The Last Hour of Gann (49 page)

“I mark
enough. Go on.”

“Well, she wasn’t saving them. She was just feeding them. And eventually, she disappeared. I don’t know, maybe she died. My point is, she was gone and do you think the cats
started catching all the rats and roaches that were absolutely infesting that building? Do you think they started taking care of themselves just because they
had
to?”

Meoraq glanced over at the other humans. They looked curiously back at him as they ate the food he had provided and warmed themselves at the fire he had built.

“No, they stood outside where the old lady used to feed them and yowled all day and all night, because
that
was what they knew how to do. And when they got hungry enough and desperate enough, what they started eating was each other. Every time you looked out there, you could see them, all those cats, with their bones showing and their fur falling out and blood all over them like…like zombie-cats, still yowling and fucking…and eating. Finally the super put out some poison. He was picking up dead cats for weeks and the moral of this story is, feeding someone isn’t saving them. You want to talk to me some more about luxuries now, lizardman?”

The hand of Sheul was heavy on his shoulder.

“I need to pray about this,” he said at last.

Her glare deepened. She folded her arms like a warrior, gripping at her slender biceps where a Sheulek’s honor-knives should be. “I’ll wait.”

He grunted and closed his eyes, finding stillness with just a few breaths. ‘Sheul, O my Father, guide me, I pray,’ he began silently, but then stopped and just sat quiet. He was not ready to know Sheul’s mind just yet. His own knew too much unrest.

There was nothing in Sheul’s Word to specifically forbid a woman from carrying a spear or standing a watch. The goodly virtues of a woman—to be invisible and chaste while in her father’s House, to show her
husband meek obedience and loyalty, to be fruitful and to raise her children in the sight of Sheul—did not seem to apply to Amber’s present situation. If it dishonored her father that she was wandering the prairie in the company of so many human males, it was no concern of his. It was disgraceful behavior, perhaps, but not criminal.

You’re already sick to death of us
…
feeding someone isn’t saving them
…

He’d felt something when she said that. He felt it again now, clarified in the quiet. He didn’t like to call it hurt…an itch, perhaps. He had fantasized many times, in much detail, during each day’s walk and each evening’s patrol about the end of this interminable journey. He had imagined walking across the courtyard of Xi’Mate
zh with the humans at his back and seeing the doors that had stood fast against so many travelers open wide for him. He had imagined kneeling before the holy forge at which Prophet Lashraq and the rest of the Six had met with Sheul Himself and hearing His voice spoken aloud and perhaps, just perhaps, feeling His hand with warmth and living weight upon his shoulder, looking up and seeing the very face of God looking down at him.

Ah yes.

But afterwards? If Sheul gave him no command regarding the humans who presently plagued him, what would he do with them? He could not leave them at Xi’Matezh to desecrate that holy place. Surely God would lead him to some other place. Some secluded valley, perhaps, with a slip of a stream and a few trees. He would help them build a smokehouse and fleshing pit and then he would go and let their fate fall into their own hands.

His mind conjured the fleeting impression of Amber alone with her spear in her hand, receding as with distance.
He pushed it away, but now found himself thinking…If Sheul led him to that gentle valley, of course he would leave the humans there as Sheul willed. But if Sheul instead gave him his own will in the matter…what would he do then? With her?

Timeless stretches of unquiet passed and left him with no answers.

‘Well, it is very simple,’ he told himself abruptly. ‘Will you kill them?’

No.
Not all of them, anyway. Scott had a way of getting under his scales, but the rest of them were only minor annoyances in a large group and once they were behind him, he thought he would forget easily enough. He didn’t need to kill them to have peace.

‘Then you will
abandon them to the wilds and let them find death at the hour Sheul decides. It is not your responsibility to hold watch over all the people of the world. Besides, if they are still unable to provide for themselves after you have carried them all the way to Xi’Matezh, it can only be because they are meant to die.’

Then he would leave them to their fate, b
ut he would take Amber with him.

‘Why?’

Why not? He would not be the only one ever to take mementos home from his pilgrimage.

‘Most
people settle for bits of broken temple bricks.’

It would be as long a journey home as it was to reach the shrine and Amber made better company than a broken brick.

‘Only sometimes. She’s far more often a profound annoyance. And she’s ugly.’

He was uncomfortable with that, however true it was. Surely her flat face, furry patches, and clay-soft body would be gruesome aberrations to any dumaq, but she was human. And for a human, she was…agreeable.

‘And what will you do with your agreeable human and her agreeable pet? Because even if you convinced her to leave the rest behind—unlikely—Amber would pull the heart from her breast before she left her Nicci. Will you wander the wildlands for the rest of your days tending the two of them?’

