The Last Hour of Gann (101 page)

Obedience was not immediate—it never was with Amber—but at last he felt her shift and heard the rustle of fabric as she opened her clothing. At once he put his bare hand between her br
easts and, as he tasted his way from her throat to her naked shoulder, he moved that hand slowly up and down, up and down, a little further on each gentle stroke, until he had slipped beneath the loose waist of her breeches.

She grabbed at his wrist, her skin smacking audibly against his scales. The next sound he heard was the soft thump of her back hitting her bedroll and she was flat beneath him and he was above her and hi
s hand was there, stroking hard up and down through the small patch of coarse hair that grew above her opening. Her shoulder was soft and warm and tasted of smoke and rain and Amber as he gently bit, not piercing, not yet, but wanting to, needing to. Was she fighting again? It was hard to tell. One of her hands was on his chest, pushing; the other, at his back with her blunt claws prying at his scales. When he looked at her, her eyes were shut and her neck irresistibly arched, so he bit it and then scraped his chin hard where he had bitten, until he could taste her in every breath.

He didn’t want to wait anymore and neither did she.
The edges of her slit were oddly plump and human-soft, but already open to his lightest touch; she was
very
aroused. Careful exploration with his fingers (she clutched at his wrist again, but did not move him and did not really appear to be trying) proved she was deep and pliant and that was all he needed to know. He burrowed his free arm beneath her, pulling her up off the mat, and yanked her breeches down until they tangled with her boots. He unfastened his loin-plate eagerly and then, with the last of his reason, he paused and leaned back so that she could see him.

His cock had flexed free the instant it had liberty to do so and now stood primed and ready before him. Amber froze, as he had suspected she
might, to stare at it. Her expression was strange, difficult to read.

“Don’t
be afraid,” said Meoraq awkwardly. He hated to break the mood, but some surprises were pleasant while mating and some were not. Human males were small and limp and fleshy. This had to be a shock. Far better to break the mood than to stab her with what she might perceive as a weapon.

“This is my masculine member,” he expla
ined, and pointed. “It will go here.” When she did not correct him, he gripped her thigh and said, “Open to me.”

She stiffened
, staring intently and in tight-lipped silence into his eyes, but then she obeyed without allowing him even a token show of force, submitting as one already in his possession.

He resisted the urge that swept him then, instead touching the soft skin below her brilliant eyes. “You are mine,” he said. It was early for these words. They were meant to come after, when conquest was done, but conquest, it seemed, already was.

She put her hand on his cock—a hesitant touch at first, one that grew firm as she closed him in her fist. She looked down, watching with a faintly furrowed brow as her fingers moved over him, growing slick with the oils she brought from him so easily.

Few women
had ever done this for him and no woman had ever looked as she did now, neither angry nor afraid but still fierce when she met his eyes. No woman had ever said the words she said next, in a voice like the prairie wind, that shook but still blew strong, “I want you.”

She frowned when she said it, as if confused by her own meaning. He understood very well how that could be. Sheul’s voice had not been clear to him in all this time, and he had been trained to hear it.

“I want you,” he told her. These words had no place in the ritual at all, but they felt right in the air. He said it again as she lay down before him and again as he rose over her. He entered with those words and the proof came at once with the first rush of Sheul’s blessing, filling her womb before a single stroke had been made.

He’d never mated
this way before—lying down and belly-to-belly—but it felt new and exciting and perhaps just a bit deviant. Covering her in this fashion, he was all that she must feel. His flesh, his weight, were all her sensations. Looking down, he saw her looking up and knew he was all that she could see. This was the conquest all others had been imitating.

Hers was not a
dumaq body. There was no resistance, no clenched sleeve of muscle to battle through, but only a soft, tight well that gripped the whole of his length at once. He was free to withdraw and stab again, thrusting with the whole of his body and crushing her possessively beneath him as he made himself drunk on this strange, enthralling sensation. He was vigorous in his passion, perhaps too much so, his weight driving her back and forth across the ground, but she did not protest. Indeed, she fell back, relinquishing all control to him with a hoarse, human cry. Her little claws gripped at his back, their points prying at his scales as she bucked up at him. Not so fragile, then.

“Sheul,
O great Father, make this woman worthy,” he groaned. “Let her soul be pierced and made open. Let her womb be warmed to receive my spirit—” And never mind it would be for the second time. The important thing was that he’d remembered to say it at all. “—and Yours. If it be Your will, raise her up with Your blessing and give her the gift of new life.”

She cried out suddenly, and at the same time, he felt her body
seize on him in the grip of her own blessing. In the next moment, he shared it.

The second explosion was greater, which was so seldom the case. He felt it pour out of him, unbearably bright and alive. He could not pray aloud
in its grip, but the name of Sheul and all his ancestral fathers burned in his mind until it was done and he slumped heavily atop her. He felt he could keep going—he wanted to try, anyway—but three was the sacred number of creation and belonged to Sheul alone. He would not sour this gift with blasphemous lust.

“Now you have become completely mine,”
he said. “Let Sheul who has made you for me witness as I take you from your father’s House and give you the headship of my own. I take you in, Soft-Skin, to be Uyane under me for all the days that remain to you. Hear me and know that you are mine.”

She spoke no word of submission, shyly
or joyfully or any way at all, still lost in her own fires. He nuzzled at her, scraping the end of his snout hard across her skin to fill his senses with her scent and taste, and, every nerve alive with Amber, bit deeply into her shoulder. She yelped and struck him fetchingly as he drowsed, licking at the wound to stop it bleeding and thinking of what a fine scar it would make.

