The Last Hour of Gann (41 page)

Meoraq
released Scott with a shove and turned around. He went back to his place at the fire and crouched down. He picked up a stick and stirred coals.

Scott
looked at Amber, wild-eyed and shock-white everywhere that Meoraq hadn’t slapped him purple, his clothes still bunched up around his neck. His mouth worked a few times, but his eyes kept cutting at Meoraq. Finally, he spat, “You just remember to watch
your
mouth, Bierce,” then spun around, grabbing at Eric and Crandall, and staggered away.

Amber sat down and
waited while people cleared rapidly away. She could hear Scott across the camp, loudly holding court, but she couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. She didn’t have to. She could guess.

Meoraq was watching her. After a while, she looked back at him.

He pointed at her and said something stern about never speaking for him again. He was a…foot?…and when he wanted something said, he’d say it.

She started to get up (
but not in a huff she could be pissed off without going off in a huff like a stupid girl
), but he caught her shoulder and shoved her back down. He said something she was too angry to catch, squeezed her shoulder extra-hard, then let go of her to pat her once on the head. He told her he didn’t need…something. Defending? But that he acknowledged her obedience and he forgave her for wandering off.

Forgave
her. Like she’d done something wrong. Big scaly son of a bitch.

“I’m sorry,” she
muttered, looking back at the fire.

“Eh?”

“For calling you a lizard all those times. I guess it is pretty rude.”

He snorted, then tapped at her knee with his knuckles. He told her he knew she didn’t mean it as an insult.

“Sometimes I do,” she admitted. “Let me ask you something. Honestly.”

He rolled his hand through the air in a bring-it-on gesture that translated perfectly.

“Is there any point to this? To you and me, I mean. Talking. I don’t know.” She rubbed at her face. “It doesn’t feel like anything’s changing. Unless it’s getting worse. I don’t mean just me and Scott, although God knows that’s about as bad as it can get.”

Meoraq grunted in what she was coming to think of as his affirming way
. His stare was unnervingly direct.

‘He’s getting this,’ she found herself thinking. ‘And if he’s not getting every word, it’s at least nine out of every ten.’

“Is it just me?” she asked, and immediately wished she sounded more frustrated and less…whiny. “I always thought I was pretty good at coping with things, but I’ve got to tell you, Meoraq, I suck at this marooned-on-an-alien-planet crap.”

His
hand rolled again, inviting examples.

“We have to start working together. We have to
start planning for our future, you know? Otherwise, he’s right, all we’re doing is killing time while we wait to die. And I realize that I could maybe be better…”

She gave him a chance to comment, but he merely looked at her, wonderfully inexpressive as only a lizard could be.

“But damn it,” she sighed, combing restlessly at her hair, “if the future means getting along with that son of a bitch, I’d almost rather see it all end here.”

His head cocked the other way. He leaned forward, the tip of his snout
in kissing distance of her face. He spoke. You blah blah blah, something about God…blah blah and stop whining.

“
Easy for you to say. If Scott gets bitchy at you, you can slap him around and leave. I have to live with these people!”

Meoraq
scowled and scratched at the side of his snout. After a moment, he asked what kind of help she wanted.

“Oh hell, I don’t know.” She rubbed at another chunk of headache. “But I feel like I’m the only one who’s actually trying to find a way to live here! And everyone else is trying to find a way to live back on Earth.
I want to go home too! I want clean sheets and a cheeseburger and a hot shower and everything else they want, but it’s not happening! We have to be here! We have to kill things if we’re going to eat and pick grass out of the water we drink! We don’t get soap and we don’t get toilet paper and if we can’t figure out what we
do
get in one hell of a hurry, we’re all going to die here!”

He looked briefly heavenward and then rubbed at the bony ridges over his eyes. He muttered something about his God sending him to them.

“Yeah, and I can see you’re thrilled to be a part of that—”

He snorted.

“—but I’m glad you’re here, because we’re all going to die without you.” That sounded a lot more true than she liked. She tried to hide it with a smile, but it wouldn’t stick. “Everything is so hard. I’m tired. I can’t…do this forever.”

He stood up, saying something she mostly understood without guessing: “Things will get easier when we can speak more freely.”

“Easier is a relative term, lizardman.”

“Truth,” he agreed in lizardish. “But then, life is in the journey. If you cannot have an easy journey, have an interesting story.”

“That needs to be a fortune cookie,” said Amber. “I don’t know how my story can possibly be more interesting than it already is without…well, I was going to say alien invasion or a giant lizard, but we appear to have those bases covered.”

He grunted and gazed into the fire.

After several minutes—she had all but forgotten he was there, lost in her own relentless playback of the whole rotten day—he nudged at her arm. When she glanced his way, he was holding up that square of jerky and staring straight ahead into the fire.

She took it. “Thanks.
What is this stuff, by the way?”

“Cuuvash.”
He clasped his empty hands and watched the embers.

She repeated him, pretending not to see the way he rolled his eyes at her pronunciation,
and gnawed off a piece of the dried meat. Her jaws were still sore from the last time he’d shared this stuff, but it was still pretty good. Like jerky, only not as salty, with a richer flavor and a weird undertaste almost like cheap wine. She ate, eyeing him suspiciously. “You’re not having any.”

He
said no again, but in a different way. Not yet, maybe. Then he stirred, rubbing at his brow-ridges, and looked at her. “It’s time to go,” he told her.

An icy stone dropped into her belly. T
he jerky…the cuuvash got stuck in her throat. She swallowed hard, coughed, and managed, “You’re leaving?”

