The Suitor

"Don't lizardman usually eat..." she began, a little bewildered.

"This one cleans his teeth most carefully," he said, sounding a little wounded. "This one is civilized. This one knows civilized guests are not seen in their hosts' laundry rooms with their hosts' undressed daughters. This one thought it best to hide."

"Yes, of course," Merilanth said. "But turn around. I'm still not quite dressed." Not that he could see anything in the dark— she didn't think he could see in the dark...

"And no peeking!" she hissed again. In the darkness she felt his shoulders rise and fall.

"This one has no room to turn around— this closet is narrow. That one will have to trust that this one is closing his eyes," he said, and Merilanth fumed inwardly. Outside, the sounds of laundry being piled into a tub to soak told her that they'd be stuck like this for a while.

"Oh just— I'll turn," she hissed, and quickly spun around, putting her foot down on Ssilikesh's tail as she did so. He hissed in pain and jerked his tail away, and she stumbled backward into him, knocking him into the wall head-first. He tripped over a jar of soap on the closet floor and began to slide down the stone wall to end up on the floor, and Merilanth, who had been leaning on him to keep her balance, fell heavily on top of him. She ended up with her back pressed against the lizardman's firm, scaled chest with only two thin layers of silk between them and her head tucked up under his long flat chin, hair now come fully loose. She could feel his heart beating against her back, tempo ever so slightly faster than her own.

"This one hurts," he said, sounding a little dazed, and he tried to get up. The shift unseated Merilanth, who let go of the fasteners of her dress to catch herself against the wall of the closet before she hit her own head. Her dress, never quite done up properly to begin with and then pulled by Ssilikesh's manhandling her into the closet, gave up the ghost and opened fully, exposing her pert, golden breasts to the air. Merilanth gasped when the cool cellar air hit them, nipples stiffing slightly, and then covered herself desperately with one arm and prayed that the lizardman really couldn't see in the dark.

"A...Are you all right?" she asked tentatively, turning to look back over her shoulder despite being able to see only the lizardman's dim outline.

The lizardman shook his head as though to clear it, and then put one clawed hand to the back of his head.

"This one is not bleeding," he said after a moment. "This one will live."

"Can that one hear anything outside?" she asked. There was a moment of silence.

"No," said the lizardman. "This one hears nothing."

"Then by all the ever-present stars, get out," she hissed, and throwing open the closet door, put both hands on his chest and pushed him bodily out of the closet. He stood in the light and blinked at her for a second before she shut the door in his face and began to do up her dress, blushing furiously.

Ssilikesh, for his part, stood contemplating the closet door as he waited for the daughter of his host to emerge. He'd never seen a human woman's bared chest before, and Merilanth's mammalian anatomy had put him in mind of two large, soft-shelled serpent's eggs. He understood they had some function in the bizarre live birth humans gave, though what precisely he didn't know; his patron had never elucidated him on the subject, and he'd never thought to ask. It had been more important learning to ask for food in the tradetongue— he hadn't eaten, when he'd asked in his own language.

The door opened again, and Merilanth came out of the closet, once more properly dressed but still missing her veil. She didn't bother to hide her face—Ssilikesh had already seen it— but she couldn't force back the blush that darkened her cheeks.

"Upstairs," she said, looking Ssilikesh firmly in the eye and daring him to comment. "I need to find another veil, and to fix my hair. I wanted Mother to be uncomfortable, but if she sees me like this she might die of apoplexy." Ssilikesh bowed at the waist and gestured for her to lead the way. It was an unnatural affectation for the lizardman, but bowing had been drilled into him as a sign of respect by the patron of his House, and it also brought his head level with Merilanth's chest. He eyed the front of her dress surreptitiously as she passed him. He hadn't given her bizarre anatomy much thought previously, but his brief exposure to her rounded form had stuck in his mind as a curiosity.

Merilanth led the way up the stairs from the cellar, pausing every few steps to listen for the sounds of her relations. They reached the top of the steps, and the coast was clear.

"Wait here," she hissed at Ssilikesh, and abandoned him in the hall at the top of the steps to race for the way up to her own room before her mother or aunt could discover her. On the way past the kitchen she froze, hearing her parents' voices within.

