The Last Hour of Gann (44 page)

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded, thrusting the object he had collected on his solitary walk—a plain stone, charred along one side—out before him.

Scott looked at it. So did Amber, although she had to come around the side of him to see.

“What did he say?”
Scott asked in a tight, impatient way.

“He…wants to know what that is.”

Scott looked at her. She rolled her shoulders and shook her head. He frowned.

Meoraq waited.

“It’s a rock,” said Scott.

“And do you know where I got it?” Meoraq inquired.

Amber asked.

Scott
’s brows puckered. “How the hell should I…? This better be what he’s really saying, Bierce, because if you’re just trying to make me look stupid—”

“You d
on’t need my help to look stupid.”

Meora
q gave the rock a terse shake. “Answer!”

Amber rolled her shoulders again, adding,
“I hope to God you don’t want us to walk back and look because I’m done in, lizardman.”

“I took it from your fire-pit!” Meoraq bellowed, so suddenly that both of them—and quite a few of those around them—jumped.
“We have been walking all day and for what? We are still in easy distance of your first camp’s fires! I could walk further on two broken legs!”

“What’s he saying?”
Scott asked.

Amber ignored him, beginning to scowl up at Meoraq in her fearless, senseless way.
“Hey, I think we’re doing pretty goddamn good here!”

“We have not gone half a span, human! Not even half
of half! Do you know what a day’s shamefully idle distance is for me?”

“Do I care?”

“Five!”

She looked at him, then down at herself, and up at him again. “Look at me!” she said angrily. “Do I look like I can go
any further than I did today? Do any of us?”

“I could,” said a human.

“Shut the fuck up, Crandall!”

“Well, I could. Hey, realistically, we did, what?
Two miles?”

“It had to be more than that,” said
Scott, looking alarmed.

“Uphill, loose terrain, bad weather, and of course,
lugging the heavy stuff. It took us forever to get going and every time we took a break, we’d end up sitting around like two hours. I wasn’t going to say anything,” he added, rolling his shoulders. “I mean, I realize you guys aren’t soldiers.”

“But we could have done
a lot better,” Eric said quietly.

“Well, you just tell him we need this
equipment,” said Scott, turning back to Amber. “And while you’re at it, you might find a nice way of suggesting that he pull the stick out of his scaly ass or someone just might have to kick it for him.”

“H
ow many times do I have to tell you? He understands English just fine!”

Scott
frowned at her, then looked at Meoraq.

Meoraq slapped him.

“And we’re not slowing you up for the fun of it,” Amber told him as Scott staggered back. “This stuff is heavy.”

“Then leave it behind! I have never seen you so much as open those crates
! How can they be so essential?”

“What is he saying now?” asked
Scott, cradling his jaw just as though Meoraq had broken it.

“He wants to know if what we’re dragging around is important,” said Amber.

“What we’re dragging around is none of his business. His only job is to act as our guide.”

“No, human,” said Meoraq, darkly amused by the man’s
audacity in spite of himself. “My only true task is to serve Sheul as his Sword and his Striding Foot, and in that pursuit, I am given all liberty. All, S’kot. To defy me is to defy Him, and the cost of that defiance is death.”

Scott
continued to glare, although his brows creased above his snapping eyes with a human expression of confusion. “What did he call me?”

“He didn’t call you anything,” Amber replied. “He just said he doesn’t work for you. And…something about God, I’m not sure what. And I think that bit at the end was him telling you to quit arguing with him.”

“I’m not arguing with him! He’s arguing with me! Look, Meoraq,” he said, turning briskly to face him even as he edged out of easy striking reach. “I can appreciate your concern and I share it. If it was within my power to expedite our progress, I would.”

“You could carry something,” Amber remarked in a dry tone.

“Your input is not requested, Miss Bierce,” said Scott without looking at her. “If you can’t act as an interpreter without inserting your uninformed opinions, I will end this discussion right now.”

She opened her mouth.

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warning and squeezed it. Miraculously, she silenced herself, even if she had to roll her eyes first. “I am prepared to hear you, human,” he told Scott. “But so far, I have heard only your insolence and a lot of human whining. I will not carry you all the way to Xi’Matezh!”

“It isn’t his decision, Miss Bierce!”
Scott said loudly once Amber had repeated this in their own rumbling tongue. “It’s mine! And you can tell him that we aren’t going to be walking forever! Someday, we’re going to have to make a permanent home with a permanent infrastructure! These things are essential to our ultimate goal and, regardless of how he thinks this inconveniences him in the short-term, we’re keeping them!”

Meoraq cocked his head. “He has a tendency to use longer and st
ranger words when he thinks he’s losing an argument, have you noticed?”

“Oh boy, have I noticed.”

“Don’t talk to him!” Scott snapped, glaring from one to the other of them, his face coloring up high in the cheek. “You’re just the translator!”

Meoraq ackn
owledged this with a grunt and did his best to address Scot without sarcasm. “If the things you insist on carrying are vital to your settlement, I will allow you to hold them for now, but the weather
is
turning and I will
not
be caught by it.”

“
How bad is it going to get?” Amber asked, frowning.

“If this day is anything to measure by, the mountains will be hip-high in ice before we come to cross them,” he told her,
then gave her a hard rap on the brow with one knuckle. “Speak my words. And tell him that he must prove these things to be truly needful before I allow them to anchor us further.”

