The Last Hour of Gann (16 page)

“How could you
—? Inexcusable! Representing this hall—!” Words briefly failed him. He floundered, then drew himself up and pointed two shaking fingers at Nkosa, saying, “This man will be punished, honored one, severely punished!”

Meoraq kept his hand on
Nkosa’s shoulder and clenched it, preventing a repentant bow. He said, quietly, “You are intruding on a private conversation. If it is in me to take offense, it is far more likely to be with you. Remove yourself.”

He did, stammering apologies, but the mood was dead and there was no reviving it.
Nkosa muttered something that might have been the other man’s name and some slur on his parentage, but he kept his head bent. They were almost brothers by blood, almost brothers under the Blade, almost friends just by nature…but only almost. Sometimes that was enough to bridge the gap between them. Sometimes it just wasn’t.

Meoraq released him.
Nkosa went and started picking up shards of nai-damp clay. “I should tell someone you’re here,” he said, not looking up. “Some foreign official has been waiting on you for days.”

“
Exarch Ylsathoc.” Meoraq flicked his spines dismissively. “So I hear. Do you know why?”

“You have to be better
than a front-room watchman before they tell you things like that. I only see his name and yours on my duty sheet. It might be nice if someone here thought I could do my job,” he added at a mutter. “But if you want to hide from him, there’s a petition in the hall right now.”

“A Sheulek doesn’
t have to hide from anyone,” said Meoraq. And frowned. “A dispute at this hour?”

“They
’ve been here half the day. They brought their champion, so it must be serious. I didn’t hear the charges.”

Nor was there any reason he should. His sole responsibility was to this one gate in this one room. And assuming it was not ingloriously stripped from him for one moment’s thoughtless joking, it would be the most responsibility he ever had in all his service as a man of the
warrior’s caste.

“I suppose I should put my name in,” said Meoraq, heading for the door
. “It was good to see you, ‘Kosa.”

“Think of me tonight when you’re making free with all your conquered virgins,”
Nkosa said morosely.

“I sincerely hope not. But think of me while you get dipped with your wife.”

“I always do.”

They both laughed, but it wasn’t quite the same laughter as it might have been.

The clerk, or whoever he was, was in the hall just outside, gesticulating wildly as he hissed to a whole crowd of solemn-faced men, some of them robed as judges. Civil judges, perhaps, but a very bad thing to see. They all looked at Meoraq.

Nothing he did now could possibly be the right thing to do. If he said nothing,
Nkosa was sure to be punished, which could mean anything from the loss of his post to a public whipping. If they waited to bring their charge against him until Meoraq was gone and another Sheulek heard that he had put his naked hand on Meoraq, Nkosa could easily be exiled to the wildlands or even executed. But if Meoraq did speak in Nkosa’s defense, he would make a public issue out of what still might be a private one, humiliating not only his friend, but the man whose name he carried. The taint could reach as far as his household’s master, the steward-lord of House Kanko, who might take the view that House Uyane had dishonored him personally. For that matter, the governor of this piss-miserable little city might raise formal charges against the governor of Xeqor, since House Uyane was that city’s championing House.

The only reasonable response was silence.

Meoraq twitched his spines…then flattened them and strode purposefully over to the watchful crowd. “Twice a year,” he said over their bowing heads, “I have the pleasure to see my cousin.”
It wasn’t entirely untrue. They were blood-kin, anyway. “We have precious few moments together and you—” He leaned close, staring furiously into the top of the clerk’s bent head. “—have robbed me of three of them. One for the interruption I might have forgiven. Two for the threat you had no right to make. And three that I find you so soon smearing the tale out into the hall. How say you, man?”

The man could not seem to say anything. Meoraq was not entirely certain he was breathing, although he did appear to be trembling very slightly.

Meoraq gave him a quick count of six to feel the weight of all these staring eyes and then he straightened up and drew his samr.

