The Last Hour of Gann (31 page)

“Meoraq,” he said
clearly, and knocked his chest again.

“Me
e’orrak,” it babbled back. This time, it put the stress on the last syllable.

He tried a third time, leaning forward to put his eyes on a level with its own, as if his stare alone could help the fool thing understand him: “Meoraq.”

“Mee’orrak!”

It had to be
trying
to mangle his name. How else could it manage to such a spectacular degree?

It was knocking its own chest again: “
Mmbr! Thtzmi. Ef’uqantok yu’af t’bi’ablt’sa minam. Mmbrrr!”

“
I do not mark,” said Meoraq, openly showing the thing his confusion with the flexing of his spines, even though he had no reason to think the spineless creature would know the gesture’s meaning. “Do you mark me at all? Eh? Do you know speech?”

“Mbr. Imambr! Dam’mt donjst’sterritmi sa’a somthn! Mmbrr!”

“Gtdon!”

Meoraq recoiled for a
second time, looking past Mmbr to the second creature who had come boldly across the prairie without him noticing. This creature also had a stick, which it held as if it were nerving itself up to point it at someone and just hadn’t decided yet whether it should be Meoraq or Mmbr.

“Gtdon,” it said again, waving one arm. “Imgnna killit.”

“R’rufukkn ntz?” Mmbr demanded and after that, the words between them were too many and too heated to sort out.

Meoraq’s eyes darted from one to the other, but otherwise he did not move. He knew that he could kill two creatures as easily as one—for that matter, he knew that he could kill all of them, especially now that he had seen the
way the creatures hunted—but something stayed his hand, something more than he could fathom. Sheul spoke into his heart…but like Mmbr’s words, it was sound without meaning. He knew only that his fate was tied to them.

The creatures were still barking at each other
, neither one bending its neck to the other, and eventually the second creature abandoned words entirely. It shoved Mmbr aside, still barking, and raised its spear—not pointing it, but only wanting to make sure Meoraq saw it.

So Meoraq let him know he’d seen it by plucking it out of the creature’s pink little hand
and snapping it over his knee. The creature let out a shrill sort of shout and leapt back, tangling its boots in the same thorns that had caught Mmbr, and fell over.

“Wut’thfuk,” said Mmbr,
raising its arms to heaven and dropping them with a slap to its sides. “Skt wut’thfukz rong wth’u?”

The second creature pointed a shaking
hand at Meoraq. “Tht’theng trid t’kilmi!”

Mmbr snorted. It was a perfectly recognizable sound, so much so that Meoraq had to look around and see the humor in its eyes for himself. And it was there, by Sheul, of a contemptuous sort, but there.

“F’thatwertru uudbi’ded,” said Mmbr. It looked up at Meoraq and its mouthparts curled, grotesquely pliant. It put its hand on his arm and took a step backwards, into the prairie. “Cm’n Meoraq. Donlzzn to’m. Eezadik.”

It wanted him to follow it,
he realized.

And out of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever, thought, ‘She.
She
wants me to follow
her
.’

He looked from one creature to the other, stunned and not a little disgusted,
and saw that Mmbr’s face indeed had more delicate features and although its clothes obscured much, its body as a whole was both smaller and rounder. Its chest in particular was as full as a milking mother’s, which it could very well be.

‘So then,’ he
told himself brusquely. ‘It’s female. What of it?’

Her hand upon his arm felt warmer.

She grimaced at him, then turned around and started walking, picking her way back through the brambles past her sullen companion, trusting Meoraq to follow.

And he did.

6

A
mber was never able to put into words just why she brought the lizard back to camp. When asked (and they asked, many times, for days afterwards), she was always able to come up with something plausible-sounding about how useful he might be, but that first impulse remained indefinable. She only knew that she wanted him with them.

So now he was here and
he was staring at her. And that was okay, because honestly, she was staring back at him.

She should have been prepared to see something like this. An alien, that was. From the moment she’d first seen the scaly
deer if not sooner. But there was a big difference between knowing intellectually that there were forms of animal life on this world and seeing a six-foot tall lizardman come at you out of the bushes with a knife in his hand.

Lizardman was perhaps a derogatory term. It was also the only one that fit. There was nothing wholly recognizable about his features, nothing she could point at and say with authority
that looked like a crocodile or a komodo dragon or an iguana, but lizard summed it all up nicely. It was the ‘man’ bit that bothered her.

She was pretty sure he was a
man, anyway, or at least a male. Masculinity was a stamp over the whole of his body: his lean and muscular build, the craggy scars cut into his scales, even the predatory way he had of crouching down and holding perfectly still while he stared at her—none of it was any guarantee of gender on an alien, but all of it screamed male to Amber’s eye.

So he—if he was a he—w
as a biped and essentially humanoid, with two legs and two arms and no tail. His was a gladiator’s body: a long, V-shaped chest, heavily scarred and ridiculously muscle-wrapped, that tapered into a flat stomach and narrow hips. His skin was the smooth, scaled hide of a snake rather that the rough one of an alligator, but however you looked at them, they were scales, black and shiny. But his hands had only three fingers, and they
were
fingers, not claws. His legs looked like normal legs, and although he had a habit of walking forward on the balls of his feet, they weren’t all bent backwards and bestial. He was even wearing boots.

