The Last Hour of Gann (100 page)

He could not have said this to
Ylsathoc and he could not say it now to a stranger. Ashamed, Meoraq turned away, from the exarch and his oaths of office, from his own father’s bone, and in that small movement somehow left the temple and arrived in the plains on a bright morning. He could see the humans walking away from him. He could see Amber lying at his feet, her face white and still.

Now he could speak, feel, act. He ran after the humans and cau
ght furiously at Scott, shouting, “Damn you for a coward and a murderer! How can you leave her?”

But the man who turned to face him, human though He appeared to be, was not
Scott. Meoraq stumbled back. He had never known fear, true fear, the kind that froze the fire in one’s veins. Therefore, he did not know it now. He was uncertain.

“
Fathers, take caution of the women you wive, for they will raise the daughters who wear your name,” said the man wearing Scott’s form. He spoke in dumaqi, quoting the first line of the Admonition of Womanly Virtues, which was so unexpected that Meoraq backed away again. “See that every woman of your household is brought forth as a proper woman in the sight of Sheul, Father of us all. A woman wears modesty around her neck and keeps low her eyes when her man speaks. A woman’s trust lies below her man’s boot, as her open hand also, to take in with graciousness all that he places before her. In all ways does she acknowledge him as steward over her and nursing no bitterness in her throat to be brought forth as slight and slander. A woman keeps herself covered and away from all eyes, save when her man alone has will of her, and receives him gladly at his every command. A woman speaks not against her man’s ear, nor walks before him, nor shows her eyes, but in three things forever seeks: To obey his word, to lessen his burden, and above all, to bear his sons.”

Nicci, wet-eyed at
Scott’s side, expressionlessly opened her mouth and emitted a ghastly mewling cry, like a chorus of hundreds of faceless women all at once.

Meoraq did not step back this time; he leapt back
. And when he looked at Scott again, Lord Saluuk of Tothax stood in his place. He bent, pulling Amber up from the ground, which became the very edge of the high wall of the city in a moment. “If she will not behave herself as a proper woman,” he spat, “better she be dead.”

Meor
aq snarled and lunged forward, but again, between one running step and another, he was suddenly in Master Tsazr’s room at Tilev. He staggered to a stop, then checked his body to see if he had become a brunt, but the hands he held before him were a man’s hands and the chest he saw below his chin was the scarred playing field of a Sheulek. He looked up again just in time to meet Master Tsazr’s hand slapping hard against his snout.

“I expected better of you,” he heard as he lay dazed on the floor. Master Tsazr’s mud-caked boots tromped around him and away to the window-ledge. “
I knew for eighteen years that the doors of Xi’Matezh would open for me. For eighteen years, I prayed for a reason worthy enough to let me go. But you, ha! You make a holy pilgrimage just to avoid your responsibilities at home!”

Meoraq braced his hands on the floor and slowly pushed himself up. He kept his throbbing head bent, feeling his former master’s stare like coals on his scales.

“You stood here in this room and pretended to listen when I told you that being Sheulek meant more than seeing the world and fucking a different woman in every city.” Tsazr snorted contemptuously. “And here you are. Walking all the way to the end of the world and back so you can have just a little more time to do it.”

“No
,” said Meoraq, but he could not raise his eyes.

“Lies! Go on then! Ask! If I choose to answer only one question, what will you make it? What have you been rehearsing for the day when you stand in the temple at the Heart of Gann? What will you ask when you have God’s own ear? Say it!”

He would have given every coin he had in the world to be the master of his own mouth in that moment, but the vision took his tongue and the words came out: “If I am to be the steward of my bloodline, where is the woman worthy to be bound to me? Set her down before me, O Father, or let it be Your will that I sire my sons as Sheulek.”

Tsazr let a full silence fall before he breathed out his sneering hiss. “And you are
such
a prize.”

Whatever had hold of him let go. Meoraq shoved
himself to his feet. “It wasn’t supposed to sound like that!”

“How was it meant to sound? ‘O great
Father, if You want the benefit of my superior seed, I command You to provide me a woman no more than twenty-two years in age, with black eyes and all her teeth, very pretty, who can cook, sing, dance, write poetry, and stay virgin-tight for all her life, or You can settle for those I sire by conquest’? How dare you make demands of Sheul! He is not some servant in your House, Uyane,
you are a servant in His
!”

“I can have any woman I want!” Meoraq shouted. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know there will be sixty of them waiting at my door when I get home? And every one of them, the same fucking woman!”

Tsazr’s eyes sparked. He leaned back, his arms folding under his sabks.

“I d
on’t want a pretty, black-eyed, cooking, singing, dancing,
simpering
, mewling, whining, empty-headed
idiot
!” he finished, now in full throat-throbbing rage. “Give the fucking House to Nduman! Give it to
Salkith
! I would rather die a Sheulek tomorrow than live fifty years with a wife like that!”

“A wife like what?” asked a new voice, one that severed his fury as easily as the stroke of a sword severs flesh.

In turning, Tsazr’s room at Tilev became his father’s House at Xeqor, and there stood Rasozul, beyond his prime but still powerful, showing his son only his broad, scarred back as he donned his armor.

Meoraq
betrayed himself with a step backwards. “Father?”

The old warri
or glanced around. “Are you ashamed of me?” he asked, in that same calm, reverberant voice Meoraq remembered of his father.

He recoiled, stricken to the very heart of him. “No! Never!”

“No? Not even in the disgrace of my retirement? Did I not accept the defeat of a woman bound to my bloodline? Is this not the fate that drove you out into the wildlands?”

