The Last Hour of Gann (42 page)

“What delay?” asked
Scott.

Meoraq drew back. “Is he serious?” he asked dangerously.

“Yes,” she sighed. “Look, Scott, he wanted us on the road first thing this morning. First thing. Like, the sun comes up and we get going.”

Scot heard this without apparent concern, certainly without apology.
“Well if that’s what he wanted, he should have been ready.”

“What in Gann’s grey hell does he mean by that?” Meoraq demanded.

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?” she asked Scott. “He’s been ready for hours. His teepee’s packed. He’s got his good, um, belts on. Or whatever he’s wearing…Are those suspenders?”

“This is a travel harness!” Meoraq snapped, clutching at one of its buckles. “And it’s a damned expensive one! I would have to sell three of you as cattle t
o make the cost of this harness and I can hardly see the sin of that since you have made no effort to obey me as men must do! Get your damned humans on their feet and make them ready!”

“And what was that?”
Scott asked after a wary moment.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s a safe bet that it’s got something to do with all this standing around.”

“Fine.” Scott turned boldly away from Meoraq and addressed Amber alone, folding his arms as though he wore a pair of blades upon them. “Tell him that if he wanted us to start early, he should have had our food ready on time.”

“I should have what?” Meoraq hissed.

“Are you high?” Amber asked, and while it was impossible to read either her malleable face or her tone, both were clearly touched by some sort of emotion. “He’s not running a hotel here, he doesn’t owe you a continental breakfast!”

“He does if he wants us to follow him anywhere. I like this camp exactly where it is, Miss Bierce. We have the high ground here, we’re in easy reach of water, we have the herds—”

“This is not your decision, human!” Meoraq snapped. He could feel his throat warming in pulses. His color was coming in. He made an effort to take deep breaths.

“What herds?” Amber asked. “The saoqs are hours away these days and you have no guarantee that they’re coming back.”

“Deer don’t migrate, Miss Bierce.”

“These aren’t deer, you dumb dick!
Stop acting like this is Earth!”

Meoraq terminated her further words with a silencing grip on he
r shoulder. “Enough. Speak my words, human. Do not speak for me. I am Sheulek.”

She shut her mouth and waited, glaring at
Scott who made a point of gazing loftily back at all his lounging people as he said, “If you want to go, go. No one’s stopping you. But you are going to have to give me some incentive before I uproot these people a second time. We have everything we need right here in
my
camp. I’m not leaving just because you say so.”

“So be it,” said Meoraq, once he was himself quite calm. “Sheul has put you in my path and until I know the reason, I accept that I must care for you. So
I will make a hunt for you. But if you want to share in it, you will have to be at
my
camp.”

Amber relayed this, more or less, while Meoraq stood behind her and punctuated the words with hisses where necessary. “Now here’s a little something from me,” she said at the end of it. “In all this time, you haven’t done a goddamn thing except hold meetings and tell us everything is going to be okay. When Meoraq walks away, you don’t get to say that anymore. Instead, you get to tell them to pick up a spear and figure out how to use it before they starve to death. You think anyone is going to care how far they have to walk as long as they don’t have to do that?”

Scott said nothing. His face had turned a deep purplish-red color, like shadesweet fruits left too long on the vine and gone to poison. “I’ll think about it.”

“Think as long as you like
,” Meoraq told him and turned to Amber, “Gather your things and whichever of your people—”

“You do and you’re out of here
!” Scott shouted, grabbing at Amber’s shirt. “Don’t you dare say one word to anyone, Bierce! This is my camp! Mine!”

Meoraq had never lost his temper so entirely
or so quickly in all his life. Shoving Amber aside, he seized Scott by his soft, pink throat and lifted him right off the ground. “No one interrupts a Sword of Sheul!” he bellowed. “Not abbots, not judges, not governors, and not you, you freakish little gutter-bastard! Give me your obedience or I’ll send you back to the clay that shat you out!”

Scott
strangled and battered futilely at Meoraq’s arm.

“Obedience, I say! Show me your fucking fist! Tell him—” he roared, turning, but Amber was nowhere to be found. Meoraq blinked, breathing hard, looking left and right and finally down, where Amber sprawled across the wet ground, clapping one hand to her head and staring dazedly at the sky. Blood, red as those shadesweet fruits in their fullest, d
appled her fingers and streaked her hair.

And his first thought, unwelcome as a cold draft blowing across a dark and empty room, was not that she was injured, but only that she was a woman lying at his feet upon her back. He saw that and somehow forgot his anger even as it continued to throb in his throat, just as he forgot the human gasping for air at the end of his fist.

But thankfully, that moment ended.

Meoraq turned all the way to her and let
Scott go. He didn’t mean to throw him, but he wasn’t careful either, and Scott crashed into a wooden crate and slid gasping to the ground. Meoraq was on one knee in the next instant, chasing her hand away to probe through the springy, matted mass of her hair.

The damage he found was little more than a scra
pe, neither deep nor wide. It bled, as head wounds were apt to do, but Amber did not give any kind of cry when he nudged at it. She pulled irritably out of his reach instead, saying, “I’m fine, damn it! You pushed me in the mud, not off a cliff! Christ, these pants were clean just, uh…I guess it was a week ago, but still! Damn it, Meoraq!”

“You’
re bleeding.”

“I’m what?” She noticed the re
d smears on her fingertips and stared at them without comprehension, then touched at her head and studied the fresh daubs of blood she took away. “I didn’t hit a rock or anything,” she said, seeming puzzled but only a little troubled. “It must have been you.”

He drew back, his spines flaring forward.

