The two men stood to one side while Amber and Xzem tried for several maddening minutes to fit the three of them together, offering no help and no encouragement. The baby cried louder, drawing strength from the touch it craved more than the milk it needed, until the flashings along its pale, scrawny throat began to turn yellow with rage.

Zhuqa and Iziz snorted in unison.

“It’s a son,” Iziz declared. “Only a boy could get that worked up over riding a woman.”

“In fairness, it is one damned fine ride,” Zhuqa replied.

“Better than a quick fuck into my mother?”

“Better than a slow fuck into God.”

Iziz looked at him, startled and trying to smile. “That’s a blasphemous lie.”

“No,” said Zhuqa seriously, watching Amber. “It isn’t.”

“You, sir, are a pervert. All that smooth skin. It must be like fucking a baby.”

Zhuqa said something in reply, but Amber didn’t hear. Smooth skin. Smooth and soft.

She looked around, then thrust the baby back into Xzem’s arms and ran to the table. “Do you have anything else like this?” she asked in lizardish, holding up the wineskin. “To wrap it in?”

They looked at her, both of them frowning, as she mimed putting on a shawl.

Damn it. She slowed down, trying to work her mouth around the alien words: “I need something with smooth skin.” Frustrated, she slapped her naked body a few times and then slapped the leather flask. “Like me!”

“What the hell is that thing barking on about?”

Zhuqa’s spines flared. He looked at the baby and then at the wineskin. He came over to the table and took it from her.

“No, you idiot!” Amber said, exasperated into English. “I don’t want a drink, I need—”

“I hear you, woman,” said Zhuqa. He uncapped the neck, righted the bowl that had once held their scattered dinner, and carefully poured the contents of the wineskin out. As he shook the last drops free, he drew his knife.

“What are you doing? Oh Zhuqa, no. Please, that’s a perfectly good—and there it is,” Iziz sighed, rubbing at his brow-ridges as Zhuqa sliced the skin open down its lengthy middle. After a short silence and a few meditative breaths, Iziz turned a glare on Amber and snapped, “Do you know how hard it is to make a watertight vessel out in the fucking wildlands? No, of course you don’t, you are a fucking watertight vessel!”

“Mind your manners,” Zhuqa said distractedly.

“That was a perfectly good corroki bladder! What the fuck does she want with it?!”

“She wants to put the baby in it.”

“Wants to…? Why by the names of Gann and God would she want to do that?”

“So it will think she’s holding it, you fool. Quiet down.” Zhuqa tossed the flap of the cut wineskin to Amber, who took it and folded the baby into its dry side until it was entirely cocooned but for its snouted face.

“Hush, baby,” she said. “I’m here. Amber’s here.” And with that, she placed the damp, wine-stinking bundle back in Xzem’s reluctant arms, its wailing mouth close to the leaking eye of Xzem’s teat. At its first accidental bite, the small head turned, shoving itself up so that most of the lizardlady’s single breast was swallowed into its stiff, lipless mouth. Its hungry cries turned at once to grunts of effort and then to soft, slurping sounds.

It drank.

“So,” Iziz said after a moment. “It wanted a blanket. Shows what I know about sprats. My apologies for disturbing you, Zhuqa.” He reached down to take Xzem’s arm.

“Let it eat.” Zhuqa sat down, picked up his cup and dunked it in the bowl. He gestured ruefully. “Have a drink. It’ll be full of dust and dead yifu by the morning.”

“Waste not the gifts of God,” said Iziz piously, picking up the whole bowl for a series of deep swallows.

Zhuqa sipped at his cup, picked splinters off the nearest chunk of roast, and tossed that at Amber. “A good thought, Eshiqi. Eat.”

She did, but without appetite, too much aware of Xzem’s hungry stare.

Iziz helped himself to a baked root, unzipped its skin, and swished it through the wine a few times before popping it whole into his mouth. He studied Amber while he chewed and swallowed, then said, “You know I have to ask…”

“Go on then.”

“What it is really like to dip it in that thing? Honestly.”

Zhuqa grunted, looking Amber over, then flexed his spines in a shrugging gesture. “Perverse. More than you can imagine.”

“With respect, sir, you have no idea the sorts of things I imagine.”

“She’s smooth, like baby-skin. Soft all over. Soft inside.” He took another sip of his drink and chuckled. “She cums like a man.”

“What do you mean?”

“She oils up when she cums. Like a man. She even has a little sa’ad.”

“What?!”

“And she’s so soft inside, softer than her outsides even. There’s nothing to catch on, nothing to push against, nothing but this soft, wet squeeze.”

Iziz drew back in a wince of queasily fascinated revulsion. “So it’s like fucking a sack of hot shit. Your pardon, a hot sack of male shit. There’s something wrong with you, Zhuqa.”

“I don’t describe it well. It’s nothing like a real woman’s sleeve. It’s like…like skin. A second skin over your cock. Every time you move, you can feel it gripping and pulling at you, all over, all the time. Just moving in her feels amazing. The only thing that compares is my first fuck—well, my first with a woman—and only because it was my first and has that same sort of revelation. Otherwise, there is no comparison, no more than you can liken a bite of this shit—” He picked up a root and tossed it back on the table. “—to fried bread and fancies. She’s hard to look at, but she’s like fucking God.”

Iziz studied him over the lip of the bowl. “Of all the sex you’ve had, you said. And then you said…with a woman.”

Zhuqa looked at him, then at his cup. He put the cup down a little harder than he had to and gave it a short push away. “Strong drink weakens the mouth and the mind, says the Prophet,” he muttered. “It was a long time ago, Iziz. The door is shut.”

Iziz put the bowl down. “You weren’t born out here, I know that much. You were a Sheulek!”

“In training.”

“Still…who the hell got you on the ground long enough to get a poke at you?”

Zhuqa glanced at Amber. She looked at the baby. He snorted laughter and looked back at Iziz. “You are the fatherless son of a wildland exile and the nameless catch-cock who served the whole of his camp. What could you possibly understand about anything I could tell you of that life?”

“She has a name, I just don’t remember what it is.” Iziz drank. “Why are we talking about me? I want to hear the story of mighty Zhuqa getting plugged.”

“That isn’t what happened.”

“It wasn’t even a man, was it? I knew it. You were ravished by a wild kipwe.”

“No.”

“Before I came here, I ran with a camp that used to hold kipwe shows,” recalled Iziz, his attention wandering to the bowl in his hands. “They’d strap a slave into a kind of harness. I don’t know…the kipwe had to be trained special, I guess…and every time I saw it, I had to wonder…How the hell do you train a kipwe to fuck something? How do you even start?”

“Do you want to hear this story?”

“Yes.” Iziz drank.

“In the cities, in the Houses, in the caste of the warrior, they take you away as soon as you can be trusted to walk without falling on your ass or piss without it running down your leg. They send you to a special place close to the innermost walls to train you. You live there with the other boys of your caste, all ages, all together, and you only go home for the cold season. You speak to no one but the men who train you and the boys who train beside you. You learn nothing but prayer and the laws of God.” Zhuqa paused to fill his cup again from the bowl in his friend’s hands.

“No women?” asked Iziz.

Zhuqa snorted. “The only time I ever saw women was when I was home for the cold season, and they were only servants. My mother had been turned out by then. I had no sisters. I think it’s possible I went the first ten years of my life without knowing there was such a thing as women. Truth. No idea.”