The Last Hour of Gann (161 page)

“Want to fool around before we go?”

He drew back far enough to see if she was serious. She was.
And even though that changed absolutely nothing, his mood immediately lightened from the choking black it had been to, oh, a dull sort of grey. “Yes,” he said, releasing her. “Go get the flask. We’ll fill it on the way back.”

“And they say men can’t multitask.” She stood up on her toe-tips and pressed her mouthparts to his snout. “It’s almost over,” she said again. “Try to remember that, okay?”

He grunted and watched her go back downstairs, trying for her sake to find some hidden reserve of patience and goodwill. It was almost over, that was truth, and he shared responsibility for how it ended. When he overheard Amber telling his children the tale of this pilgrimage, he did not want to hear the words, “…and your father acted like a bitch the whole way back.”

Some
day, he really had to find out what that meant, exactly.

He could hear Amber coming back already, talking over her shoulder in a gratifyingly terse tone. He met her at the door of the underlodge, caught
her by Lady Uyane’s fine green girdle and pulled her to him, pushing his snout hard against her skin all the way up her throat and down again. He kept her there, just for a moment, not thinking but only breathing her in. When he released her, it was with a hiss and a sigh of surrender.

“I am the master of this camp,” he told her. “And I could be a better one. We’ll move on, Soft-Skin. All of us.”

Her furry brows arched. “Does that mean we’re not fooling around?”

“It does not.” He took
the flask away from her and started walking. “Come.”

“
That’s the goal, lizardman.”

“Eh?”

“Nothing.” She caught his hand and held it as she walked beside him, inexplicably grinning. “It’s so nice to know that no matter what else happens, I’ll always have moments like this…when you don’t have the slightest idea what I’m saying.”

“This makes you happy?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

Meoraq thought that over and shrugged his spines. “If it makes you any happier, I have at least one of those moments nearly every day.”

Her smile widened. “Guess that means we’re married, huh?”

The last of his dark mood blew away like smoke in Sheul’s good, cleansing wind. He put
his arm around her. “I suppose it does.”

* * *

The land which would eventually be known as the Ruined Reach had once been among the greatest lands of Gann. Images preserved from that time showed its cities, like pools of glittering light, reaching north as far as the ice deserts and south into the Green Sea. The Prophet wrote much of life in that land, of its loss and of the sins which had made that loss so necessary, and of the poison that had so permeated its soil after the Fall that he warned no man should seek it. Long after the Prophet’s death, one of the Advocates had decreed that the land had healed enough that those seeking pilgrimage in that land had liberty to do so, but in keeping with the spirit of the Prophet’s warning, no road had ever been built that led into the Reach, not even to Xi’Matezh, mere days out of holy Chalh.

Yet with Lord Uyane’s directions and fair weather, the remainder of the journey passed without difficulty. Meoraq’s humans were inclined to be obedient, or at least unobtrusive, and easily managed. Nicci shared his tent and there was nothing he could do about that, but a tent wasn’t much privacy anyway. And it was only for a few more days. He
had already decided to demand another tent on his return visit to Chalh and give it to Nicci. Also a bedroll, blanket and even a cushion. Anything to keep her from robbing Amber of her comforts.

Patience, Uyane. Patience for another day. The doors of Xi’Matezh would open and he must not pass them with anger in his heart.

Days passed. He did not count them, although he meditated each night on a new horizon and felt the soil softening beneath his boots. He tasted salt on the wind and felt the damp of the ocean long before he saw it. And when he saw it…

It had been there before him most of that last day, but the glimpses of greyish
green he could see through the branches were not worth the inevitable stumble as his feet caught in the clutter of Gedai’s trees. He knew it was the ocean, the end of his journey. He knew it was a marvelous sight, utterly unknown in the city of his birth. He also knew it wasn’t going anywhere.

So when Nicci lost her footing and spilled herself down a sandy slope onto a fallen log, Meoraq called camp, meaning to stay through the night even though the afternoon had scarcely started. He felt no great sense of time lost in doing this—what was another day, more or less?—but considered it a test of his resolve to show patience. In that mind, he sent
Amber away with the empty flask and knelt to inspect the injury, ha, of Nicci’s scuffed knee and bruised arm.

Amber retu
rned in mere moments, the flask just as empty. She let it drop. “Come and see this.”

The three human males and Amber’s own Nicci sat around her, but Amber said this only to him.

Meoraq went and through the trees, not twenty paces from his camp, the forest broke and the ground dropped away. They stood at the top of a cliff, nearly sheer, six times the height of any city wall, plummeting down onto a deadly mash of rock and steel and ruin, sloping away over a wide swath of rust-colored sand, and there was the ocean at the end of it.

He had seen pictures. He had thought that would prepare him, that he could see the ocean and somehow still know how he
fit beside it. But there it was and it was as deep as sight would go, so vast that it became the horizon, so entire that he could see the very curve of the world along its skin.

He did not think to look for the temple in that first moment. He did not think at all. Uyane Meoraq beheld the naked body of Gann—its breathing lung, its beating heart, its pregnant belly—and forgot his own entirely until Amber took his hand.

He looked at it, anchored suddenly into his own clay’s dimensions, and then at her. She did not meet his eye. She, too, was lost in the sea.

He looked back into the ocean and was at once dizzied. The way it moved
restlessly toward him…it felt as though he were falling and there was nothing to grab at, no hope of rescue. He felt that he could fall along that undulating skin forever until he slipped up into the sky. He looked and saw Gann pressed to Sheul’s heaven with nothing between them, no difference at all.

“Is it…
beautiful?” he asked uncertainly.

