The Last Hour of Gann (145 page)

Meoraq took the skewers off the fire and, ignoring the immediate outstretched arms of
Scott and his humans, gave them out to his brothers under the Blade.

Onahi
watched Scott stomp and swear his way back over to the edge of camp while his skewer cooled, but when the human finally quieted, his attention drifted. He took a small bite, swallowed quickly, then stood up.

Meoraq prepared more
kipwe to roast, watching without seeming to watch as Onahi crossed around the fire and went to one knee before Xzem. “Mother,” he said, respectful as a man at prayer. “It is Onahi Chasa before you.”

The slave ducked her head and rocked the child of Gann, giving Amber short sidelong glances until she realized who it was the man addressed. Her next wary glance was to Meoraq, but he kept his own eyes on the roasting
meat and let whatever was happening here happen without him.

Onahi
waited. Patience was not a word to him. Meoraq felt a little envy stinging through his grim amusement as he let this scene play itself out.              He did like the man. He was a bit of a fool, but a good man, and after the unpleasantness of this day, even a foolish sort of goodness was a soothing thing to see.

It was obvious
Onahi had no experience with servants, let alone with slaves. One did not directly address them unless one were giving orders. The slave knew this even if Onahi did not. If he had simply dropped the skewer in her lap and walked on, she would be eating now, not cringing in confusion under the weight of his gentle gaze. But this was no proper household, no more than it was a raiding nest, and it seemed neither of them knew the rules of conduct.

The slave ultimately seemed to realize that the man before her would not leave until he had an answer of some sort. Short spines shivering, her neck bent so far that her chin touched her chest, Xzem finally managed a wordless mewl of feminine inquiry. The little sound cracked in her mouth, uncertain.
             

“It is
Onahi Chasa,” he said again. And when the slave continued to shrink away, he looked back at Meoraq.

‘
O my Father, why are You including me in this?’ he thought. Aloud, he grunted only, “Xzem,” as he fussed determinedly with the meat.

“Xzem,” the slave whispered and rocked the baby a little faster, as if she feared a beating to go along with the introductions. Not an unreasonable fear, all things considered.

Onahi relaxed, believing himself to be on firmer ground, rather than further out in the mire. “Mother,” he said, offering the skewer of his hunter’s portion of kipwe to a Gann-born raider’s slave. “Take and be fed.”

Xzem hesitated, but only for a moment. She gave Amber the baby. Without a word, she rose and moved to the wall of the windbreak, gripped a post, and bent. She stood her legs well apart; the wind flattened the folds of her worn shift to her body so that she might as well be naked there, and every man’s eye was on her. She waited.

Onahi stared, as all the watchmen of Praxas stared, at the rounded curve of her hip and the shallow valley beneath her shift where her sex must be (and worn well open, all things considered). Meoraq had seen many women bend for him this way and even he stared for a short time before running his brooding and distracted eye over Amber. She still wouldn’t look at him. Which was just as well, he supposed. The fires of Sheul were burning—they had not cooled completely since he’d found and reclaimed his wife—but there were twenty other people in this camp now. Meoraq was not ashamed of Amber, but he hated the thought of other people listening in while he had sex.

‘Not tonight, Uyane,’ he thought bitterly, turning the skewers. ‘Not while she sits there with her damned Nicci under her arm. Not unless you want the whining little pest in the tent with you.’

Onahi stood. He went to Xzem and, just as Meoraq was reluctantly opening his mouth to order him back, he took her arm and stood her gently up. He placed the skewer in her puzzled hand and released her. “Take and be fed, mother,” he said.

The other watchmen of Praxas exchanged glances. One of them picked at the remaining portion of his own meal and looked at one of the slaves.

Onahi turned around and came back to the other side of the fire. He knelt. His fingers brushed at the buckle of his loin-plate, testing, before he set his hands on the ground. He closed his eyes and prayed in grim-faced silence.

