The Last Hour of Gann (48 page)

His hunt that night turned up no meat, but plenty of good wild gruu. He gathered up an armload and took it back to soften in the coals, and once he’d taught the humans how to get it out of its leathery peel, they seemed to find the taste agreeable enough to squabble over.
They ate like animals, barking and chuffing through mouthfuls of food, reaching across one another, picking at their teeth with the flimsy claw-like protrusions that tipped their fingers. From what he could see, they didn’t even wash their hands—not before falling on their meal and not afterwards. He left them to fight over the peels and made a lengthy patrol, stopping once to fill his flasks and bathe at a small ground-spring, and once again at a stony ridge to watch the sun set through the clouds and pray.

He did not return to camp until well after dark and he returned troubled
. He had heard the calls of tachuqis behind the wind and seen the blood-stained and trampled grass that marked the site of one of their recent kills. He could only hope it was recent enough that they would not be actively hunting tonight, because a pack of ungainly, unarmed humans would be a damned easy hunt indeed and Meoraq needed to sleep.

Most of the humans were huddled around the fire he had set for them—at least they hadn’t let it go out this time—and the rest had bedded down already. A few nodded to him, their bobbing heads an unpleasant reminder of the tachuqis who were perhaps nearby, and
Scott rather grudgingly raised his hand in some sort of human salute, but that was all. His time with them had taught him well not to expect better tribute than that.

“And why should they
pay it?” he muttered, unbinding his tent and assembling the first of his poles. “Who am I but the man who protects and provides for them in their most desperate days? Lazy, useless, machine-worshipping pests.” Meoraq snorted, sending a scathing glance back over his shoulder, only to find Amber almost immediately behind him.

“Hey,” she said
and offered him a somewhat mangled-looking hunk of gruu.

He looked at it, then at the starved and ha
lf-chilled human who had saved it out for him. The hand of Sheul was heavy upon his shoulder. He grunted and began to put another pole together. “Eat it.”

Her hand slowly lowered, melting out of the air like the grimace melting off her malleable face. She turned around.

Damn it.

“Sit down.” Meoraq
kicked the rumpled roll of his tent into a kind of mat and took his own offer, indicating a place beside him and realizing only afterwards that he’d done it with the back of his hand—an intimate gesture—and not the two-finger point that would have been proper for a Sheulek dealing with subordinates, civilians, cattle, and surely humans.

She hesitated, frowning over her shoulder at him.

He said it again, speaking slowly in case it was his language and not his complete lack of tact that held her at bay, gruffly adding, “Eat with me.”

“You don’t have anything.”

He grunted and dug into his pack for his cuuvash, showing it to her before snapping off a square and putting it away again.

She sat down.
The tent was still folded and not quite long enough to accommodate them both, especially as he’d dropped himself in the middle of it. Her shoulder bumped his as she settled; he heard the faint slap of her hair on his scales whenever the wind caught it; he felt the warmth emanating from her body all along his side. He thought he should probably move over and give her more room. He didn’t.

“See anything out there tonight?” she asked.

“There is always something to see.” He tore off the first bite of cuuvash and softened it, watching her jaws work as she ate her roasted root. The thought that he had provided the gruu that fed her did not annoy him the way it did to think of feeding the other humans. Instead, it made him wish he’d brought more. He brooded on this, his spines low, while he ate.

“I heard some weird sounds,” said Amber.

He grunted, inviting elaboration.

“A kind of…ooo-
wah
ooo-
wah
!”

He was more fascinated by the cupping of her hands around her mouth than the noise she made by doing so. It took a moment or two to regain focus, another moment to make sense of the clumsy human sounds, and yet another few moments to think about what it meant. “When was this?”

She hesitated again, then took an obvious guess at his meaning. “Not right here, but pretty close. I went out to look, but I didn’t see anything.”

“Not where—” he began, and stopped to frown at her. “You went out to look? Alone?”

She only looked at him.

He p
oked her. “You,” he said and made walking fingers. “Went out.” He moved that hand away from his body. “Alone.” And glared at her. “Against my command.”

Her brows dropped in an infuriating human scowl. “I had my spear!”

“Would you like to be burned with it, you senseless little calf?”

“Would I
what?”

“You stay here!” he told her, thumping t
wo fingers down (on his tent, but he would not notice this until later). “You do not leave the sight of this camp for any reason and you do not go even one pace away alone! Swear it to me!”

She frowned, but it was not incomprehension that made her do so
, only stubborn human defiance. “Why?”

“Because I said so!” he snapped.

“I can take care of myself.”

H
is spines slapped flat. He stood. “Get up.”

She took that for an order to leave him and started angrily away, so that he was forced to catch her arm and pull her bodily back to him. He turned her around, held her firmly until she stopped trying to shake him off, then released her and said, “I am a tachuqi. A lone tachuqi. One only man-height, with no beak or talons, ha! I am just such a lamed and feeble enemy and you have come this close to me. Take up your spear.”

She looked around, as if thinking it would present itself, then closed her hands hesitantly around empty air and bent her knees in a clumsy warrior’s stance. She eyed him with suspicion and uncertainty in equal parts and then lunged for him.

He kicked as a tachuqi kicks, leaping up and driving his leg outward, even sweeping his foot downward in the slashing motion that would disembowel if he had the beast’s killing talon. She tried to dodge—she also finished her lunge, stabbing her imaginary spear into his side as her dying act in a move that he knew his training masters would roar with delight to see
even as they beat her for her suicidal stupidity—but his boot caught her fully on the chest and knocked her hard to the ground. He bent, his hand hooked to make a tachuqi beak, and gripped her firmly by the throat. “You are dead,” he told her. “Get up.”