Everyone took a long step away, save the clerk, who dropped with a wheeze of terror to his knees. He stared up at him, his eyes in the lamp-light like daubs of jelly, like something already dead that only glistened.

“Uyane Meoraq stands before you,” spat Meoraq. He was calm, quite calm despite the venom in his tone and the shine of his naked blade. “And with the right to carry this weapon comes the right to use it however I will. You offend me.”

From the kneeling man’s motionless, open mouth came a series of soft, dry clicking sounds. After a moment, Meoraq decided he was trying to say, ‘I cry,’ but managing only the first glottal before his strength failed. His bladde
r, Meoraq noticed, already had. A twinge of disgust flexed through his spines, seeing that. He did not expect every man to face death as a warrior, but he should at least face it as a man.

“I have not decided to forgive you,” he said, sheathing his samr and stepping away before he got piss on his muddy boots. “But I will think about it and let my
judgment be known when I return in the sowing season.”

He left unspoken but very clear the understanding that if he returned to news tha
t Nkosa had been punished, his judgment would be severe.

“Thank you, honored one,” breathed the man on the floor, still without moving.

Meoraq turned his eyes on the best-dressed of the men still clustered to witness all this nonsense. “Where shall I find the abbot?”

“I don’t…In the quorum?”

“He might be in sequester,” another man offered. “I think there was a vote tonight.”

“A sequestered vote?” asked the first, clearly surprised.

“One of the oracles died.”

“
Orved,” said a third, timidly nodding in Meoraq’s direction to excuse himself for speaking. “He was on the roof when the fire went up and he fell down the stairs.”

“Oh. I heard about that but I didn’t know it was
Orved.”

“Where do you think he’s been all this time?”

“The Halls of Judgment don’t exactly drip oracles,” said the first crossly. “I don’t see any number of people for days on end, but I don’t assume they’re all dead!”

Meoraq folded his arms and gripped his biceps very close to the hilts of his sabks, waiting.

He had their attention again at once.

“If he is not sequestered, honored one, then he should be in the quorum. Th
ere is a dispute in session…ah…Are you here for the dispute?”

Meoraq turned away without feeling any strong urge to answer, although he did spare a last glance down at the floor wher
e the kneeling man still knelt. He had recovered only enough to close his eyes and that was just as recovered as Meoraq wanted to see him. There was a great rustling behind him as men made their salutes and bows, but Meoraq didn’t stay to witness them. He knew where the quorum was. It abutted the arena.

* * *

There was a man posted outside the quorum doors, swordless, with a brutal-looking hammer at his side. Not one of the warrior’s caste. A bailiff, then, and not one Meoraq knew or at least not one he remembered. He gave his name and went into the arena hold to wait. It was his right to hear any dispute where he might be called to challenge or champion, but he wasn’t in any kind of mood to hear the bickering that invariably accompanied legal disputes.

He was not alone in that, it would seem. There was a man in the arena hold already, sitting on the altar and leaned back against the wall, by all appearances asleep, except that no sleeping man’s breath was so precisely even. He wore nothing but a battle harness and a loin-plate, cinched tight over a ridiculously young and unscarred body. His sabks were metal and shiny, as young or even younger than he was. He rested one finger lightly on the hilt of each.

Unwilling to interrupt a brother’s meditations, Meoraq gave no greeting. He set his pack down and opened it, working quietly through his supplies until he came to his spare clothes, which were not much cleaner and not much drier, but some of each and worth changing into. He began to undress.

“I had a bath brought,” the other man said without opening his eyes. “Water’s cooled, but not too murky.”

Meoraq located the basin in an unlit corner of the hold and went to use it, grunting appreciatively. The other man acknowledged this with a grunt of his own, but that was all.