At last, Me
oraq rose and retrieved his knife, careful to keep the hairs it pierced together. It wasn’t easy. After a moment’s thought, he held it out to her. “Plait this into a cord,” he ordered, “and I shall wear it.”

She looked at him for a long time before she took it. Perhaps
among her people, a trophy of first conquest was burnt or buried.

Well,
her people had turned her out. Now she belonged to him. He licked her shoulder once more and went, smiling broadly to himself, back to his mat and slept.

6

D
awn woke her, but he was already gone. His pack and hers were already bundled and good to go. A little more than half of last night’s horrible dinner had been tucked up beside her head next to his flask. Apart from the aching, scabby bite, a brand-new breeze on her ear and some dry threads of grass itching around inside her pants, she could almost believe she’d dreamed the whole thing.

She ate. Drank.
Packed up the tent. Reached into her pocket and brought out what been covering most of the left half of her head the previous day. Her hair. He wanted to keep it. Like a trophy.

She honestly did not
know how to feel about that. He’d taken her by surprise (so to speak), but in the cold light of day, she knew she hadn’t tried very hard to fight him off. Hell, if he’d chosen to wake her up with his hand between her legs instead of hacking at her hair, she probably wouldn’t have fought him at all. It had all happened so fast and felt so inevitable that she’d just…given in.

All the same, this didn’t feel like her usual morning-after regrets. Part of her wanted to braid t
his hair and see him wearing it; it brought to mind those story-book pictures—Amber as the damsel bestowing her favor and Meoraq playing a dual role of knight and dragon. But that was only part of her. The rest of her remembered only too well looking up through a haze of cramping pleasure to see him working at her in unhurried rhythm with his eyes fixed on the wall above her head and no expression on his face. Yes, he said he wanted her and yes, he told her to make his little keepsake, but all the rest of the pillow-talk had been between him and God. She was just “this woman” in that little chat, like it didn’t even matter if it was Amber, like any warm squeeze would do. And after the bite that had branded her, he’d put out the light and gone to sleep, leaving her to pull her pants up and button her shirt in the dark. She’d had to lie awake a long time while the ghost of her drunken mother talked to her about men and whores. She didn’t believe it, not really, but it was hard not to listen.

Amber
braided the hair.

It wasn’t easy. She’d worn her hair in braids as a very little kid, but only when her mom did the braiding. Messi
ng around with hair was a girly thing to do, a Nicci-thing, the sort of thing Amber rolled her eyes at with lofty disdain. Who’d have ever thought that was going to come bite her in the ass on an alien planet?

She had managed to produce a mangled-looking snake of snarls and was working to tie off the end when Meoraq came prowling back with the
big waterskin. He grunted at her as he passed by. It sure didn’t sound like a good-morning-radiant-woman-of-my-fantasies greeting. He checked the weight of the wrappings containing last night’s leftovers, gave her a disapproving glance, then noticed the clumsy braid in her hands. He grunted again and beckoned to her. “Come. You may tie it around—” He eyed the length critically. “—my arm.”

Amber frowned up at him for a moment, then got to her feet and went to him. He offered his arm. His bicep bulged. She could still remember the strength in tho
se arms as he grappled with her, the power evident even in his gentlest touch. And there had been a few of those too, even though he was not a gentle man.

She tied the braid on just under his shoulder, where the bulk of his muscle would keep it from slipping down around his wrist. It stood out surprisingly bright against his dark scales. Every loose strand and ugly knot showed clearly, but he seemed pleased with it. Proud of it, like the look in his eye when he shifted his gaze to the bite on her shoulder. He even gave her a deeply unsettling yet probably playful lizardish grimace before moving past her to collect their things.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

He straightened up, gave that some obvious thought, then cautiously said, “Good…morning?”

“Not that. About last night!”

His spines snapped irritably flat.
“What am I supposed to say?”

“
Why don’t you start with why, after all this time, when you’ve never so much as crossed your eyes at me, you suddenly decided we had to have sex?”

“I had a vision,” he replied.
“A true vision of God.”

It was not a shocker, as revelations went. Amber covered her eyes
with both hands solely to keep them from turning into fists. In the dark behind her palms, she said, “God told you to have sex with me? Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?”

“
Yes.” He shrugged into his pack and secured the straps. “We need to get moving. I see a hard rain coming and I want to put the spans behind us before it reaches us. No more arguments, woman. Let’s go.”

There was that word again
. All of a sudden, the whole issue with her hair seemed a lot less important as making love took an ugly turn into fucking. “Did you just call me ‘woman’?!”

He shouldered the filled waterskin and gestured at her pack
. “Yes.”

Absurdly, her first impulse was to snatch her hair back from him. She restrained it. “And just what in the hell makes you think you get to do that?” she demanded.

He looked at her, his expression tipping back and forth between annoyed and confused. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s rude! I don’t call you man!”

“Yes, you do. Lizardman, even,” he added with a glare.

“Not all the time. Only when we’re fighting.”

He threw out his arms, his head cocked hard and eyes snapping. “We appear to be fighting,” he told her, then pointed at her pack. “Get your things,
woman
, and let’s go.”

Her stomach clenched
. “Stop calling me that.”

“You’re my woman now, I’ll call you whatever I want.”

“The hell you say! I’m not ‘your’ anything. Just because I slept with you once doesn’t mean I belong to you.”

“You slept in my camp. That means you belong to me. You have been mine from the day—”
He stopped there, then rolled his eyes and heaved a hard sigh. “Fine. How many times do humans mate before the woman considers herself conquered?”