The Last Hour of Gann (102 page)

She stared at him for a long time before she was finally able to say, “That’s not how it works with us,” biting off each word and spitting it like a bullet.

“More pity for you,” he said with a careless shrug of his spines, “because that’s how it works with us. No more talk. We’re leaving.”

She
put her pack on, snatched up her spear and started walking, too angry to even look at him anymore. “Well, clearly last night was a huge mistake.”

On the horizon, thunder muttered, attracting his immediate attention. “You don’t mean that,” he said, frowning back over his shoulder at the sky.

“Don’t tell me what I mean. I don’t care what God told you, I don’t belong to you.”

“
Yes, you do,” he said, not in a romantic way, but just another argument in his favor. “You are mine as much as my own skin. God Himself has married you to me.”

“No, he didn’t,” she snapped
, slapping at her forehead.

“Yes.
He did.”

His matter-of-fact tone finally pierced all the way in and made everything else she was feeling fade to an uneasy black. She looked at him, feeling her brows draw in. “Yea
h, but we’re not really married.”

His head tipped, as if he were very, very slight
ly puzzled. He caught her by the sleeve to make her stop walking, leaned close, and said, clearly and distinctly, “Married.”

“What, just because we had sex? That’s ridiculous!”

“It would be, if that were the only reason. We are bound by God’s will, Soft-Skin, and what He has joined, no force on Gann may sunder. You are mine. My woman.” He raised his hands and clasped them together with a sound of impressive finality. “My wife.”

The wind blew between them.

“You don’t mean that,” Amber said, but her voice rose at the end, making it almost a question.

“Don’t tell me what I mean.”
But his spines lowered and he brushed his knuckles across her brow, then along the shorn half of her head. “How can you say you’re not mine when you gave everything you had to me? Everything you are…” His fingers scraped lightly down her cheek, along her throat and under the neck of her shirt, peeling it back from her skin so that he exposed her bitten shoulder.

And did she roll her eyes? Shrug off his hand? Take even one step  back out of
his reach? No. She just stood there with her mouth slightly open and her girly heart fluttering and a hot glow way down deep in her belly and let him do it.

“God
gave you to me,” he murmured, nuzzling under her jaw. “Even when I did not know how to ask. He found you anyway and put you in my path. You are the woman I was born into this world to find.”

“To own,” Amber whispered.

“Do I own my skin? My bones? I possess them.” He moved to the other side of her neck and roughly nuzzled her some more. “It’s not the same, when you think about it.”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“Please yourself. Fortunately—” He straightened with an air of reluctance, checking the fit of his belt before adjusting her shirt and covering her up again. “—you don’t have to. We’ll walk now. We’ll talk later, if you still want to. All right?”

She looked at the sky, which dropped a blob of rain in her eye, then gave up and nodded. He turned around and started walking. She leaned on her spear for a mome
nt, thumping her head on it until the urge to run after him and hold his stupid hand was gone. Then she shrugged her pack up higher, put her head down and followed.

* * *

They walked all day, like any other normal day. They stopped twice—once to ford a rain-swollen ravine and fill their flasks, and once just to stop—and they were normal rests. They made camp in the late afternoon on the top of a stony bluff next to a patch of champagne-colored berries which smelled light and sweet, but tasted so fantastically bitter that Meoraq had to threaten her in his normal way to eat them. He put up his tent, had a nice normal argument with her when she picked up her spear, then took her hunting. They killed a saoq together, and he stood over her with a critical but approving eye while she butchered it, and then they went back to his camp and cooked it up. They ate a normal dinner, having normal conversation, and when he’d finished wrapping up the leftover meat for tomorrow’s hike, he unbuckled all his buckles, shrugged out of his harness and zzzzzupped off his belt, tossed his metal panty-panel carelessly to one side, and said, “Do you want to lie on your belly or your back?” in a perfectly normal tone of voice.

“Uh…my back,” was her somewhat dumbfounded answer (but only somewhat), and with an approving grunt and a playful nip to her shoulder, he pushed her down and climbed on top of her.

The sex was much as she’d remembered it from the confusion of the previous night’s battle and as before, she could not summon any defense against that spined, hooked, alien weapon that he fought with. He stabbed her once and it might as well have been over.

There was no petting, no caresses, no pillow-talk. He stared straight ahead while she thrashed and clawed at his back, his neck arched so that all she could see when she tried to look at him was the yellow stripes glowing out from the black scales on his throat. He moved nothing but his hips the whole time, kept breathing in the same slow rhythm, and ignored every effort she made to pull him closer. Amber had never had the kind of flowery romantic sex that people had in movies, but it still bothered her. Even so she came first and came again and came until she was actually screaming with pleasure for the first time in her life, something she’d always thought only happened in the made-up letter
s in men’s magazines. By the time he trotted out the, “Make this woman worthy,” part of his prayer and came to his own hissing climax, she had begun to feel dangerously close to losing consciousness.

If he noticed, he didn’t think it necessary to remark. He merely licked again at his bite
-mark on her shoulder and got off her. While she struggled to recover, he adjusted himself to let his penis retract, scooped up his harness and his panty-plate, and said, “I will have the first watch. You will sleep in my tent. Rest well.” And off he went. Just another normal night.

He was giving her permission to use his
tent? Where the hell else did he think she was going to sleep after all that sex, curled up at his feet? And rest well? What the hell did that mean?

She put her clothes back—not back on, they’d never been all the way off, just back to where they were supposed to be—snatched her blanket out of her pack
and her own bedroll, scooted over to a less sexed-up patch of grass, and shut her eyes in a haze of defiance and misery.

