“What the fuck was that?” Crandall demanded below. “Now I’ve got to ask the lizard’s permission every time I use a fucking cup? What am I supposed to do, drink off the fucking floor?”

Eric answered, too low to be heard, followed by Nicci: “I told you he’d get mad.”

“Shut the fuck up, lizard-bait.”

“Leave her alone.” Amber.

“You can shut up too, woman. Lie there and bleed or something. The big boys are talking.”

Meoraq breathed. One for the Prophet…

“Come on, man,” Eric said. “Lay off her. She’s hurt.”

“Oh yeah, she’s hurt. I’d completely forgotten, seeing as she’s spent the whole damn day bitching and moaning about it.” Crandall’s voice skewed up into a shrill mewling, grotesque to hear. “‘Please, Meoraq, put me down! Oh, please stop, I can’t stand it!’ Like you had such a hard day when we were the ones hauling your fat ass around.”

“It’s not fat,” said Amber, her irritation clear even though the cupboard door.

“Whatever, woman, I saw you naked. You’re putting the belly back on you.”

Saw her naked? Meoraq put a hand on the hilt of his kzung and closed his eyes, trying to come up with just one reason not to go right back down those stairs, haul Crandall out into the rain and cut his ugly head off. Amber had reasons, or thought she did, but Amber’s reasons were not, in this moment, good enough.

“Stop trying to shut me up!” Crandall shouted suddenly, breaking Eric’s low murmurs. “I’m not his fucking dog and I’m sure as hell not yours! Hey, woman!” A rapping of a human hand on wood. “Am I disturbing you? Why don’t you cry some more? You’ve gotten awfully good at that, Miss I-Don’t-Need-My-Hand-Held, Miss I-Don’t-Need-A-Man. Let me tell you something, I’m not spending the rest of my life getting slapped around by your scaly dickman! You and your scale-bait sister ought to remember that not everyone can fuck their way to the lap of luxury on this planet and show a little goddamn respect to the guys who are picking up your slack!”

Enough. Meoraq swept his samr from its sheath and turned around, but he had only just put his foot on the first descending stair before the scrape of the cupboard door silenced the human below. It was Amber’s voice that rang out next, slurred but strong and filled with fire: “You want to thank your God and his that I am a girl, Crandall, because it’s my girlie squeamishness at seeing a man sliced up the middle that’s keeping you alive right now. You don’t like it? Feel free to go back where we found you! Otherwise, shut the fiddling fuck up, and if you say one more word about my sex life, I will knock every tooth out of your ungrateful mouth, so help me, God. There’s only one person who calls me ‘woman’ and gets away with it and buddy, you aren’t it.”

Silence. Not even mutters. The cupboard door scraped shut again.

‘She doesn’t like them,’ Meoraq thought sullenly, tapping one finger along the hilt of his sword. ‘Why does she want them with us?’

For answer, the memory of her exhausted, broken voice: We’re all that’s left. Please. That has to matter.

It did. Of course it did. Did the Prophet love all those he brought into Sheul’s light in the days after the Fall? No, no more than the Ancients deserved to be saved from the wrath their great sin had brought upon them, but the Prophet understood what apparently Uyane Meoraq only gave voice to: Life is the most precious of God’s gifts. When so few of the Ancients survived the Fall, Prophet Lashraq did not judge this or that one unlikeable and therefore unworthy to seek God’s forgiveness. No. He forgave them all their past and welcomed them, every one.

Meoraq glanced upward through the rough roof of the lodge’s storeroom, properly chastened, and sheathed his blade. “I hear you, Father,” he said. “Not so clearly as my wife, but I hear You and I am humble to Your will.”

Sheul’s hand touched his shoulder as below him, Crandall muttered something uncouth and kicked the walls of the underlodge that sheltered them in the wildlands where Gann ruled. Meoraq sighed, feeling the bitterness and anger in his mortal heart until he had mastered them and could set them aside. Then he turned away from the humans in his keeping and went out into Gann’s world to hunt.

6

It did not take much work to make the underlodge habitable for a lengthy stay. Cleaning, of course. The crafting of various tools. The mantle shelf needed repairs, which Meoraq could manage, and half the cookware he was able to find had been broken, but the ways of working clay were unknown to him and they would just have to make do without. The one metal pot he’d found and his own stewing pouch were more than enough for his needs. If his woman were well and at his side to help him, the lodge would have been fit and comfortable by the second day. As it was, he had four lazy humans who seemed to think the job of improving their camp to be a show he enacted for their pleasure each day, and Amber, who would be only too willing to help and tear open her wound in the effort. So it all fell to him.

Nevertheless, it gave him something to do and so Meoraq worked. He fixed the shelf. He manufactured a simple grass sweep to get what had already come in out again. He found a way to turn one of the leather walls of his unneeded windbreak into a curtain so that the humans had ‘their’ half of the lodge and he didn’t have to look at them as much. They were all much happier with that arrangement.

To further keep himself out of slapping distance, Meoraq took lengthy patrols, familiarizing himself with this land of hills and forests. He hunted when he had to, but one mimut each day was more than enough to sustain his small party, even after he relented and allowed the other humans to share his meals. He searched daily for medicinal herbs, but found no more healershand, only a little iseqash, and a small patch of wild phesok. He stared at this last discovery three days, meditated three nights, and then went back and took it, for despite the plant’s dangers, he knew Amber would need it.

She had showed many encouraging signs of recovery in the first days. She drank as often as he gave the order, and although she required his help to make her way up the stairs and out to pass her waters, she did that often as well. She could not stand very long and had twice collapsed from the effort of climbing out of the cupboard (against his orders), but she rested well when sleeping and seemed alert when awake.

And all these things were very good, but Meoraq cleaned her wound at the start and close of each day, and he could see the infection growing in her. At first, it was only that yellowish crust around the edges of her wound, easily wiped away. Then the viscous pools of pus welling up around the beetle heads. Her skin swelled and grew hot. She needed more iseqash in her tea to sleep at night and began to ask for it during the day. As the pus thickened and took on a greenish tinge, her lethargy and confusion grew until she did little more than lie in the cupboard and stare into the fathoms. Then came the night he woke to her moans, struck a light and found her shined with sweat and insensible beside him, impossible to wake. When he opened her bandages, he could smell rot.

So be it.

Meoraq put his palm over her burning brow and bent close, his mouth against her flushed cheek. “Sheul has been with you, Soft-Skin,” he told her quietly. “Believe that He is with you now. And so am I.”

She moaned.

He covered her over with his blanket and left the cupboard, closing it gently behind him. It was early, well before dawn. The curtain that halved the living space was closed and the only sounds to be heard beyond it were the growling breaths Amber called snores. Moving quietly, so as not to disturb them (and Amber said he wasn’t ‘nice’), Meoraq cut the sleeve off one of their spare tunics (if the owner didn’t want it cut, he shouldn’t have left it on the floor), tied a knot in one end to form a crude sort of bag, then went up the stairs and out into the forest.