“You seem upset,” Scott remarked with a smile.

“Should I take another walk, asshole?”

His jaw tightened. “Watch the profanity, Miss Bierce, or you will.”

Meoraq swept out of his tent and stalked back to the fire. He crouched down at Amber’s side, took her wrist again and slapped a square of his jerky-stuff into her palm hard enough to sting.

“I don’t want it,” she said, pushing it back at him.

He looked up at the sky, rubbing the jerky between his fingers while the scales at his throat faded between yellow and black, yellow and black. He began to talk then, but not to her. He started out calmly enough, but in less than a minute, he was on his feet, his voice steadily rising as he paced back and forth, pointing at Amber and bellowing into the clouds.

Several people eased quietly away.

“What’s he saying?” Eric asked finally.

“He’s praying,” said Amber.

“That’s a prayer?”

Meoraq swung around and shouted directly at her for a while, then threw himself down very suddenly in his thinking position—crouched low and bent forward, one hand open on the ground and the other resting on one knee, head bent, eyes shut. He breathed, silent.

“Now what is he doing?” Eric asked.

“Praying harder.”

Meoraq muttered under his breath, rubbed at his brow-ridges, inhaled, exhaled, and was still.

Everyone watched except Amber, who poked at the saoq bones in the fire and wished she had something to eat, and Scott, who was watching her.

“I would like to ask a question,” said Scott presently. “Could you, Miss Bierce, translate one so-called word of that prayer? Because I’m very curious about this lizard-god. What’s he called? O Great and Scaly One?”

Meoraq’s eyes opened.

“Do you know what I think?” Scott pressed, oblivious to the narrow, red stare now boring into him. “I think you’re making it up. I don’t think you have the first clue what that thing is saying. I think you’re just too stubborn to admit it’s not saying anything at all.”

“Dude,” murmured Dag, watching Meoraq’s head slowly tip to one side. “You might want to drop this.”

“No, I think it’s long past time we had this out.” Scott came briskly back to the fireside and stood over Meoraq with his arms folded in his most commanding posture. “Say something,” he ordered. “Say anything. Talk. Pray. Heck, sing some dirty limericks. Come on, Meoraq. Let’s hear it.”

Heads turned all around the camp as people waited for Meoraq to speak.

Meoraq kept his narrow stare on Scott and did not say one word.

People began to whisper.

Scott threw up both hands in a gesture that was at once victory and surrender. “Miss Bierce, you justified the tremendous danger of bringing that thing into my camp by insisting that it could act as our guide once we had achieved some form of communication. Now I think I’ve been more than patient with you—”

“Bullshit you have!” Amber sputtered.

“—but all I’ve gotten out of the endeavor so far is a lot of argument and profanity,” Scott concluded. He didn’t shout. It was actually worse that way. If he’d shouted, she could have jumped up and shouted back, but as it was, he just talked, sounding disappointed but so damned reasonable. “All you had to do was teach that thing enough English to tell us, oh, anything! What his people are called! What planet this is! Yes, no, anything!”

“I tried!”

“She tried!” Nicci came out of the crowd of Manifestors, past a suddenly-flustered Scott, to stand at Amber’s side. “She tried every single day. For hours. No one can make someone else speak English.”

“Yeah, come on.” And that was Maria, miraculously enough. Lawsuit Lady herself, ignoring Eric’s whispers to stand up and take a challenging step forward. “What was she supposed to do? Hold hot irons to his feet?”

Meoraq’s head tipped back. He looked at Amber.

“He can talk,” Maria declared. “Even I can understand him a little, and so could you if you weren’t too busy campaigning to listen.”

Scott gazed at her for a moment or two while Eric raked his hands through his hair. “And what was he saying, Miss Alverez?”

Maria hesitated, looking at Meoraq, who kept his eyes on Amber. “I couldn’t quite…He was talking pretty fast.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“I—”

“And yet you’re convinced it was a prayer. How do his prayers usually go?”

Maria sat down again and put her hand on Eric’s knee almost defensively. Eric wouldn’t look at her.

“So, in point of fact,” Scott continued, “you didn’t understand any of it.”

Maria opened her mouth. Eric murmured something. She glared at him, but pressed her lips together, silent.

“I can appreciate that you’re trying to help, Miss Alverez,” said Scott, dismissing her with a wave, “but Miss Bierce needs to answer for her own failures.”

“My failures?” Amber echoed. “It’s complicated, goddammit!”

“And if you have something to say, Miss Bierce, find a way to say it without turning it into a personal attack.”

Meoraq glanced at him and snorted. It was nice to know that someone else saw the irony in that, since it seemed that most of the people watching them did not.

“It’s complicated,” Amber said again, struggling to keep her voice down and sound as reasonable as he did. To her own ears, she sounded weak and sullen—a child making excuses for skipped homework. “Everything he says can change just by how he says it! Like…gann.”

“Guns?” All of a sudden, Scott was interested again. “Those things have guns?”

“If you’re going to interrupt, pay attention,” she snapped. “Gann. One sound, but I’ve heard him say it different ways to mean different things. Like, um, gann—”

Meoraq glanced over at her.

“Which I think is the name of this world. And gann,” Amber continued, dragging the word up into a higher pitch and watching his spines slowly flare forward. “Which could mean a person, or at least a person’s body. I’m not sure. Or gann. That’s just dirt. And then there’s gann, and I don’t know what that one means, except that it’s a swear of some sort. There’s others, and I can hear the differences when he says them, but I can’t…I can’t do it right.”

“Well, I still don’t hear words in there at all,” Scott announced loftily. “I’m not convinced that Miss Bierce isn’t confusing some animal vocalizations with—”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, how stupid are you?” Amber exploded. “Look at him! He’s wearing clothes!”

“Yeah, and my Aunt Harriet used to put hats on her terriers all the time, but that didn’t make them people.”

“He’s wearing boots and pants and everything but a fucking top hat and a pair of spats, not to mention all the knives! I mean, what are you really suggesting here? That someone dressed him up and turned him loose? Can Aunt Harriet’s terriers put up a tent? Start a fire? Whose food are you eating right now, you fucking moron?”

“I’m not going to tell you again to stop with the profanities. And all I’m suggesting is that the things you like to call proof of intelligence look to me like nothing more than proof that some as-yet unknown master race has trained a considerably lesser one to perform certain menial tasks. Look at it logically,” he said, turning back to the Manifestors. “As Miss Bierce herself acknowledges, he’s starting our fires, providing our food, patrolling around our camp…tasks he took on literally the moment he met us!”

Meoraq’s head tipped a little further. The fading yellow stripes on his throat grew a little brighter. He said nothing, did not move.

“But has he tried to learn our language? No. In fact, does he make any effort to speak with anyone who doesn’t speak to him first? No. Does he show the slightest curiosity about where we come from? No!” Scott began to pace back and forth in front of the murmuring crowd, gesturing now and then to punctuate his points. His color was high; his step, light. He was a man in his element and, ragged uniform and scruffy beard-stubble aside, he looked good when he was there. “When native tribes are first discovered by a civilized society, they react, ladies and gentlemen. They show awe. Curiosity. Excitement. They’re people who recognize foreign people for the first time and it’s an amazing, fantastic moment for them! But has this…Meoraq ever showed even a smidgeon of interest in…in our clothes, for example? Has he ever tried to touch someone’s hair? Indicated that he even noticed we have more fingers? Different features? Different bodies? No! Obviously, there is some higher life on this planet somewhere,” Scott concluded. “But after observing this particular specimen, I am more convinced than ever that we haven’t found it yet. What we have here is…”