He told her yes in some complicated way, said something about the weather and something about mountains, and that he’d only waited this long so that they could learn to talk. “Tomorrow, we leave,” he said
at the end of it. It was not a question.

“We?” Part of the knot in her throat relaxed a little, but her stomach stayed tight and sickly-cold. “
You mean all of us?”

“Yes.” He sent a black glance over his shoulder and cupped the end of his snout, muttering something with
Scott’s name in it. He told her it would be a long journey.

“And an interesting story,” Amber guessed, rubbing at her stomach to
try and ease up the rest of that rock before she had to puke it out.

His gaze shifte
d to watch her hand. He frowned and looked away, feeling idly at the buckle of his belt as if mimicking her movements. “You will tell S’kot to have his humans ready to travel tomorrow.”

“
Sure, why not. And I’ll be ready, too.”

The
corners of his mouth flicked up in a smile before his usual fierce frown replaced it. He leaned toward her, aggressively close, the way he’d been before the slaps started flying. He said something about Scott and the others…no, he said, “When you are S’kot’s human, you may disobey him all you like. When you are mine, you do as I say.”

He waited, but apparently took her lengthy efforts to translate as a sign of submissive assent. He grunted again, but in a pleased way, even though his scowl stayed fixed to his face. He leaned even closer, filling her field of vision with nothing but his scowling, scaly face. “And when you are mine, if you ever leave my camp to—” Something…and probably not flattering. “—I will—” Again, she had no idea precisely what the threat was, but, “—you may never walk again,” gav
e her the gist of it. He paused and frowned a little. “Did you mark that?”

“Most of it.”

“Then I have your obedience.”

“I didn’t exactly plan to
go anywhere this morning,” she told him testily. “But I wasn’t lost. I was just hunting. And I wasn’t in trouble.”

“Human, you are not yet
out
of trouble.” But he leaned away from her and looked up at the sky. He said something she couldn’t catch in an inquiring tone, then gave her a rap to the knee with his knuckles. “God sees us both and we can both show Him improvement. Tomorrow.”

“Right.”
Amber popped the last of the cuuvash in her mouth and went to work on it, poking at the coals so the fire wouldn’t die. She woke a few flames up. They crawled along the saoq bones, releasing a great smudge of black, foul-smelling smoke directly into her eyes and then went out.

Perfect.

Amber tossed down her coal-stirring stick. “God sees us, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

He seemed puzzled by the question.
“Now and always.”

Amber
looked at the clouds. “Could you possibly make this day any worse?” she demanded.

A drop of rain hit her in the eye. Then another. And then the skies opened up and began to pour
, killing the last coals in just a few steam-hissing seconds and drenching her to the skin.

Meoraq threw back his head and roared with curiously hoarse and
chuffing laughter. His hand slapped at her back once, nearly knocking her cuuvash out of her mouth, and he got up, still grinning, and walked away into the grass. She could hear him talking to God as he went, but she couldn’t hear what he said over the rain, or for that matter, over the cries of fifty Manifestors scrambling to get out of it. Amber herself stayed stubbornly where she was, already as wet, cold and miserable as she could get, determined to wait it out and start the fire again when it was over.

“And I’m still an atheist!” she shouted, swiping water from her face.

So there.

BOOK
IV

PIONEERS

M
eoraq was a warrior and had been all his life. He had been born under the Blade, raised in the training halls of Tilev, called to serve as Sheul’s own Sword in judgment. These were the ways he knew—to cut, to grapple, to conquer—and every man who ever spoke a word in his presence spoke it with respect and by his leave.

He was Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul, who was son of Ta’sed, son of Kuuri, and forty-three names more, every man of them a Sheulek in his own time, all the way back to U
yane Xaima, who had walked with Prophet Lashraq himself. He was the veteran of better than three hundred judgments and if Sheul willed it, he would either go on to three hundred more or retire to stand as champion of Xeqor. He was a warrior. He was not a cattle-drover.

The humans said they were ready to follow him. Yes, they said this, even on the night before, when they bedded themselves down free of
sentries and of care, trusting him to keep all danger from their little camp. They said this when it pleased them to wake the following morning, most of them not only after dawn, but well after. Those with tents made no effort to strike them. Those nearest the fire were setting it alight. They all assured him they were ready and then they just sat there!

Meoraq worked his way through four humans, dragging them bodily onto their feet and setting them in a line, but when he reached for a fifth and noticed all four of his humans had drawn off into a cluster, he had to cry surrender. He bellowed it, in fact. And then he stormed off in search of Amber.

She was sitting on a crate at the edge of camp with her Nicci. Both had their packs on their laps. Amber stood when she saw him, although he noted she put her pack down, rather than shoulder the strap for travel.

“What are they waiting for?” he demande
d. “Did you not tell them dawn? Where is that chattering cattle’s ass who calls himself your abbot?”

Amber’s green eyes rolled heavenward, just as any dumaq’s eyes might do if one were entertaining thoughts best not spoken aloud to a Sheulek. “Oh
Scott!” she called in a curious, lilting way. “Meoraq would like a word with you.”

“A word? I’d like my hand upside his snout, if only he had one! Half the morning is gone! S’kot!” Meoraq grabbed Amber by the arm and dragged her with him as he
strode ahead to meet the human hesitating toward him. “I wanted these people ready to march at dawn! Where is your obedience?”

Scott
looked at Amber.

“He’s not happy about the delay
,” she said.