“You have rough hands,” she told him. “Your…you know, your scales.”

He stared at her
for a long time before slowly looking down at the faint sign of her blood, like red frost, on the side of his hand.

“There he goes,” said Amber, climbing to her feet. She was watching
Scott, who had already retreated across the whole of the camp to gather his lieutenants and hiss at them. “It doesn’t look like he’s telling people to pack up and get ready, either.”

“I do not care
,” said Meoraq distantly. He clenched his hand to a fist and opened it again, watching the blood shine where it was still wet and crack where it had already dried. “If it is to be Sheul’s lesson that I learn to herd cattle, so be it. I shall tether them up in a line and whip their flanks, but they will walk, by Gann.”

He heard a dry, fleshy, smacking sound. Amber had clapped both hands to her face and was holding them there. “You can’t talk to them like that,” she said, sighing in the same breath that she spoke, which was a clever human trick.

“Of course I can. I am Sheulek.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I am owed all obedience.”

She
sighed again. “Listen. This is…This is a social situation, okay?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means…You have to make friends with these people.”

“Eh?”

“Friends.” She cast about with her eyes, then shrugged her arms out in futility. “Friends, you know? You need them to
like
you.”

She said it,
as she said most things, with sincerity even though he knew it for a lie. Friendship could be pleasant, but it could also be a dangerous distraction. A boy born under the sign of the Blade did not play with the other boys of his caste, but competed against them, brawled with them, beat and were beaten by them. The masters at Tilev allowed no leisure hours in company, only study, meals and sleep, where every stolen whisper risked a slap across the snout. The brunts at least had some leeway to chat amongst themselves, but were set against each other so often and so brutally as part of their training that even then attachments were few. After his ascension, his duties as a Sheulek kept him moving from city to city, and what company he might share with a man like Nkosa was kept brief. A Sword of Sheul must always be honed and ready to strike, and personal feelings could only complicate things.

“Do you like any of these people?” he asked, gesturing toward the camp where a few humans were
reluctantly gathering up their gear.

She dropped her eyes
as if it were a reprimand before glancing shamefacedly at her people. “I should.”

“Why?”

“Because…Christ, I don’t know.” She covered her face again, baring her teeth as if she wanted to bite something. “Okay, so I’m a horrible hypocrite and the last person who should be trying to explain this to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less true. People need people.” She grimaced even as she said it, not in a smiling way. “What would you do if Scott convinced them you were some kind of…of raging, man-eating, bloodthirsty lizardman?”

“Kill him,” Meoraq said with a snort.

She stared at him for a moment before asking, in some exasperation, “Wouldn’t that just prove him right?”

“I might as well, since he’s already convinced them
in your scenario. At least he wouldn’t be around to gloat afterwards.” He watched Scott as he moved among his people, touching them, bobbing his head, speaking lengthy and serious words, and motioning quite often back at Meoraq with the whole of his Gann-damned hand. He found himself toying idly with the thought of killing the man, then more than idly, and then he let it go and looked at Amber instead. She was also watching Scott. The blood in her hair had dried, forming a short series of stiff, brown spines, which stuck straight up as if she were in a state of great surprise, comically at odds with the solemn expression on her face. He looked back at Scott and said, “I did not intend to strike you.”

“
Yeah, I know. I’m fine.”

He grunted,
then pointed brusquely out at Scott (with the whole of his own hand, ha). “How long is this likely to take?”

“I don’t know. Longer than it has to, I’m pretty sure.”

“Are you prepared to travel?”

“Me?” She looked around at the crates where she had left her pack and her Nicci.
“Yeah, I’m good to go.”

“
Then let’s see if we can hurry them along.” He shrugged his own pack higher on his back in a meaningful way and started walking. A great outcry rose up from those humans who noticed, and it had not fully settled before Amber was hurrying to collect not only her pack and her pet human, but one of the heavy, sealed sacks her people usually used to sit upon. Its weight gave her obvious difficulty, but she heaved it up and managed a loping run back to his side. Soon all the humans were finally scraping themselves together, shouting out for him to stop, to wait, to give them a damned minute, just as if he had not given them all morning.

Meoraq listened, at once annoyed and grimly pleased with the commotion he had caused, and unthinkingly gave Amber a two-knuckle tap to the
shoulder in a far more intimate welcome than he ever should have given one of her kind, much less a woman of any kind. Luckily, she took it for a command, looking back over that shoulder in a puzzled way at the humans who were struggling to follow in his wake.

“Yeah, they’re coming,” she said. And looked up at him with half a smile, half a frown. “
But I don’t think you made any friends.”

“In the Book of First Hours, it is written, ‘If every hand of every man reached out to you in friendship, so it would yet remain they reached from Gann. A true son of Sheul is never tempted, but seeks always to clasp the one hand that reaches down from heaven.”

“I got…practically none of that.”

“It means I am Sheulek,” he replied, patting her companionably but safely on the unfeeling swell of her pa
ck. “And I don’t need friends.”

* * *

Which was just as well, since he made none that day.

Meoraq knew it was no easy thing he asked of them. He had waded through the hip-deep bog of reeking water that the lowlands became in the rainy season, crossed the middle plains under the sweltering wet heat of summertime, and climbed the highland steppes when the icestorms raged so violently that his clothes were frozen to his body. He had walked both by day and by dark of night, upon whole roads and fallen roads and no roads at all, and he had done all these things with no company apart from the ravening beasts of the wild and the equally ravening men who had gone to Gann. He had suffered and survived the consequences of his ignorance, recklessness and, yes, outright stupidity, and knowing the humans were strangers to this land and its hardships, he was resolved to forgive much.