Meoraq felt his soul wither. He knelt,
palms open upon the tiles, but no hand came to him in a forgiving clasp. His father continued to gird himself—endless armored plates and sharpened edges went on, only to vanish into his skin, leaving nothing but another scar and a place to put another piece of armor, another weapon.

“Your mother was a responsibility of the office I accepted when I came to this House as its
steward,” said Rasozul. “I did not want her. I chose her wristlet from a barrel of such trinkets and wed the woman to whom it belonged, so little did the matter mean to me. But when her breeding years were done and I had my sons by her, I did not turn her away. I did not begin nor end any day that I passed within these walls without sharing at least a warm drink and a private word in her company. My fires burned for her alone, all our years together. I gave her memory the only tears I shed in my life. This is the fate you despise, to have earned the true affection of a good and faithful woman. This was the woman you despised, who never heard a word from her eldest son that was not spoken with contempt. You were ashamed of her, my son. And it made me ashamed of you.”

Meoraq bent his back yet further, bent until his faithless head touched the floor, b
ut no touch of forgiveness came and no more words. When he dared at last to look up, he was in his father’s House no longer.

He was nowhere at all.

But he was not alone.

Before him, his neck bent and palm to Gann,
Meoraq saw Meoraq.

“No more of this, I beg you,” he said hoarsely.

The other Meoraq meditated and did not reply.

He staggered to his feet and saw blackness in all directions, devoid of life or light. His copy remained motionless, tranquil, as Meoraq ran first one way and another, exhausting his body only to find himself exactly where he had first stood. At last, he swung to face himself, shouting, “What do you want of me?”

“What,” the other Meoraq mused, “do you want of me?”

“Why am I here?”

“Why did you come?”

“Why do you torment me?”

“Why do you perceive it as torment?”

Meoraq managed not to swear, but could not stop the snarl. He sta
lked in a futile circle that led nowhere and turned back to find himself now standing and gazing at him with alien eyes, just waiting.

“I do not know what you want me to do,” Meoraq said at last. The words tore at him, a confession of the worst kind of failure.

“I want you to
know
what to do,” his copy replied, in the very faintest tones of exasperation. “How hard does it have to rain?”

Meoraq dr
ew back, baffled.

His copy waited.

“I know who You are,” said Meoraq, and much as he fought to be master of himself, his voice shook.

His copy’s spines flexed in an amused fashion. Otherwise, he did not respond.

Meoraq gathered his nerve and took a step forward. “Why did You set the humans in my path? Was I meant to take them to Xi’Matezh? What else could I have done with them?”

“I sent you a warning,” his copy replied.

“What warning? I saw none!”

No reply. His copy stared him down.

“Why did You strike the woman ill and allow her people to abandon her? Where are they now? Is it Your will that I find them again?”

“And a boat.”

“A what?”

“And a heli
copter.”

“
What are You telling me?” Meoraq cried out in frustration.

H
is copy threw out his arms and cried back, “Why don’t you
listen
?”

And then the blackness shattered and Meoraq lay in
his tent. After several stunned, stabilizing breaths, he found his lamp in the dark and struck a light. He could see Amber sleeping, curled small under her thin wrap, and at once the vision (no dream; a Sheulek does not fall asleep during meditation) coursed through his veins in a second, fiery pulse, growing hotter as he stared at her.

He knew. All at once, he knew.

Sheul’s fires burned in his belly, but that was nothing to the fire burning in his mind, taking away all thought and all but one: He had begun this journey to ask Sheul to guide him to a worthy woman. Well, here she was and if she did not have a dumaq woman’s looks, neither did she have one’s mewling mannerisms. She was not the woman he’d expected, but she was a good woman and God Himself had given her to him.

The light from the lamp had finally succeeded in rousing her from her sleep. Amber rolled toward him, holding up one hand to shade her blinking eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it morning?”

“No.”

She got her elbows under her and pushed herself halfway up. “What do you want?” she asked crossly.

He knew what he wanted. The only question remaining was how to go about it and in the waking heat of his vision, there was only one answer. He drew his ancestral knife and showed it to her. “This is the knife of my fathers, the blade of conquest.”

She looked at it and then at him.

He waited.

So did she.

“This is the knife of my fathers,” he said again, a touch testily. “This is the blade of conquest.”

“Uh huh, I heard. And this is my mother’s honey-blonde hair,” she said,
pointing at her head. “What do you want, lizardman?”

Her hair? He’d been expecting her wristlet, as
dumaq women were themselves wont to offer. The intimacy of her choice briefly staggered him. He shook that off too, then gathered up a fistful of her mane as she began her formal protests, and cut it off. “You are permitted to fight,” he told her, but she was already slapping at him, so their mating rituals must not be too dissimilar.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Meoraq stabbed the blade deep into the ground, still piercing the hair—to hell with the tent; he could get another tent—and swept back the blanket. His belly was hot and every nerve felt new and alive in a way he had never known. He had never been so aware of his own body or of a woman’s. And she was still struggling, still pretending not to understand, but when he slipped his hand through her tangled hair and behind her head, her shouting, swearing protests stopped and she grew very quiet as he leaned close to scrape his chin along her throat, filling his senses with the fullness of her scent.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

His throat was too tight to answer, but hers was soft. He nuzzled his way up to the underside of her jaw and scraped his chin slowly down again, breathing her in. The heat in his belly had become pain, a second pulse like a hammer from within. His hand dropped, feeling along the front of her shirt and plucking once at the alien fastens he found there. “Take this off,” he murmured. “I don’t want to rip it.”