"...must be polite," her father said. "Szirion is an influential house, we can't insult them—

Her mother cut him off. "They insult us by sending this reptile to court our daughter..."

"Even so, dearest, we must at least have him for..."

They hadn't heard her. She continued past, voices receding behind her, only to jerk forward and dash around the corner as she heard the kitchen door open behind her. She slipped up the steps to the sleeping chambers and out of sight, and breathed a sigh of relief. She made it to her room undiscovered and found herself a veil and a brush, and spent a moment covering her face and hastily putting her hair to rights before straightening her dress, squaring her shoulders and heading back towards the stairs.

Downstairs, Ssilikesh stood a little forlornly in the hall, unsure what to do next. He could just leave— he thought Master and Madam Erebet would be more relieved than insulted, and Merilanth was a strange snake who couldn't be predicted, and was perhaps safer simply avoided. He was just resolved to find his way back to the door when he heard two sets of footsteps coming down the hall toward him. He turned, tongue flicking, and found his hosts coming down the corridor towards him, he striding as manfully as he could muster, she sidling along behind her husband like a reluctant crab.

"Master, ah, Ssilikesh," the husband began. "We are taking a late lunch on the terrace. Would you care to...join us?"

Ssilikesh blinked, imagined, briefly, simply turning and making for the door, and then bowed.

"This one would be honoured," he said.

Merilanth came down the stairs from the sleeping chambers to find her mother waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. She froze halfway down— her mother went still too, and looked at her. They eyed each other warily for a moment. Merilanth's change of veil and dress didn't go unnoticed— Merilanth's mother's eyes tightened a little bit, but she said nothing.

"Where is Father?" Merilanth ventured. Her mother visibly unclenched her jaw before answering.

"Your father is on the terrace. We're having lunch," she said. "Please join us." It wasn't a request.

Merilanth came the rest of the way down the stairs. "Is Aunt Ferrila joining us?" she asked.

"Your aunt fainted," her mother said, a note of accusation shading her voice. "She's asleep in the parlour."

Merilanth should have blushed now if ever, but all things considered she couldn't bring herself to feel guilty about her aunt; it seemed like a minor infraction after being very nearly naked in a closet with very nearly a stranger. Instead she creased her brow with feigned contrition and tried not to smile behind her veil.

Merilanth's mother led her out onto the terrace, where her father sat on one side of a rectangular wooden table overlooking the garden down below, and Ssilikesh sat on the other. The lizardman fixed her with a look when he spotted her that despite his reptilian features she has no trouble translating into a sort of "save me". The silence on the terrace was thick and awkward. Her father chewed his food stolidly and looked out over the garden, avoiding Ssilikesh's eye, and Ssilikesh picked mournfully at the flatbread and cheeses on the table and eyed the fruit hanging over the edge of the terrace on an encroaching branch.

There were two chairs left at the table, and Merilanth's mother sat down beside her husband before Merilanth could so much as open her mouth, leaving only the seat beside Ssilikesh. Merilanth shook her head minutely in exasperation and sat. The silence continued unbroken, save for her father's chewing.

"Do you eat cheese?" Merilanth asked Ssilikesh after a moment, and her mother almost spit out her food at the rudeness of the question— as though ignoring him completely were more polite.

"This one does not," said Ssilikesh, with the good grace to look embarrassed. "This one's kin do not herd mammals." The sudden thought that of course that was what breasts were for made him pause for a moment as he tried not to imagine human women making cheese— a process he didn't know anything about and which took on a slightly horrific aspect in his imagination— and failed.

"This one doesn't eat bread, either," he concluded after a moment, banishing the thought of Merilanth stripped to the waist and holding a giant wooden ladle. "This one's kin do not farm, also."

Merilanth sighed, and refrained very carefully from glaring at her mother.

"What do you eat? Meat?" she asked.

"Yes. Or fruit. Sometimes... insects."

Merilanth's mother blanched, and her father's head swung around, brows furrowed. He opened his mouth wordlessly, hesitant to ask what everyone at the table was wondering.

"Wild ankheg," Ssilikesh said. "Also scorpions, sometimes." Merilanth's eyebrow rose, and her parents simply gaped at him.

