again over Amber. He could shut the door, find something new to talk about, and maybe it would feel the same…but he didn’t think so.
“Look at me,” he ordered.
She did, with exasperation and defiance, and that was so damned incredible and she was so damned ugly, it seemed to go right around the wheel of funny and turn into something heart-breaking instead.
“It is Uyane Meoraq before you,” he said. “Son of Rasozul, who was son of Ta’sed, who was son of Kuuri, who was the forty-third son of the line descended of the Prophet’s Uyane Xaima. I am my House, that which champions the city of Xeqor in the state of Yroq, in the hour and the land of Gann. I am the Sword and the Striding Foot of Sheul. I am all these things and I say to you, I do not hate you.”
She met this declaration with a huffing breath and went back to scraping at her hide with considerably more force and less precision than before.
“You don’t believe me,” Meoraq realized.
“Actions speak louder than words, lizardman. Especially the ones you don’t say.”
“That ought to be my argument,” he shot back. “Who am I sitting with right now? Who am I teaching to cure a hide? What does a name matter? And if it bothers you, why haven’t you said anything until now?”
“Because I thought it was all of us!” She yanked the hide, half-done, further over her knee and went to work on the bloodier side, her arm jerking and slashing. “And then when you started saying people’s names, I figured I’d be next eventually. But now I know that, thanks to your stupid God, I get to be ‘Hey, you,’ for the rest of my life and you don’t even think there’s anything wrong with that!”
“Mind your work. If it upsets you this much, I’ll give you a dumaqi name.” The offer was bitter in his mouth. Naming was the work of a father; he didn’t always know exactly what he felt about Amber, but he knew none of those feelings were fatherly.
“I don’t want a new name! I have a perfectly good name! I want you to use it!”
“It is not a word,” he replied, stubbornly scraping at his hide and refusing to look at her. “It cannot be spoken.”
“I speak it just fine! Amber! Say it with me, lizardman!”
“No. Mind your work.”
“I am!” she snapped, but she put her glaring eyes back on the hide. “You have the most ass-backwards religion I’ve ever heard of. You’re perfectly okay with killing people but my name is some huge sin. My name sends you straight to Hell. That’s where you draw the line.”
“The line is not for me to draw.”
“Well, that’s just stupid.”
“There is no Word but the Prophet’s Word and I am done with this discussion. Mind your work!” he snapped, pointing, but it was too late.
The scraper slipped in Amber’s careless hands, narrowly missing her fingers, but cutting a gash right through the hide. Embarrassment lent new fuel to anger and she let out easily the most vulgar variation on a timeless epithet he had ever heard in all the years of his warrior’s life.
“That had better not have been addressed to me,” he said blackly. “My mother was a virtuous woman.”
“It had nothing to do with you,” she snapped, inspecting the damage to the hide with deep disgust. “I’m just a foul-mouthed bitch. Damn it, it’s ruined!”
“Hardly,” he said, taking it from her before she could finish shoving it off onto the ground. He arranged the hide across his own lap, going back over the places she had too hurriedly finished. “You should have stopped if you weren’t going to give it your full attention. It is better to do half a hide well than all of it poorly and teach yourself habits you will have to unlearn.”
She started to stand, flush-faced and tight-lipped.
He caught her by her bloody wrist and seated her again, perhaps with more force than was necessary. He did not release her right away, at first because he could see that she was just going to get up again, then because he was busy counting off six breaths, and finally because he could look at her calmly and see that beneath her senseless anger was embarrassment and unhappiness and exhaustion and everything else he had been hoping the gift of his hide-making lesson might soothe away for just one night.
He opened his mouth to tell her she was acting like a child and heard himself say instead, softly, “Do you think I would not call you by your name if I could?”
She looked at him and away, trying to pretend she was not attached to the arm that ended in his grip. “I guess you think it doesn’t matter. I guess you figure as long as I still answer to ‘insufferable human,’ it’s fine.”
“It’s honest, at least.” He sighed, opened his hand and rubbed at his brow ridges instead. “There are three words I could call you that come close to the sound of your name. Taambret, a disease we have that causes festering sores of the mouth.”
She blinked, her brows puckering.
“Mb’z, a vulgar term for one weak of mind,” he continued. “Amyr, the name of a kind of swimming creature that lives and feeds in the mud. And I will not call you by these names.”
“You said…You said it didn’t matter what the word meant as long as—”
“Not for you.”
She looked at the fire.
Meoraq picked up the scraper and continued cleaning her hide. “Take this one I have finished and make ready with the brains,” he ordered. “Pour half of them out—like that, yes, in a line—and let them cool.”
She obeyed, silent.
“Now use your hands to rub them in. This is why it is so essential that the hide be completely cleaned. Any fat or blood left behind will prevent the cure from absorbing well. I despise S’kot and I don’t care what I call N’ki,” he said, still scraping. “I will not offend God, but I will not insult you either, whether or not you know it is an insult. Any pieces of lhichu that have not softened can be disposed of now.”
She picked up the chunk she had been trying to press into the hide and dropped it into the fire. She still did not look at him as she went to work, but he could see her thinking. After a few false starts, she braced herself and said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
The apology was as embarrassing to hear as it had plainly been to say. Meoraq acknowledged it with an uncomfortable grunt and waved vaguely at the hide under her rubbing hands.
They worked in silence, he scraping and cleaning, she rocking back and forth while her hands made endless spirals over the wet and slippery surface of the hide. He did not watch her.