“I don’t know.” She hesitated and shifted a little closer. “I don’t like it. It’s too high. And everything down there…looks dead. I don’t know,” she said again. “I’ve never been to the beach before. This wasn’t what I imagined.”

“Hell, no,” Crandall announced.

They both turned, and just why he should be surprised to see the others, Meoraq truly did not know, but he was, as much as if he were seeing them for the first time.

Crandall crossed his arms back and forth in front of his chest, shaking his head for emphasis. “
Hell
, no,” he repeated. “The joy ride ends here. I am not climbing down that. Bull-
shit
.”

Meoraq looked again at the cliff, but not for long. The height, the eroded fingers of the ruins pointing out of the sand, the constant swallowing sound of the sea—the single glance that Meoraq took found its way to his belly and knotted there.

“You and the lizard can do what you want,” Crandall was saying. “I ain’t killing myself so he can plant a tree in Israel or whatever the fuck he thinks he’s doing.”

“Relax, man. There has to be another way down.”

“Says who? Don’t you ever watch the travel shows? Since when do they ever put temples where any old asshole can walk in?”

“Hey, Bierce.” Eric reached toward Amber, visibly thought better of it when Meoraq looked at him,
then settled for pointing. “What’s that look like to you?”

Meoraq looked along the top of the cliff, since that was where Eric seemed to be pointing, but saw nothing except the same thick forest they had been struggling through for days. Yet Amber actually gasped, her hand clenching where she still held his. So Meoraq looked a
gain, at the treeline this time and then the treetops and finally at Amber, who was looking back at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“You don’t see it, do you?” she said.

He looked a third time, squinting as if through smoke and darkness and driving rain, but saw only the same close growth of trees, too tall and thin for Meoraq’s comfort, almost black against the grey sky. With a little imagination, he could see a thousand, thousand crooked fingers, pointing in defiance at the God that had judged this land and found it wanting, but he could not see a temple.

Even when she pointed, he saw nothing but another tree, a little taller than the rest, but no more or less remarkable than
any other. But where the others were wrapped in years of parasitic growth, dripping creepers and grasses that would have had no chance at life on the sunless forest floor, this tree stood naked, branchless, burnt black. A dead tree then, and yet he could see by Amber’s face that it was more.

“I cry,” he said. “What is it?”

“I…It…I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Eric, shading his eyes in an effort to see the thing better. “But it sure looks like a transmission tower to me. Sheesh. Wouldn’t that
just chap Scott’s ass?”

* * *

The walls that surrounded Xi’Matezh had been raised, it was said, by the Prophet’s own Oracle Mykrm, and his mark was said to have been carved on the very last stone to be set. Meoraq looked for it as they circled around in search of entry, but with only half an eye. There was so much else to see. The curious color of the stone—nearly black, mottled through with grey and green—made it all but impossible to see through the thick trees. Meoraq had never made a formal study of stone, but all the rock he saw beneath his feet was of that pale, flaking kind; this stone had been quarried elsewhere, brought for the singular purpose of enclosing this sacred place, and the sight of it did his weary clay great good.

They were beautiful walls, deceptively plain, perfectly molded. At one time, there must have been gates, but the damp corrosive air had claimed them and they had not been replaced. It gave him a twinge of disappointment, seeing that anyone could walk in, and he had to stop there in the opening with his neck bent until he had reminded himself that Sheul’s house was open to all His children. The inner doors, those were the true test.

“Are we going in or are we standing here all day?”

“Dude, just give him his space.
This is a big deal for him.”

“Yeah, yeah. Lizardman’s gotta get right with the Big Liz. Meanwhile, I’m freezing my nuts off.”

Six breaths, deep and slow. One for the Prophet, who had been the first to enter these ruins and hear the true voice of God within. Two for his Brunt, who had surrendered everything, even his own name, to serve others in faithfulness and humility. Three for Uyane, the first Sword, father of his own line. Four for Mykrm, the hammer, who had raised the first true cities under Sheul and taught men to rule them fairly. Five for Oyan, who carried seedlings across the ruin of the Fallen world and brought life out of the poisoned earth. Six for Thaliszr, priest and healer, who had brought the man Lashraq out of death and restored him as Sheul’s own Prophet.

Meoraq raised his head and crossed through the gateless portal into
Xi’Matezh.

He saw the ruins at once, ruins he had every reason to expect to see, ruins he had no right to resent now that they were before him. There were several buildings within the walls, much eroded by the ocean air, windowless, doorless, lifeless. He saw the thing the humans called a transmission tower—weathered, but still standing, still humming beneath his hand when he reached out to touch it. He saw no machines, but the courtyard was too well-kept to think none were here, even here.

The next thing he saw was the ocean, which he could see only because of the huge, tumbled hole in that beautiful wall. Not just one or two missing bricks, but a whole length of them, loosened by the constant pounding of the waves on the cliffs or eroded by the wet wind that had pitted so many of these other buildings. If he and his humans all joined hands, they still couldn’t make a line long enough to touch both sides. This fine wall, the life’s work of who knew how many master masons, carried block by block to be raised here under Oracle Mykrm’s own living eye…This beautiful wall was falling.

But beside the
hole, Meoraq saw the only thing that really mattered: a dark stone dome enclosing the true shrine and the heavy doors that sealed it. The doors were made of qil, the same as his sabks—a lost metal, from a lost age. Perhaps Oracle Uyane had made the knives from the scraps left after the doors were cast. Perhaps he had always carried a piece of Xi’Matezh with him and never knew it.

“Wife,” said Meoraq, and when she was
with him, he began to walk.

“God, there better be wall-to-wall booze and burgers in there,” Crandall said, falling into step at his side.