The Last Hour of Gann (24 page)

“I know.”

Meoraq sat up and sheathed his sword. “Nkosa,” he said, surprised.

“I shouldn’t be here,” his blood-kin admitted, still lingering by the stair. “And if you don’t want to see me—”

Meoraq gestured at the benc
h beside him, his spines forward in invitation. “How did you get up here?”

“I relieved the guard below,” said Nkosa, settling himself uncomfortably on the very edge of the bench. “And as soon as his real relief shows up, he or I or all three of us are probably going to be whipped. I just…I heard about Rasozul.”

Meoraq grunted and looked inanely at the rooftop wall, which had nothing at all to show him. “I envy him,” he said. “He sees our true Father’s face tonight.”

“Well…I’m sorry anyway. I know you were looking forward to seeing him at home.”

Meoraq glanced at him and frowned at the wall some more. “I will see him in the Halls of Sheul.”

“Until then,” said Nkosa quietly, “I’m sorry.”

The wind blew.

Meoraq’s stiff spines lowered some. “Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t sure that was the thing to say, but he didn’t know what was.
He’d killed many men in his time of service, but he had never had to suffer a loss of his own.

Nkosa tapped at Meoraq’s knee with the backs of his knuckles, awkwardly proving his sympathies, then took his hand back. “
Everyone’s talking this morning. They said that exarch was here to appoint you steward?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t let him?”

“I had to pray.”

“About what?”

Meoraq flicked his spines and stared at the wall.

“Now they’re saying you’re leaving for Xi’Matezh?”

“Yes.”

“Xi
’Matezh
?”

“Yes.”

Nkosa waited, his head tipped to encourage further explanations that never came. At last, he blew out a rude breath and said, “Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, O mighty Sword of God, but if you want to kill yourself, you can just jump off the wall.”

Meoraq tried and failed to catch the laugh that coughed out of him. He eyed his cousin, rubbed his snout, and sighed.

“Marriage isn’t all bad,” said Nkosa.

“That would depend on who you get,” Meoraq muttered.

“At least you’ll have a choice.”

“For all it matters.” Meoraq sat up str
aighter and looked at his blood-kin. “I don’t want a choice, ‘Kosa. In fact, you could say that I am going to Xi’Matezh so that the choice is made for me.”

“I could.” Nkosa flicked his spines in polite incomprehension. “And w
hy in Gann’s grey hell would I say that?”

“Sheul lit that fire in the sky for me,”
Meoraq said, stating it as plainly as such a statement could be made. “I thought it was to bring me here, but even when I first saw it, I knew it didn’t lie directly in the line of Tothax. It was further east.”

Nkosa frowned, uneasy. “In the line of Xi’Matezh, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t possibly know that. You can’t sit on the roof in Xheoth and know where Xi’Matezh is.”

“I know,” Meoraq insisted.

“Fine, then point to it.”

Meoraq looked out at the wildlands, his spines low, scowling. “I can find it.”

Nkosa snorted. “So could I. East to the mountains and over
into Gedai, then east to the Ruined Reach and up along the end of the world until you trip over the shrine. That’s the thing about legends, everyone knows how they go. But don’t sit there and tell me the burning tower was pointing the way to Xi’Matezh because you can’t know that.”

“It was.”

Nkosa slapped a hand over the end of his snout and rubbed it, hard. “I really hate talking to you when you’re like this.”

“Like what?”

“A fucking Sheulek.” He dropped his hand. “You’ve been a good friend to me and I’m proud to hear you call me cousin like it was truth, but ‘Raq, are you sure you aren’t looking for reasons to do something you already want to do?”

“Why would I
want
to walk across the whole damned wildlands this close to winter?” Meoraq asked reasonably. “Why would anyone?”

Nkosa shrugged his spines, still looking troubled.

“For twelve years, Sheul has spoken through me,” said Meoraq. “Now He is finally calling me to Him. I have to go. My father’s…My House will wait.”

“What are you going to do when you get there and He tells you to go home and get married?”

“If that is what He has called me to Xi’Matezh to hear,” said Meoraq with confidence, “then I am sure He has a particular woman in mind.”

Nkosa looked at him for a long time before sa
ying, quite matter-of-factly, “That sounds like you expect God to provide you the woman.”

Meoraq thought about it, then shrugged his spines.

“That is the closest thing to true blasphemy I think I’ve ever heard anyone say.”

“’Kosa, he summoned me out of Xheoth with a pillar of fire. Does that sound like He wants me to go home and t
ake the first woman I see?”

“H
ow many women do you expect to see in Xi’Matezh, you idiot?”

“One,” said Meoraq
. “The one He means me to marry,
if
He means me to marry.”

Nkosa rubbed at his brow ridges, plainly choosing his next words with great care. He settled on:
“I hope this isn’t what you told the exarch.”

“I don’
t have to tell him anything,” said Meoraq, dropping back against the bench with a dismissive wave. “I have a whole year before Uyane has to present a steward. I could crawl to the Reaches and back in that time.”

They sat
, Meoraq watching the clouds and Nkosa watching him.

“You’re going to make me say it,” Nkosa said finally.

“Say what?”

“Sheul is not going to give you a woman.”

“So,” said Meoraq, untroubled. “That will be a sign of something too, won’t it?”

“Did you sleep through the lesson the day they were supposed to teach you about sophistry?
” Nkosa demanded, still trying to laugh as if this would all turn into a joke if he just believed in it hard enough. “What makes you think you’re even going to get through the doors?”

“
Nuu Sukaga.”

