The Last Hour of Gann (147 page)

“You have to get the baby out of here. This is taking too long and it’s getting weaker.”

“The humans are at their limits. They can go no faster.”

“Then you have to leave us behind.”

Us, she said.

“It’s too cold,” Amber said. “We barely got anywhere today and I know it’s our fault—”

Our.

“—but I can’t make us go any faster and you can take that baby to Chalh.”

“No.”

“I heard those other guys talking. Even they know it’s going to die if…It’s just a baby!” she burst out. He could hear her slapping at her face, punishing the eyes that betrayed her with tears. “How can you not care about that? You said you forgave everyone! Didn’t you mean it?”

He glanced at her, but his troubled thoughts turned to flame and he faced back into the wind at once.
“It is not for me to forgive the children born to Gann.”

“I
don’t care whose it is!” she sobbed. “It’s just a baby! You can’t let it die because it’s Zhuqa’s! That’s not its fault! God, Meoraq, look around you! How can you even think of letting it die? In a world where so many of you have died, you should be doing everything you can to save it just because it’s alive!”

The words stabbed him twice—once for their edge alone and once because s
he believed them. It didn’t matter to her that the child was sired of her enemy by a slave. She saw only an innocent life, and where the right was hers to end it out of vengeance, she wept because she could not save it.

‘Yes, my
Father,’ thought Meoraq, once more in the tribune hall at Tothax with the daughter of Lord Saluuk weeping at his feet. ‘I hear you.’

And he was ashamed.

“I will send it and the others on with Onahi in the morning,” he said at last, but the words were ash in his throat. Onahi may yet have kin in Chalh, but the gates would never open to a man who had ended his time at Praxas as barracks-ward, a man who came with a procession of fatherless women, unhooded, unveiled. It would be a Sheulek’s command alone that could open those gates and win welcome.

Her hand stole in to touch him—that fearless hand—weakly gripping at his arm just below his sabk. “Please look at me.”

He tried, but her tearful face inspired only greater heat and furious urgency in his belly, and that was obscene to feel when he knew a life waited on his judgment. He stepped away from her, clapping a hand to his throat to try and cool the color rising there. “I can’t,” he said. “Leave me. I have to pray.”

She did not. She stood silent at his back as he forced himself to kneel and
, as he was taking only the second of his first six breaths, suddenly her hand came out of the wind and slapped him in the head.

“Are you breaking up with me?” she shouted, sobbing so explosively that she could hardly breathe. “Because if that’s
wuh-what this is, I can tuh-take it! But don’t you may-ake me fucking wuh-wuh-
wait
for it!”

“What are you talking about? What’s broken? What—
”

And then he thought he understood.

“Do you think I’m putting you aside?” he asked incredulously while his belly groaned and his loin-plate strained. “Why would you even think that, woman?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” sh
e said, trying to sneer through her tears and succeeding only in sounding more pathetic. “You won’t touch me. You won’t look at me. You barely even talk to me and you’re always angry when you do!”

“I’m not angry.” His hand stole down to check the fit of his loin plate. He coughed out a bitter laugh, muttering, “I’m the furthest thing there is from angry,” but it didn’t feel true. The idea that Gann’s loathsome hand was on him came creeping in, as it had so often during these last days and burning nights—that he had breathed it in like a sickness
somewhere in the raider’s camp or that it had rubbed off from the flesh of all these damned women…but not from Amber. Never from his Amber. Sheul could not give her back to him only to see her and him both tainted beyond redeeming.

“I’m not angry,” he said again, gazing into the darkening sky. “I just need time.”

“Time for what? Is it…Is it because I was one of them?”

That made no sense to him no matter how many times he turned over her odd human words. “One of what?” he asked cautiously.

She glared at him, flushed and trembling and miserable, and suddenly shouted, “A slave! Because I was their slave—
his
slave—and you’ve got a lot of goddamned nerve breaking up with me for that, you scaly son of a bitch!” The last words degenerated into fresh tears. She clapped her hands over her face and choked on them.

“You were never a slave. You were always mine! You are still mine!” He caught her
wrists and forced them down, forced her to look at him through the wet shine of her tears. “Sheul Himself gave you to me and what He has bound,
nothing breaks
! How do you mark me, woman?”

She
sobbed, if possible, harder.

“I will have an answer,” said Meoraq, beginning to be alarmed.

“You don’t mean it!”

“Stop telling me what I mean!” he snapped. “You’re always doing that and it’s infuriating!”

“You don’t!” she shouted. “You told everyone out there you forgave them! You told me there was no sin in conquest, but that’s still what you see when you look at them! That’s what you see when you look at
me
!”

He recoiled. “I do not,” he said, but it was only a half-truth and the Sheulek in him knew it.

“Then tell me that baby deserves to live! Tell me it doesn’t matter who its father was! Tell me you think Xzem is a good mother!”

He looked at her, and just as her eyes welled up with fresh anguish, he said, “Truth.”

She blinked, knocking tears loose, but not sobbing them out. “Huh?”

“Truth,” he said again, now frowning.

They stared at each other as the wind blew between them.

“You don’t believe it,” she said again, but timidly now.

“I don’t have to. I hear your words. I judge them truth. If I struggle with acceptance, that is my failing. I will have to pray about that.” He braced himself and gave her a tap, just the backs of his knuckles to the side of her arm, and still almost more than he could stand. “But you are still mine. I never questioned that.”

She looked away.
“It won’t ever be the same.”