F
ootsteps woke her in the middle of the night. She raised her head and watched Meoraq drop an armload of grass-and-dung bundles by the fire. He simply tapped a knuckle to his brow when he saw that she was awake and went on in to his tent.

It was a long night. She ate a few more of the bitter berries, made herself some tea, and entertained herself by tying the bundles together into little lizardman shapes and burning them. She didn’t mean to stay up, but her stupid brain wouldn’t shut up and the more she listened to it, the more upset her stomach got, and before she knew it, the sky was turning grey.

She was still staring at it in the first blush of astonishment when Meoraq’s tent flaps jerked and opened. He emerged with a skyward glance and a scowl, his tunic hanging open and his half-fastened harness dangling at his knees, and stomped off into the underbrush.

Christ, she’d pulled an all-nighter. And now she had to walk all day and she was already exhausted. She could ask him for a little time to sleep before they set out, but she was pretty sure she’d just get another of his ‘let this be a lesson to you, insufferable human’ lectures instead. Or worse, he’d agree and be pissed off about it, and she’d know he was pissed off and be too upset to actually sleep, so she’d be even more tired when they finally left and they’d have to stop early as well as leave late.

He came back as Amber was sitting and rubbing her churning stomach, buckling the last buckle on his harness and muttering to himself. “Is there tea?” he asked.

“A little. It’s probably gone cold. I didn’t think it was this close to morning.”

He grunted and glanced at her. “Is that an apology or an excuse? I can’t tell.”

She’d been trying for an apology, but if that was how he was going to be… “Neither, it’s just me whining at you again, you jerk. I can stay up as long as I want.”

He didn’t rise for the bait, just took the stewing pouch off its tripod and dumped out the cold tea. “You look tired.”

Oh, he was good at fighting.

“I’m fine,” Amber said tightly.

He moved off into the berry bushes.
“We could pass another day here.”

Amber scrambled to her feet, dismayed. “The whole day? Come on, can’t you just slap me?”

“This is not a punishment.”

“The hell it isn’t!
We’ve got to catch up, Meoraq! I can walk!”

He eyed her as he steadily filled the pouch with berries. He didn’t say anything.

“You do what you want, then,” she told him, rolling up her blanket and stuffing it into her pack. “But I’m going, with or without you.”

He snorted, but put the last handful of berries in the pouch and came out of the bushes. “This is my camp, woman, and I decide when we leave it.”

“Have fun bossing yourself around all day, lizardman.” ‘And screwing yourself all night,’ she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say that.

“I can’t deal with you before I’ve had something to drink,” Meoraq said, kneeling by the fire. “And there are days, woman, when tea is no
t enough. Go to sleep before I—”

He stopped. His spines flared all the way forward and slowly lowered again, not quite all the way flat. He put the berries down and picked up a dung-and-grass lizardman.

Amber smacked her palm into her face. She thought she’d burned them all.

He stared at it, very still, for a long time. Then he looked at her and while she was hunting for a way to simultaneously apologize and explain that she hadn’t really meant anything
by it and not to get his metal panties in a bunch, he got up.

“Meoraq—”
she began, holding her hands up in surrender.

He took them, pulled her to her feet, and put his arms around her.

“We will walk, Soft-Skin,” he said in an oddly-subdued voice. His hand moved from her back to cup her head, then her shoulder, then back to her head, as if he wasn’t sure what to touch. “Sleep a short time. I will wake you and we will walk.”

“I don’t need to sleep! I can go now
, damn it! I’m fine!”

He drew back, frowning as he searched her eyes. He opened his mouth several times as if he wanted to argue, but in the end, he set the grass-and-dung lizardman gently in
her hands. “Then we will go now.”

Amber stared at him while he started taking his tent down, then at the doll which had given her such an easy and baffling win. Not knowing what else to do with it, she put it on the fire. When she straightened up, Meoraq was watching her, his hands still gripping at the tent-poles but motionless. His eyes met hers briefly, troubled, and then he went back to dismantling his tent.

She supposed she could just ask him what he thought the stupid little doll meant, but it would inevitably lead to her telling him why she’d really made it and she couldn’t see how any conversation that included the words, “I was burning you in effigy all night,” could end well. And she didn’t want to fight.

Well, she kind of did. But she shouldn’t and she could admit that much at least.

Amber poked at the burning doll, breaking it back into the three bundles it had been before she’d tied them together. Flames leapt up at once and she watched them instead of Meoraq, knowing he’d be ready in just a few minutes more and then they’d be on the move again. And that was great.

The fire burned, strands of grass turning black and curling, one by one, before falling apart into white powder.

She wished she’d at least let him finish making his tea first.

* * *

They walked in silence most of the morning. Meoraq couldn’t be certain of Amber’s thoughts; whenever he glanced back at her, she always seemed to be wholly fixed on just not falling over. He wished she would say something, even if it was to call him an insensitive brunt (or more likely, a scaly son of a bitch), because his own thoughts were a torment. He carried them like stones in his belly, each one with the name and face of a human he had been ready to forget, and the largest and heaviest belonged to Nicci.

He hated Nicci. He’d hated her when he’d been forced to feed and tend her and he hated her ghost once she was gone, but no fire burns without fuel, and in her absence, hate had cooled to coals. In truth, he hadn’t spared her even an idle thought in days.

But she had never left Amber. She was there still, silent, invisible, clinging on to Amber’s hand and doubtless streaming water out of her empty eyes. Amber, who still spoke of ‘catching’ the others, just as though there were anything left of them to reach out and hold in her hand.