“It’s all necessary!”
Scott barked before she had hardly begun to obey. “Every single item is absolutely imperative to our survival in the new colony—”

“Oh Christ, not this again,” sighed Amber, rubbing at her eyes.

“—except you!” Scott finished, rounding on her.

“I’
m the translator,” she told him. “And the translator would like to know what fantasy you’re living in where half a filter pump and fifteen bags of concrete is useful.”

Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder in warnin
g. “My words, human. Give this fool my words now and have your own arguments later.”

“What did he just call me?”
Scott demanded. “Did he just call me an idiot?”

“Oh, that you understand, eh? Then understand this.” Meoraq moved Amber aside and pointed at
Scott with the whole of his hand in undisguised contempt. “I do not ask your will. I declare mine. Open the crates and I will judge them for myself.”

Scott
looked at Amber.

“He wants to see what we’re carrying,” she said.

Scott’s face filled with color. “No!”

Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. He folded his arms, lay his first fingers along the hilts of h
is sabks, and calmly said, “I would be very clear, human. Do you answer her or are you defying me?”

“It would be pointless!”
Scott insisted, backing away. “He couldn’t possibly understand anything we showed him!”

Meoraq drew his
samr and looked at Amber. “Did he just call me a fool?”

“Oh come on!”
Scott was now retreating rapidly, trying to shield himself among his people except that they kept moving out of his way. “Look at him! How am I supposed to explain a solar generator to a…a…”

“
Lizard
?” Meoraq hissed, advancing.

Scott
bumped his back end into a crate and scuttled around it at once. “It’s highly sophisticated technology and you…that is, your species…You’re not very advanced!”

“So now we are
all
fools!”

“Meoraq.”

He looked back at Amber, catching at Scott’s clothing to keep him close. His samr remained in his hand, raised and ready to use. He grunted an inquiry, but kept his spines flat, a silent warning that he was not of a mood to entertain foolishness.

“I know this is going to be hard to believe,” she said, “but he’s not insulting you on purpose. We really do have stuff in there that…that you probably won’t understand.”

He eyed her while the human in his grip held very still, and at last, not without some reluctance, the truth she spoke found resonance in him. He was not Sheul, after all. It was not for Uyane Meoraq, born of clay, to know the infinite workings of the world and all things in it. So it may well be that the land which had vomited out such creatures as these humans had also allowed for the making of many equally unknowable things.

Meoraq raised his spines with some effort. He let go of
Scott’s shirt-front. He prepared himself to abide by another’s judgment and gestured roughly at the crates around him with his samr. “Do you say these things are necessary then?”

“Yes,” said
Scott.

Meoraq turned all the
way around and stared at him until Scott backed away, tugging at his clothing and turning various shades of red. Meoraq looked at Amber again. “We have a long way to go and the weather has already begun to turn. We will never make the crossing into Gedai at a quarter-span’s travel each day. You must understand this. If the things you carry are indeed so vital as this cattle’s ass insists, you will have them, but if they are not, you must give them up. I will carry tools, human. I will carry shelters. I will carry any instrument of your profession that will help to settle you at our journey’s end. I will not carry sentiment.”

She sighed and rubbed at her face.

“What’s he saying?” Scott pressed.

She looked at him and then rubbed her face some more. “
Scott, we have to leave some of this stuff behind.”

“Out of the question!”
Scott turned an extremely unwise sneer on Meoraq. “This discussion is over!”

“Is it now?” he hissed, raising his samr.

“I don’t want to fight,” said Amber. “I’ve been hauling a sixty-pound bag of frigging concrete around just so I wouldn’t start a fight, but for God’s sake, enough is enough. Maybe it used to be the cutting edge of colonizing technology once upon a time, but it’s all junk now, Scott! The only really useful things are the crates themselves and only if we empty them out and use them as shelters!”

“I don’t k
now whether you’re really this stupid or just short-sighted, but in either case, if you can’t see the big picture, it is not my job to draw you a new one, Miss Bierce. I’m done talking to you,” Scott declared, turning around. “Both of you.”

Meoraq had been right on the verge of sheathing his samr until he heard that. And although he managed not to run the pompous little piss-licker through the middle when he did hear it, he had reached the end of his patience with these negotiations. He stormed over to the nearest of the crates, jammed his samr into the topmost seam, and pried the thing open to look for himself.

He didn’t know what he expected to see. A Sheulek did not involve himself in the menial task of guarding those infrequent caravans that traveled between the cities and he had not the smallest notion of what was involved when households moved themselves. He supposed he had anticipated furniture—Scott’s furniture, no doubt, which he would recognize by its overwrought and garish making—and he had even the sour tickle of a notion that he might find rich food or wine or something of that sort too luxurious to share out with the likes of those who served him. It might have been works of art or chests filled with official robes or coffers of coin or anything at all.

Anything but this.

Meoraq ripped his samr free and leapt clear of the thing in the crate. It did not move. The light of the fading day gleamed dully off its metal hide, showing him a square body, armless, faceless, motionless.

“Meoraq, it’s okay,” Amber said.

He swung on her, pointing back at the crate with an arm that actually shook. “You knew about this?” he demanded. “
You
?”

She wrinkled her soft brows at him.

“Where did you…” His samr trembled again. He shook his head to clear it and aimed his blade with force at Scott instead. “Where did you get this?”