He realized what they were after just a few steps. It startled him at first, although he didn’t know why it should, really. They wore boots and slept in tents; why shouldn’t they drink from cups?

“Fuck,” muttered Meoraq, picking one up. Two cups, each with single handles sized for human hands and narrow bowls to accommodate human mouths. They were made of fired clay, or something similar, garishly painted and glazed to a high shine, and as ugly as they were, to judge by their symmetry and the craftsmanship of their nonsensical coloring, they had to be tremendously expensive. He had never seen her drinking from them. She’d been saving them. Perhaps treasuring them. And now she was leaving them.

Meoraq sighed, then unbuckled his travel-harness and slid out from under his pack. “This is not my doing,” he announced. “If she wants to crawl off and run water out of her eyes over a pair of cups, that is entirely her decision. I would have let her bring the damned things.”

I will not carry sentiment.

“She didn’t even ask me.”

Why can’t just one of you do what you’re told without whining at me?

“Fuck,” Meoraq said again, wrapping the cups, one in his spare tunic and the other in his spare breeches, and shoving them down deep in his pack. He felt thoroughly disgusted—with himself, with Amber, with the whole of Gann. Cocking an eye at the rolling face of Sheul’s heavens, he said, “Tell me just one thing, my Father, I beg. Is there ever a right answer?”

Sheul listened, but said nothing.

Meoraq filled his damned flasks and sat down on the stone, kicking dourly at Amber’s bootprints until he’d rubbed out all he could reach. He did not hurry back to start the day’s march. When Amber looked back to see if she was clear of him and free to do the rest of her crying, he wanted her to think she was alone. He wasn’t completely insensitive.

3

So followed several days of travel and, with compromise on both sides (Meoraq took a savage pleasure in this, that he was able to compromise with these creatures rather than beat them into obedience, and if that wasn’t proof of his humility and therefore his worthiness to enter Xi’Matezh, nothing was), they forged a tolerable routine. Meoraq allowed the humans to wake in their own time and to eat whatever was left of the previous night’s meal. Then they walked, scattered widely after their habit while Meoraq prowled around them, trying to take point, foot and both flanks along their careless line. They made frequent stops for resting, but managed, he thought, at least three spans each day and that was acceptable. Toward evening, they made their camp and Meoraq hunted. Thus far, Sheul had rewarded his efforts at herding human cattle with fair game and sweet water, gifts he acknowledged each night in his meditations and which the humans seemed to think was only their due.

After three days, they finally came out of the muddy lowlands and began the long, slow trek across the stony fields of middle Yroq. Tempting as it might have been to find a road and lead the humans across it as far east as could be managed, Meoraq forged his own path. There weren’t many roads and there were always eyes upon them; worse than the risk of encountering messengers or merchants or even a Sheulek about his circuit, a caravan of near fifty moving bodies would certainly attract whatever raiders were about. Better by far to keep to the wildlands, keep moving, and keep quiet.

But the first day in the plains was even slower than it had been when the humans insisted on carrying their machines with them. The ground was marginally more level, but riddled with broken rock and thorny overgrowth that made passage difficult even for an experienced Sheulek. The humans tripped and staggered like children just learning to walk, tearing their soft flesh and bruising their soft bodies with shocking ease. When he finally called for camp and took inspection of them, he found himself amazed only that no one had managed to break a bone yet. How he was going to get them over the mountains into Gedai loomed in his mind, more and more of an impossibility the longer he pondered it, but he would just have to trust that Sheul would provide the means when the time came. There were problems enough for him to solve right now.

His hunt that night turned up no meat, but plenty of good wild gruu. He gathered up an armload and took it back to soften in the coals, and once he’d taught the humans how to get it out of its leathery peel, they seemed to find the taste agreeable enough to squabble over. They ate like animals, barking and chuffing through mouthfuls of food, reaching across one another, picking at their teeth with the flimsy claw-like protrusions that tipped their fingers. From what he could see, they didn’t even wash their hands—not before falling on their meal and not afterwards. He left them to fight over the peels and made a lengthy patrol, stopping once to fill his flasks and bathe at a small ground-spring, and once again at a stony ridge to watch the sun set through the clouds and pray.

He did not return to camp until well after dark and he returned troubled. He had heard the calls of tachuqis behind the wind and seen the blood-stained and trampled grass that marked the site of one of their recent kills. He could only hope it was recent enough that they would not be actively hunting tonight, because a pack of ungainly, unarmed humans would be a damned easy hunt indeed and Meoraq needed to sleep.

Most of the humans were huddled around the fire he had set for them—at least they hadn’t let it go out this time—and the rest had bedded down already. A few nodded to him, their bobbing heads an unpleasant reminder of the tachuqis who were perhaps nearby, and Scott rather grudgingly raised his hand in some sort of human salute, but that was all. His time with them had taught him well not to expect better tribute than that.

“And why should they pay it?” he muttered, unbinding his tent and assembling the first of his poles. “Who am I but the man who protects and provides for them in their most desperate days? Lazy, useless, machine-worshipping pests.” Meoraq snorted, sending a scathing glance back over his shoulder, only to find Amber almost immediately behind him.

“Hey,” she said and offered him a somewhat mangled-looking hunk of gruu.

He looked at it, then at the starved and half-chilled human who had saved it out for him. The hand of Sheul was heavy upon his shoulder. He grunted and began to put another pole together. “Eat it.”

Her hand slowly lowered, melting out of the air like the grimace melting off her malleable face. She turned around.

Damn it.

“Sit down.” Meoraq kicked the rumpled roll of his tent into a kind of mat and took his own offer, indicating a place beside him and realizing only afterwards that he’d done it with the back of his hand—an intimate gesture—and not the two-finger point that would have been proper for a Sheulek dealing with subordinates, civilians, cattle, and surely humans.

She hesitated, frowning over her shoulder at him.

He said it again, speaking slowly in case it was his language and not his complete lack of tact that held her at bay, gruffly adding, “Eat with me.”

“You don’t have anything.”

He grunted and dug into his pack for his cuuvash, showing it to her before snapping off a square and putting it away again.

She sat down. The tent was still folded and not quite long enough to accommodate them both, especially as he’d dropped himself in the middle of it. Her shoulder bumped his as she settled; he heard the faint slap of her hair on his scales whenever the wind caught it; he felt the warmth emanating from her body all along his side. He thought he should probably move over and give her more room. He didn’t.

“See anything out there tonight?” she asked.