One by one, the watchmen of Praxas offered food to the slaves. Thanks were spoken by some, softly, uncertain of propriety.
Meoraq let them be, even when one of the watchmen sat boldly at a slave’s side and ate with her. He didn’t care if they ate together, scandalous as that was. He didn’t care if they spoke to one another. At the moment, he didn’t care if they all stripped to their scales and formed a dip-ring. His battle-wounds were a constant ache in every part of his body, like the anger and resentment throbbing in his throat or the heat of Sheul’s fires churning in his belly, and he cared about nothing and no one else.

And he was tired. All at once, the sleep he had not caught in the past several days seemed to drop into his bones. He doubted he had the s
trength to do what the fires demanded. He didn’t even have the strength to pray. So he gave the next set of skewers to the humans, including another for his wife and one for Nicci (who did not, he noticed, share it out with Amber), and ordered the rest cooked and held until morning. “I want to leave at dawn,” he said, addressing all of them together, but Onahi most of all. “Keep a strong watch and let no one enter or leave this camp unless they do so under my eye.”

“I hear you, sir,”
Onahi said, his brow still pressed to the ground in prayer.

Meoraq grunted and stood up.

Amber lifted her arm from her blood-kin’s shoulders and began awkwardly to rise without disturbing the sleeping baby at her breast.

Meoraq’s selfishness let her gather her feet beneath her, but he was only so much a selfish man.
She would be tired and sore as much as he. He knew he would not be able to lie beside her without taking her and he could not take her gently, not yet. So Meoraq stopped her with a raised hand before Amber could stand. “Not tonight,” he said sourly, and went into his tent before he could change his mind.

2

A
mber slept on the ground by the fire. She didn’t have to and she knew it. They had plenty of tents—one for the lizardmen, one for the lizardladies, one for the humans…and the one where she knew she wasn’t welcome.

So after Xzem took the baby and went into her tent with the other ladies, she just lay down where she was. She felt awful. Not just sad, but sick, as if his rejection were a poison she could swallow over and over the longer she lay there. She didn’t think she’d sleep, but eventually she did, and dreamed of Zhuqa, who was sometimes with her on the
Pioneer
or in the ruins of that lizardman city with the metal spiders scuttling forever on their empty web, and even her mother’s squalid little apartment back on Earth. “This is Zhuqa’s House,” he kept telling her, through all the confusion of that nightmare. “And once you enter Zhuqa’s House, you never really leave.”

She woke up crying, which was bad enough, and rolled over to discover one of the strange lizardmen just staring at her, which made it humiliating as well. She sat up, using the excuse of looking for Nicci in the empty place beside her to wipe at her cheeks, and felt her stomach flip ominously over. It didn’t surprise her, as miserable as she’d been, but she’d only rolled onto her knees when that small warning became irrelevant and she puked right into the ashes of the fire. Her empty stomach had nothing to give up but a little bilious slime, but it kept trying until she could feel herself trying to pass out as well as throw up. Not her usual post-trauma puke-session, but it did ease up eventually, thank God. By then, she only had enough strength to heave herself onto her side instead of dropping face-down in the stinking mess of it.

The lizardman got up and walked away, leaving her to gasp and spit weakly where she was. After a moment, footsteps returned.

“Are you dying?” Nicci’s voice, not very interested.

“I kind of want to,” Amber muttered and then had to make her aching stomach force out a laugh because it sounded so true.

More footsteps, several sets. A scaly hand gripped her shoulder—Meoraq’s hand, she knew it even before he rolled her over and she could see his frowning face—as somewhere in the world,
Scott said, “Do you have to do this now, Bierce?”

“Hit him,” said Meoraq curtly, and someone did. “Show me your eyes, woman.”

She looked at him and saw his spines flat with annoyance and not forward with concern. She scooted back out of his grip and sat up, fixing her burning eyes on her knees as she brushed them off. “I’m fine.”