"This one doesn't require ankheg," he said. "but perhaps a little fruit...?"

Merilanth's mother got up jerkily and hustled off to find something for Ssilikesh, while her father stared at him.

"Don't ankheg spit acid?" Merilanth asked— she'd read extensively about local perils, back when she'd still thought she would take to the road some day. Ssilikesh shrugged.

"Often," he said.

"How...?" her father managed.

"With spears."

And that was the end of the conversation until Merilanth's mother came back with a bowl of hastily sliced figs.

"That one has this one's gratitude," Ssilikesh said, and began to eat, swallowing pieces of fig whole.

Merilanth's mother, who kept looking at Ssilikesh as though at any moment he might produce a scorpion from inside his shirt and eat it in front of her, finished her own food as quickly as she possibly could and then excused herself. Merilanth's father, who had either a stronger stomach or a weaker imagination, managed to stay for a little while longer before "pressing business" drew him away, leaving only Merilanth herself and Ssilikesh at the table.

"Ignore them," Merilanth said after a moment. "I do." Ssilikesh nodded and pushed his bowl away, empty of figs.

"This one is used to such things," he said. "City-folk do not like lizardkin." Merilanth snorted.

"Father and Mother are stodgy. This one likes that one just fine." Ssilikesh furrowed his scaled brow.

"That one mocks again," he said.

"Teases," she corrected. "I'm teasing. Tell me about hunting ankheg."

"This one has not hunted in several years," Ssilikesh said. "But when this one lived in the desert with his clutchmates, this one hunted often. Ankheg eat the roots of the green things of the oasis, and eat the animals that come to drink. A drummer would pound a stretched skin to sound like the footsteps of an elephant, and two, sometimes three ankheg would come to hunt. This one and others would wait with spears in the tops of the oasis trees, and spring down on the ankheg when they burrowed up out of the sand. Before the hunt, the warriors would wrap themselves in skins and bathe in the oasis pool, and then roll in the sand. When the ankheg spit their acid, the sand would smoke and sizzle, and the hunters would cast off their skins and stab the ankheg with their spears. Ankheg can only spit once in a hunt."

Ssilikesh shrugged.

"This one is civilized now. Hunting is for the people of the desert." There was a wistful note in his voice.

"What happened?" Merilanth asked. She only rarely saw lizardmen in the city, and never one dressed in real clothes. They sometimes came to the outskirts to trade with the merchants who pitched their tents outside the city walls, and she'd seen them from her balcony on occasion, dressed in loincloths or rough hides. They sold the things that they sometimes found out in the sands- relics from ancient cities, or strange bones from bizarre animals, and once she'd heard her father say they sold the goods they stole from legitimate trade caravans. It was strange to see one living within the city's walls.

Ssilikesh was silent for a long moment before he spoke again, eyes on the emptied bowl of figs but not registering it. "This one was taken by slavers," he said, voice flat. "And auctioned off in the slave market. The head of House Szirion bought this one, and taught this one the ways of the city. These were hard lessons— as hard as hunting ankheg for the first time. This one suffered as many bruises for failure in both places, and sometimes did not eat for days. This one learned quickly— hunger is a clever teacher. Now this one trades goods under House Szirion, and defends the House's caravans when called. It is a life." He put his hands flat on the table, and Merilanth saw again the bands of scar around his wrists, and this time recognized the marks of manacles.

Merilanth hesitated for only a second, and then put her hand on his shoulder.

"It sounds awful," she said. "He had you beaten?"

"He would watch as men hit this one with sticks or leather whips. This one's scales grew thick. The desert was no kinder— in the sands, other lizardkin would try to steal the tribe's eggs. Some seasons the hunters feasted on the ankheg, and some seasons the ankheg feasted on the hunters. Some seasons there was no rain for many months."

He lapsed into silence, and turned to look at her with his yellow eyes. She stared back, waiting for him to blink or say something else, but he remained wordless.