She did, but wary now. Her hands flexed upon a new nonexistent spear. She braced herself, mud on her chest in the shape of his boot-print, and lunged again.

He leapt back as a tachuqi leaps, arms spread in imitation of their defensive posture, and kicked her in the back as she went by. She staggered, swinging as she fell so that her spear again found its target, and ended on the ground with his hand on her throat. “You are dead,” he said again, letting go. “Get up.”

She did, breathing hard—too hard, she was too new to this, too underfed, too small and weak, too human—as she pulled a spear from the air and readied it against him.

This time, she charged, dropping to her knees and stabbing upwards in a move that was, however ultimately futile, worthy of an admiring grunt as he, the tachuqi, darted nimbly aside and tore out the back of her neck in a single bite. “You are dead,” he told her, pinning her face briefly against the ground. “Get up.”

She didn’t, not right away, but when she finally got her arms up and her feet under her, she was arming herself invisibly yet again.

“Survival in the wildlands is not a matter of persistence,” he said, ignoring her to sit down again on his mat. “Only knowledge, strength and skill. You have none of these things. Stay within your camp, human. I am with you and Sheul’s eye is upon us both.” He picked up his cuuvash and broke off another bite, pretending not to watch her.

She glared at him, weaving slightly on her feet with her empty hands still locked around an invisible spear. She was tired enough, bruised enough, muddied enough, that he thought she might give in despite the look in her eyes.

But this was Amber.

She dove at him.

He was not a tachuqi any longer. He caught her up upon the heel of his hand, her feet flying out before her with the force of her aborted momentum, and down she went upon her back much more gently than she would have gone were he an honest enemy. He held her there, waiting as she gasped herself calm, aware that every human in the camp was awake and watching them. A little water collected at the corner of one eye, just one, and it did not replenish itself once it fell. She did not cry surrender.

Meoraq moved his hand from her breastbone to her elbow and helped her to sit up. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, but she took a piece of cuuvash when he offered it and put it in her mouth. She chewed, staring fixedly at the ground.

Gradually, the other humans settled themselves, although some continued to watch them. Scott was one of these. Nicci, he noticed, was not.

“Can you teach me that?” Amber asked at last, still avoiding his eye.

Meoraq snorted. “Yes. Come to me as soon as you can present the signet of your father’s House, proving you are a son born to the warrior’s caste and we shall begin the seventeen years of training. Don’t talk at me like an idiot. We don’t have time to waste in foolishness.”

Her mouthparts pressed together into a flat, pale line. Her lower jaw trembled.

He waited until he was certain she had accepted her defeat and then said, firmly, “You will stay in sight of this camp always. You will not go even one step beyond its borders alone. Give me your obedience.”

She looked up and directly at him with eyes that were too bright and too green. “No.”

He stared at her, knowing his spines were fully extended and surprise etched in every scale of him for all the world to see. “What did you just say?”

“I said, no.”

“You did not!” he said inanely.

“Want to hear it again, lizardman? No.
And you don’t get to argue with me about it.”

“
You
forbid
me
?” That was a killing offense, and yet he was not in the least angry. Stunned, yes, but the first emotion that bled in when shock finally faded was still not anger, only amusement. “If you have something else to say before I bind and muzzle you, I suggest you come to it quickly.”

“
That’s exactly what you’re going to have to do,” she told him. “Look, you’re already sick to death of us. You aren’t going to stick around one minute longer than you have to. When we get to wherever it is you’re taking us, you’ll leave.”

He opened his mouth to tell her this was not necessarily so, but closed it again with that unspoken because the alternatives so obviously included killing them and he would rather not have that possibility between them just yet. And it would be a lie in any event to say that leaving the humans behind was not a pleasant thought. She surely knew it and he would not insult her by pretending otherwise.

“Life sure as hell isn’t going to get easier,” she was saying. “Right now, the only thing standing between us and a horrible death is you. And you’re leaving. So, no. No, I am not going to stand around all damn day waiting for you to come home in one of your pissy moods because you’re doing it all yourself. If you don’t want me with you, that’s fine, I’ll figure things out by myself, but you don’t get to tell me to stay home and just…just wait to die.”

And she’d done it again. She forbade him to give her orders. Unbelievable.

“I am tending to you, human,” he said, trying very hard to
sound reasonable. “It is not an easy task and requires my full attention. Do you think you can just stride out into the wildlands at my side and be anything
but
a hindrance? Your intentions may be good, but I can’t afford to indulge them and if you truly believe it is not an indulgence, that only proves you don’t understand how desperate your circumstances are.”

“
I think you’re the one who isn’t getting it, lizardman.” She paused and raked a hand through the mess of her hair, snagging all four fingers before she had even reached her ear. She swore, disentangling herself, but the distraction quieted her some. “Listen,” she said, frowning. “Just listen, okay?”

Meoraq rubbed his brow-ridges and gestured for her to speak.

But she didn’t, not right away. She searched his face, her human mouth opening and closing, and finally she said, “There were these stray cats that lived under the building where I lived, and the lady three doors down would feed them, you know?”

Meoraq leaned back with a frown.
What was she saying now? Was the argument over? Had he won or lost?

“
The super kept threatening to evict her for it, so what would happen is, she’d sneak out in the middle of the night every few days and dump this bag of food out on the ground, and if you looked out the window, you could see them all together and purring as they shared it. It must have made her feel real good, like she was saving them.” She paused to frown at him uncertainly. “Are you…Are you getting any of this?”