The water was indeed cool where it lay in the basin, but there was more in a closed pail and that warmed it some. It made for rather a deep bath, but Meoraq didn’t mind sloshing over. He didn’t have to clean the floors. There was soap in a sachet and several grades of brush and the bath was quite pleasant even if he had to do it himself. Oh, he could have sent for a servant, and really preferred to use one, but they always sent women and that was too distracting before a trial. A Sheulek was
supposed to be the master of his clay and impervious to all temptation, but Meoraq had found that having a woman rub oil into his naked body had a tendency to arouse him regardless of how inappropriate the place or time might be. He was working on that.

Bathed and dried, Meoraq briskly oiled up and made ready for trial, if it came to trial. The other man finally slid his eyes open
toward the end and watched as he whetted his sabks. Meoraq let him watch. They were good knives, made in the age before the Fall of the black, stone-like substance called qil, which no man could now duplicate. The knives had served his bloodline since the founding of his House and he never drew or sheathed them without this hot, fierce leap of pride, remembering how it had felt to take their weight for the first time and feel his father’s hands binding them to his arms. In all his lifetime, including his years of service as Sheulek, Meoraq had never seen a more intimidating set of honor-blades.

The other man hardly cowered at the sight, but he did tip his head and flare his spines forward in respectful admiration. “Ni’ichok Shuiv stands before you,” he said, and glanced down at himself, still very much seated on the altar. “Metaphorically. Sheulteb in service of House Arug.”

Ah, Sheulteb. If a Sheulek was the Striding Foot, then the Sheulteb were God when He stood. Only one short year of training and one degree of rank separated them, and they shared many of the same duties, save that Meoraq served every city on his circuit and the Sheulteb were called to only one House, to act as champion if it had no lord born to the warrior’s caste. There were more of those every year, it seemed. Even Uyane’s line in other cities had Sheulteb now. The Age of the Warrior was ending, men said, and perhaps it was true. Too many of the old blades were broken.

Meoraq sheathed his sabks and went over for a
brother’s tap—his open palm to Shuiv’s chest, Shuiv’s open palm on his own. Their hearts were already in sync.

“I do not recall the privilege of meeting one of Ni’ichok’s sons, but I know House Arug well,” said Meoraq when it was done.
“He has had more than his share of troubles in recent years. What curse has he brought upon himself?”

“
A curse of daughters,” said Shuiv, wryly smiling. “And neither wealth nor name enough to sell them all off. ”

“
Sell them?”

“Not so boldly as to be criminal.”
Shuiv flicked his spines forward carelessly, then leaned back against the wall again and closed his eyes. “But I had one waiting in my chambers the day I took oath for him, before any blade had been drawn on his behalf. And as soon as I had made her belly round, I found another.”

Meoraq recoiled with a disgusted hiss.

“My samr and I explained together to her father the laws against incest.” Shuiv flared his mouth briefly, showing the tips of his teeth in idle expression of meditative contempt. “But he has had one catastrophe after another ever since, it seems, and he tries to solve every one of them with the offering of marriage.”

“A f
oolish way to empty one’s House.”

“Oh, he’s emptied it,” said Shuiv with a snort. “The mediators have cited him for frivolous intent eight times this
season alone, and each fault doubles his fine. He’s sold two fields already to pay them, not to mention his sovereignty over two hundred households, and low though it may be to repeat rumor, I could not help but notice that two of his creditors forgave his debts after a speedy marriage to his daughters. But he has a legitimate complaint this time,” Shuiv admitted, opening his eyes.

After so many years of judg
ment, Meoraq rarely bothered to hear complaints. They had a way of prejudicing a man’s mind and when he stood in the arena as an instrument of Sheul, his own will could only prove a distraction. Besides, the grand trials that pitted righteous but wronged men against corrupt and cunning powers that he had read about in his boyhood were just that: stories told by priests to impress and excite young minds. Men did not need reasons to indulge in acts of evil, just as they did not need evil enacted against them to send them crying to the courts for justice. Still, Meoraq tipped his head to an inviting angle, showing interest he did not particularly feel, and the young man before him sat up a little straighter.