The fact that he wore clothes had a way of wanting to boggle in Amber’s mind, as if the toughness of his scales rendered further covering superfluous and never mind the man’s modesty. He had pants stitched out of dun-brown hides with a
wide leather belt to hold it on, and a harness over his largely-naked chest that seemed to serve mostly as an anchor for his hammered metal shoulder-guards. Apart from that, and the boots, he wore only weapons: a pair of short knives strapped to his bulging biceps, a hook-shaped sword clipped to his belt so it hung over one equally-bulging thigh, one broad, highly-polished sword carried in a sheath across his back, and a leather cord around his neck from which hung yet another knife, a small one this time, with an ivory handle. It appeared to be his favorite; his hand had a way of straying there when he muttered to himself. He did a lot of that, although he didn’t look crazy when he did it.

Not that she would know crazy when she saw it on a lizard, she supposed, but she was convinced there was a quietness to his expression. Not a calm, maybe, but a quietness. And she
would be the first to admit that this was an unreasonable assumption because there was next to nothing that was readable about his face. He had two eyes aimed forward just like hers (except for being too big and for the color, which was a deep red, flecked with gold), under a heavy brow-ridge lined with pebbly scales that became a tight double-row of flexible spines that swept over the top of his skull to about halfway down his neck. His nose and mouth were combined into a dragonish snout, which was broad, lipless, and immoveable except at the corners; she could see the point of his thick, rigid tongue when he opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t figure how he was shaping his words at all. Like a parrot, he just spilled out sound, then closed his mouth again and looked at her. It was easy to imagine she saw frustration mounting in those reptilian eyes as she tried to repeat him, and eventually he quit talking at all.

He just stared at her.

“I’m telling you for the last time, that thing is not sleeping in this camp tonight,” Scott announced.

The lizard’s eyes shifted to him.

“Good,” said Amber. “If it’s the last time, maybe now you’ll shut up about it.”

The lizard’s eyes came back to her.

“Miss Bierce—”

Back to
Scott.

“—that thing is carrying a dozen weapons. It’s dangerous.”

“Wow,” drawled Amber. “Good eye, Commander. I can only count five myself. Where are the rest?”

The lizard’s eyes stayed on
Scott. That was weird enough that she glanced around, too.

Scott
was glaring at her. She was getting that look out of him a lot these days.

“You may not care what happen
s to these people, Miss Bierce—”

The lizard reached ba
ck and pulled that long, shiny sword out of his back-sheath. He didn’t do it fast, but he did it so smoothly and silently that it still looked like magic (and at the same time, he managed to make it clear that he could have done it fast if he’d wanted to).

“Here’s a thought,” said Amber. “If you’re really all that concerned about how dangerous the lizardman is, why don’t you stop antagonizing him?”

Scott walked away.

The lizard’s eyes tracked him. The
sword stayed in his hand.

Scott
came back.

“I want you both out of this camp right now,” he announced.

Amber’s eyes went automatically to her sister, seeking support or at least surprise, but Nicci didn’t protest. She didn’t even stand up. Nicci just looked back at her with that same lost and unhappy vagueness she’d pretty much worn since the crash.

And for the first time since that day, Amber had to fight—really fight—the urge to slap that vacant stare right off her.

Instead, she made herself turn back to Scott, and with all the disgust she could not unleash on her baby sister, she said, “I have a reality check for you, Everly. You are not Commander-in-Chief of the entire planet or even this miserable little piece of it. You don’t get to say who stays and who goes.”

He muttered something, flushed and glaring.

“What did you just say?” she demanded, knowing damn well she’d heard him. “Oh no. No no. If you’re so goddamned sure of yourself, you say it right out loud!”

She didn’t think he would, and for a moment or two, she could see him waver, wanting to bac
k down, find his supporters, regroup. Then, without warning, he changed his mind and stepped up.

“I said,
things have changed. And whether you like it or not, I am in charge. And while I’m in charge, you better watch your fat fucking mouth or else.”

“Hey.”
Eric stood up, his hands open and raised. “Everybody calm down.”

Scott
took a step forward.

Amber hopped up to meet him and bumped into the lizard’s back. He really could be fast when he wanted to be; he’d been behind her just a second ago. She had to move ar
ound him to see why everyone else had suddenly gone so quiet.

For the moment,
Scott’s head was still firmly attached to his neck. For the moment. The edge of the lizardman’s sword hovered motionless in the air just beyond the throbbing vein in Scott’s neck and the lizardman seemed content to leave it there. All day.

“Call him off,”
Eric said.

Amber looked around, thunderstruck, and sure enough, he was talking to her. More astounding, ev
eryone else was looking at her. “Hey, this is not my trained alligator!” she said crossly. “If he wants the sword out of his face, he needs to stop acting so fucking hostile!”

The alien punctuated this with a low, menacing hiss.

“You’re not helping,” Amber snapped. She started to take his wrist, but thought better of it and snapped her fingers a few times instead. “Hey! Meoraq!”

He looked at her. The
sword stayed where it was.

“You’re not helping,” she said again, and just said it this time. “Ease up on him. We’re all friends here. Sit down. But while I have your attention,” she went on as the lizard grudgingly lowered his arm and hunkered down again, “I would like to point out that
this is the only guy in camp who knows where the next nearest waterhole is. He might also know which plants are poisonous and which ones aren’t. Judging from his outfit, there’s even a good chance he knows how to take down some of those stupid deer-things and he maybe even could help us turn a few of them into clothes of our own. This is a godsend and you’d know that if you weren’t so worried about who’s in charge!”

“She’s right,” said Dag, looking at
Scott. “If nothing else, we’re going to need to know what we’re up against, right? I mean…if there’s one, there must be more.”

“And I don’t believe for a second they’re all going to be happy to see us,” declared
Scott. “Miss Bierce can believe what she wants—as loudly as she wants—but that doesn’t change the fact that, historically speaking, natives don’t take it too well when strangers show up.”