“She’s fine,” said Nicci. “It’s just something she does when she gets upset.”

Meoraq looked back and forth between them, then at the other lizardmen, and then over the windbreak at the wall of the city. He stood up. “Break the camp.”

L
izardmen moved at once to obey. Meoraq took two steps toward his tent and paused. He looked back. Then he turned around and came back, passing Amber and Nicci without a glance to seize Scott by the hair. He dragged him over to the tent where the humans had slept (Eric and the others got out of his way and the lizardmen didn’t even look at them) and threw Scott into the side of it. “If you want to sleep in it,” Meoraq hissed, “you pick it up and carry it! No one in my camp serves you, S’kot!”

“Jesus, fine!”

Meoraq’s head tipped. “You speak to Uyane Meoraq, a Sword of Sheul, and you had better do it with more respect than that if you want to walk away from this.”

“He’s in a mood,” Nicci
remarked.

Amber did not reply.

“Thanks for the tent,” said Scott, flushed and scowling.

Meoraq grunted and took
Scott by the wrist. He lifted Scott’s hand, hissed to make him stop struggling, and forced it into a fist. “This is a salute,” he said, thumping that fist against Scott’s chest. “And when you speak to me, you salute.”

Scott
was about as close to openly gaping as she thought he’d ever been.

Meoraq released his wrist and got a fisthold in his hair again, pushing
Scott’s head down and holding it there. “When I speak to you,” he said, “you bend your neck in respect.”

Scott
still said nothing, but he was breathing pretty hard.

Meoraq released him and stepped back. “We
will practice once, because this is new to you. Break your tent and make the other humans ready to travel.”

Scott
kept his head down and lifted his fist slowly to his chest.

“Fair for a first effort. Now hear me, S’kot
. These men are born under the Blade as well and you owe them the same respect. You do not speak to them unless they address you first or unless you have something damned important to say. Am I heard?”

“Yes,” said
Scott, glaring at the ground. He touched his chest again.

“You
do not walk in the shadow of my House, human. You are a burden I endure. Do not interrupt me for any reason. Do not give orders in my camp to anyone. Do not take what you are not offered. Do not offend me, S’kot. You have none of my forgiveness. Do you mark?”

“Yes.”

“Good. So. To be clear. When you speak to me, you speak with respect. When you speak to my brothers under the Blade, you speak with respect. And when you speak to her—” Meoraq pointed at Amber without looking at her, shoving his snout kissing-close to Scott’s face. “—I cut your fucking head off.”

How horrible did a person have to be when hearing something like that made her feel a fluttering of hope? Amber rubbed her eyes and looked at her knees some more.

Scott must have saluted even though he didn’t say anything because Meoraq said, “Good. This is the last time we have this conversation, human. Get moving. We eat as we walk.”

And that was all. Meoraq crossed the camp and took his own tent down.
Eric and Dag went over to help Scott, who didn’t seem to know what to do. Crandall took Nicci by the arm and led her a little ways off to whisper at her. The other humans huddled up and just tried to stay out of everyone’s way, the same as the lizardladies were doing on the other side of their dead fire.

Amber sat, alternately rubbing her stomach and
her eyes, and finally got up. She headed for Xzem, because she couldn’t think of anyone but the baby who’d want to be with her after that, but she’d only taken a few steps when Nicci caught at her.

“Come on,” she said, turning Amber around and taking her by the hand. “Let’s go pee while we still can.”

Meoraq glared at them as he dismantled his tent poles, then used one of them to point. “No further than the ravine. Go and come back.”

Nicci showed him a salute. After a moment, so did Amber.

Meoraq, bending to pick up another pole, straightened up to give her a second look. “Don’t do that,” he said and went back to work.

They walked to the ravine, hand in hand. The wind was warm and light. It was about as sunny as it ever got on this planet, which meant that it was visible as a smudgy disc behind the clouds. A nice day.