Nkosa leaned back, his spines flaring al
l the way forward. “What’s that mean?”

“I have no idea,” said Meoraq
and smiled.

Nkosa stared at him some more, then grunted and heaved himself up on his feet. “
All right, please yourself. Give me a tap, crazy person,” he ordered, palm out.

Meoraq smiled. Ignoring Nkosa’s outstretched arm, he
rose and put his hand against his blood-kin’s heart like a brother, then pulled him close in a rough embrace. It didn’t last long and wasn’t entirely comfortable, but he was glad he did it, if only the once.

“Come back before the year is up, if you can,” said Nkosa, slow to back away. “I know you won’t be able to after you take your House and I’m going to want to see the man who walked all the way to the ends of the world just to get dipped.”

“I’ll be back in the spring,” promised Meoraq. “I’ll even stay with you and do you the honor of sharing your wife.”

“Ha. Only if you share yours.”

“Done. Now get out of here,” he said gently. “I can’t stop them from whipping you every day, you know.”

“Well, in that case don’t bother coming back at all.” Nkosa raised his hand, hesitated, and then curled it into a fist and touched his
heart in a real salute. He turned his back at once and went quickly to the door, checking the stair with a look of resignation, then slipped through and was gone.

Meoraq stretched back out on the bench and clasped his hands behind his head. The clouds above him blew eternally onward. To the eas
t, he noted. Toward Xi’Matezh.

His destiny.

BOOK
III

LOST AND FOUND

I
n retrospect, the trouble with Scott started immediately, but it took a few days before Amber caught on to just how bad it was. She knew she was as guilty as everyone else of letting him take over. She also knew that she didn’t want to be the one in charge when the whole human race was just forty-eight people on an alien world with a handful of supplies camping in spitting distance of the melted remains of a ship that could very well be radiating cancer into every living thing for miles around. Oh no. Fuck that. Scott could be in charge of that mess all he wanted.

And if there was one thing
Scott was good at, it was putting himself in charge. Before the sun came up over the remains of the
Pioneer
, he’d made two trips to the top of the ridge and compiled a complete inventory of what they had left, which wasn’t much but was still more than they should have had.

Tents, for example. All the tents that had been up on the ridge had been incinerated in the
Pioneer’s
explosion. Not just burned. Erased. There was nothing left up there to prove there’d ever been a camp at all except a melted heap of glass and metal that had probably been one of the solar generators. But as bad as that was, it could have worse.

Not knowing how to set up an outpost,
Scott had apparently just dumped the supplies in piles wherever he thought he might like to put a building someday. Most of those piles had been up on the ridge, but he did have a number of tents down by the lakeshore, marking the proposed site of the colony’s pump house and filtration station, to hold the necessary equipment and materials until he’d decided exactly when and where to begin construction.

“Tents?” Maria interrupted
immediately upon hearing this. In her firm, furious tone, Amber heard again her threat to sue the Manifestors and their Director right down to the ground. “You said there weren’t enough tents! I was in a sleeping bag and you had more tents the whole time?”

“They’re for keeping the e
quipment dry,” Scott answered. “They aren’t for personal use.”

“Well they are now, bucko. It’s pouring! Where are they?”

“I haven’t decided how to assign them,” said Scott, and whenever Amber thought about it, she always came back to that as the only moment when someone might have been able to put a stop to things. But you can’t take out the guy in charge without replacing him. And she did not want that job.

So when people started arguing and those angry voices started climbing and
Scott was holding up his hands in an ineffectual bid for silence, Amber said, “That was smart, Scott.”

He swung around to glare at her, holding up one hand against the storm—the miraculous storm which had probably saved their lives but which showed no sign of blowing off any time soon.

“I’m not being sarcastic,” she told him. “That was smart. If you hadn’t set that stuff aside, we wouldn’t have anything right now. How many did you save?”

And that was the word that did it. Save. Like he’d planned it. Like he’d pulled them out of the fire with his bare hands and carried them to his desperate people.

Scott squared his shoulders and gave his crewman’s jacket a brisk tug. “Six. Two command units and four bivies.”

“What the heck is a bivy?” Maria wanted to know.

“How big are they?” Amber asked.

“Not very,” someone else answered.
Eric Lassiter, one of the soldiers Jonah had sent her. “What he’s calling a command unit is just your typical one-room dome tent. Allegedly, it could hold eight people.”

“If they were greased up,” Crandall added dubiously. “And drunk.”

“And a bivy is pretty much a sleeping tube.”

“More like a body-condom
,” inserted Crandall.

“
Two people could share one if they were really,
really
cozy, but even if you packed them all full, most of us are going to be out in the weather.”

“Well, that’s bullshit!” said Maria, doubtless ready to add a few new names to her list of impending lawsuits for her brother to receive back on Earth.

“No,” said Amber, as quietly as the driving wind and rain allowed. “That’s just the way it is. Getting mad won’t help.”

There were mutters, but that was all, and even Maria didn’t protest when
Scot kept one of the command units for himself, because he was in command. He gave the bivies to the Fleetmen—Eric, Dag, Crandall and Mr. Yao. The last tent, he gave to the women at the end of a chivalrous and deeply concerned speech in which he referred to those women, not just once or twice but at least a dozen times, as resources. And Amber let him. So it was her fault too.

She didn’t even get a space in the tent. Despite
Eric’s assertion that eight people could fit, only six of them actually did and there were eleven women. Amber didn’t try to bully her way in, because she knew she was fat and didn’t need to hear it again.