"When I was a child I wanted more than anything to see the desert," she said at last. "Our family lived with my Grandfather, before Father began to do well enough as a merchant to move us here. Grandfather had a library, more books than you've ever seen, or... I don't know, maybe you've seen thousands of books. Szirion is a rich and powerful house. But I had never seen so many. Grandfather would read to me and Lerisell, and when we were old enough he let us into the library on our own. We would hide from Mother there, between the shelves. Lerisell read poetry and tittered over The Perfumed Garden, but I read adventure stories. I read about the boy who found a golden lamp in the desert and commanded an army of djinni to build him a palace, and I read about the wise man and the ghul who travelled from place to place, the wise man healing the sick and the ghul devouring the bodies of plague victims to stop the spread of sickness. I read about the Caliph's Royal Guards and their journey to find the most beautiful princess in the Caliphate for their master to wed. I wanted that life— I still want that life."

She turned, and looked out over the garden wall at the minarets outlined against the horizon. It was already late afternoon, and the sun was beginning to set.

"I wanted more than anything to live the life of the road. I was going to run away... next year, or the year after. I was going to find travelling companions and explore ancient tombs and become the apprentice of a powerful sorceress with a beautiful, black-haired son, and I was going to be happy. And now Lerisell has run away instead and I must marry you."

The last word came out mournful and accusatory, on the tail end of a fantasy that seemed almost childish now, and she instantly regretted saying it.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't mean to say..."

"This one understands," he cut her off. "This one expected to take one of the daughters of the tribe for his mate, and have many eggs. This one is willing to make a... a political arrangement, for the sake of the House, but this one knows the surprise that one must have felt. If that one would like, this one will leave, and that one can marry who she likes. That one's parents will approve— this one believes he has shocked them enough for that."

He got up from the table then, and bowed formally again before turning and heading stolidly for the door, feeling, suddenly and surprisingly, achingly tired. He was almost to the door when Merilanth's voice stopped him.

"You said the desert was no kinder than the city. But... you miss it, don't you? You miss being out there."

He cocked his head to one side for a moment, and said without turning: "Yes."

He heard her chair scrape against the floor of the terrace as she stood up too, silk dress rustling softly.

"Come with me," she said. "I want to show you something."

She led him down into the garden again, carefully, needing to be certain they were unobserved. She needn't have worried; neither her parents nor her aunt were anywhere in evidence, and it was getting darker out- they'd likely be ensconced deep inside the house by now, commiserating with each other.

In the garden, she led him through to the far corner, where a thicket of pomegranate trees grew up against the wall. Looking around one last time, she ducked underneath, gesturing for Ssilikesh to follow. He had to crouch down where she had merely stooped— he was a head taller than her— but once inside he found he was able to stand again. He looked around and found himself in a small hollow in the stand of trees. Merilanth stood with her back to the wall, her eyes searching his over her veil. He wasn't sure what she was looking for. After a moment, she spoke.

"You must never tell my parents about this," she said. "But somehow I don't imagine you will." And with that she pointed to the pomegranate tree behind him, and he turned to see a rough, natural ladder of branches in the tree, bark worn smooth by regular use.

"That one sneaks out," he said, comprehending.

"Are you coming or not?" she said, already beginning to climb.

The view from the top of the garden wall was breathtaking. The setting sun made the towers of the city into pillars of jet against a backdrop of beaten copper, the sky flaming red and orange. They only stayed for a moment before Merilanth slipped over the top of the wall and onto the roof of the building next to them, and Ssilikesh followed. They shimmied down a flowering vine that grew thickly up the back of the building, and then they were around the corner and in the street, where merchants leading camels and women with clay pots balanced on their heads passed them by, returning home for the day.

"Father and Mother think I never leave the house except to go to Temple with them every week," she said. "But I suppose being out here isn't the same for you as it is for me. You can come and go as you please." Ssilikesh said nothing, thinking about the city gates and wondering why he had never simply walked out of them and not looked back, when his patron had first let him out into the streets on his own. Maybe it was because he'd had nowhere to go.

"In any case," she continued, almost dancing down the street. "This isn't what I wanted to show you."

She led him through winding streets he knew and through streets he didn't, and once she'd taken his hand to pull him down a narrow alley, and his claws had tightened over her fingers almost imperceptibly before she had withdrawn her hand. They came at last to a narrow spire near the city wall, standing alone in a tiny courtyard, next to an ancient well.