“As what?” Meoraq asked. “As life before my father’s death? Before you sailed your ship? I don’t want the same life, damn it, I want this one!”

She sniffled and rubbed her face. He couldn’t think of anything better to convince her and couldn’t keep looking at her, so he faced into the wind again.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked in a small voice.

“A little,” he admitted, and rubbed hard at the end of his snout. “Do you want to be broken from me? Is that what this is about? Because you don’t get that!”

“No!”

“Is it because I left you? Because I wasn’t there and you were…taken…”

“We can’t be together all the time. No, Meoraq, that was just…” She paused and uttered a short, tearful laugh. “I was going to say dumb luck, but you don’t believe in that. I guess you’d say it was God’s will.”

Meoraq thought about that.

“Perhaps it was,” he said slowly. “For Xzem’s sake. For Nali’s. For
Onahi and his men. For N’ki. Even…for S’kot. I hadn’t thought of it that way…”

But he did now, thinking of all the wooded hills of Gedai and how easily he might have walked through them and on to Xi’Matezh, never suspecting the city of Praxas with its caged humans even existed. He had been meant to find them, to save them. No matter his personal feelings, God had given them a new chance at life.

Meoraq rubbed at his snout again. “Xzem…does seem to be a good mother.”

“She is. She really is.” Amber sighed. “And I want her to have the baby. I know she can take care of it better than me, okay, I know that. I just…worry about who’s going to take care of her, you know? But I’ve seen
Onahi with her and if they’re not shacking up yet, they will be by the time you get to Chalh.”

Meoraq grunted, now thinking of
Onahi meditating in his tent, patiently awaiting death at a Sheulek’s hand for his perceived corruption. And who was Meoraq to say it was not so? However good the man might seem, it
was
unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother. Was it a greater sin to end the man now, while he still had some chance of finding peace in Sheul’s Halls, or to wait until the unforgiveable act had occurred? The temptations of Gann were no easy ordeal (his constrained cock throbbed abysmally, sunk in fire, bruising the edges of his slit, and he was never going to have Amber against that fucking tree).

But wait…

It was unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother…unless the man had married her.

And suddenly Meoraq realized what had been before his damned eyes since leaving P
raxas: There were six women in his care, five and Xzem, and six watchmen, five and Onahi.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I’ll marry them.”

“Who?”

“
Onahi and Xzem. I’ll marry them. I’ll marry all of them!”

Amber stared at him, not in awe, but in horror. “You can’t do that!”

“Of course I can. And why are you looking at me like that?” he asked testily. “If I presented them at the gates of Chalh as fatherless women, they’d never be admitted. I will give them husbands and I will name those men soldiers under Uyane. There has to be a House Uyane in Chalh and its steward will
have
to take them in when I command it as Uyane of Xeqor.”

“
Meoraq, you can’t! You’re just…passing them out. You’re not even discussing it with them first. It’s like they’re not even people to you, just…”

“Problems,” said Meoraq
.

“I was going to say ‘things’.” She looked at him and just as swiftly looked away. “Are we all that way to you? Just problems you need to solve?”

“In the wildlands,” said Meoraq bluntly. “Yes.”

“Even me?”

“You?” He snorted again and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “No. There is no solving you, Soft-Skin. You are my problem forever.” And before she could turn away, he said, “I am yours. And you will never solve me either, but at least you are trying. I will take the baby to Chalh.”

Sh
e scrubbed her arm across her face, erasing the last trace of her tears. “Tonight?”

The wind gusted. He looked up to watch the high branches come together and sway apart.
“Yes. Come with me,” he said hopelessly.

“I can’t leave my sister,” she said. He could have said it with her if only his mouth could make the words. “And I can’t leave those idiots to fend for themselves. They’ve been prisoners so long…If anything happened, they’d be helpless.”

If anything happened…

She saw his face, read his eyes.
“Yeah, I know. But I can take care of my people. And you can take care of yours.” She seemed to grope for something more comforting to tell him, but in the end, all she had was, “We’ll be waiting right here.”

“In easy
distance of Praxas. And there are uncounted raiders left in the wildlands! How shall I stand before Sheul and tell Him I left you unguarded when He has only just given you back?”

“You can tell him I begged you. I’m begging you, Meoraq.”

He looked away.

“I’ll be all right
,” said Amber.

“You cannot know that.”

“Some things you have to just take on faith.” She hesitated, then said, “Do you have to pray about it?”

He glanced up at the grey heavens where Sheul watched him, then bent his neck. “No.
So be it. Don’t,” he said as she reached for him. “I can let you go, Soft-Skin, but only if I do not hold you first. Go. Please.”

She took one step away and there watched him while he took six breaths and six more. Then, finally, she left him.

Meoraq fought through three more slow-counts, keeping the Prophet’s name and Sheul’s holy Word close against his heart until the fires subsided. The rotten-tooth ache remained; he just knew he was bruising something down there. Cooled, if not at peace, he returned to his camp. He took Onahi, visibly braced for death, out of his tent and bound him to Xzem with a few terse words. He left the two of them staring at each other and went swiftly through the rest of them, matching man to wife without really looking at either of them and especially without looking at Amber. Then, before he could change his mind, he struck two of the tents, packed a portion of the kipwe, and loaded one of the litters. As the humans were beginning their first alarmed outcries, he gave the order that moved them on to Chalh.

Amber followed him as far as the walls, but no further. He left her there without a word (his throat was tight as Gann’s fist), but managed only six steps before he halted
.

He turned around.