No. With Amber, that was at least only a foolish thought. Add Nicci and it became lunacy. He would have to take up stewardship of House Uyane just to give them a place to safely stay. Even in the depths of his meditations, he could feel himself wanting to laugh at that, but before he could, the image abruptly fell on him of how it would really be to bring Amber into his House. If humans were people, then she was a woman. He would be bringing a woman into his House.
His
woman. And he, the steward of his bloodline.

‘At least until your brothers challenge you on the grounds that you have bound yourself to a monster.’

He’d best them.

‘You sound very sure.’

He
was
very sure. Even if he could be persuaded to abandon his woman and bastard children, Nduman fought with favor to his left arm ever since the judgment at Riqar and Salkith was an idiot. A well-trained idiot, but still an idiot and no match for a true Sheulek. He’d best them easily, both together if necessary, and then he’d put Nicci away in his mother’s old rooms and give her a servant or something so he wouldn’t ever have to deal with her. He could spend the rest of his life waiting to defend Xeqor and all the households of Uyane’s protection, a portrait of domesticity to do his father’s memory great honor.

‘And what will you do with Amber?’

This was disturbing for one or two short moments, and the most disturbing thing about it was the apparent ease with which his imagination was able to provide him with suggestions for how the two of them might sexually combine. Too many of his thoughts were turning in that direction lately. He accepted that for the distraction that it was, embraced it, owned it, and finally fought it down to a place where it could be ignored. Sex was not the issue. Amber was, in herself, not the issue. What was to come of the humans once he was away from them was not the issue, although it was bordering. The issue was and remained whether it was permissible or wise to set a human female at watch while he slept.

But he found he trusted Amber.

‘You don’t trust her, you just want to fuck her,’ he told himself cruelly, but the thought, although unsettling, did not sound like truth. Amber was weak and she was ignorant. She would not know every danger if she saw it. But if she did know it, by Sheul, she would defend him.

Meoraq opened his eyes on Amb
er, watching him with predictable exasperation and impatience. It really was the most amazingly ugly face, if one stopped to think about it. Strange, how often he simply didn’t see it.

‘She
would never be boring,’ he thought, and snorted.

“That better
not mean what I think it means,” she said, scowling at him with mud on her face and grass in her hair. Pinned to Gann four times, and not defeated yet.

His hand went out without his will to brush at her flat, smooth, pallid and generally disgusting brow—the second time he had done so. They both recoiled a little.

He recovered first, frowning. “So be it,” he said briskly. “We will hold watches between us at night and I will take you to hunt with me whenever possible.”

“Tomorrow?”

He hesitated, then shrugged his spines. “I could spare an hour in the morning if you rise early, although the only thing we’re likely to spear is more gruu.”

“At least it won’t run far,” she said with a crooked smile. “Maybe I can actually catch a limping potato.”

He grunted, then pointed sternly at her face. “But when I am not with you, you will stay within my camp. You go nowhere alone, do you mark me?”

“Okay,
okay,” said Amber, rolling her eyes. “In the spirit of compromise, I promise to buddy up when I go to the bathroom.”

“Uyane
hears your vow. You have the first watch tonight. Wake me when you begin to tire.”

“Got it.” She pushed herself onto her feet, but stayed bent awhile, brushing at dried mud and grass. This gave Meoraq the unlooked-for and not entirely unwelcome opportunity to watch her odd body in motion, so that when she finally straightened up and asked if he was going to sleep right away, the only honest answer was, “No. I think I have to pray.”

“Oh. Well…good night.” She backed up, then walked away across the camp, raising her hand as she went without bothering to look at him.

Meoraq watched her go until she took up her spear and a sentry’s positi
on at the boundary of the camp, then resumed the assembly of his tent, trying to ignore the undeniable fact that he was profoundly, even painfully aroused. “Father,” he murmured, stabbing poles into the ground with more force than was usual. “See Your son in his ordeal and grant him the strength to endure it, because without Your hand upon me, O great Sheul, I do not know how I am going to survive this.”

Footsteps.

Meoraq glanced around, but it was Scott coming toward him, not Amber. He grunted dismissively and flattened the spines which had been flaring forward in greeting. “What do you want?”

“What were you two talking about?” the human asked, making a very poor effort to sound merely curious.

“If you wished to know, you should have come closer and joined us.”

A lengthy pause led Meoraq to silently congratulate himself on a scathingly civil retort, right up until
Scott’s hesitant, “What?”

Meoraq sighed. He
gave the tent-fasten under his hand a particularly vicious yank as he tied it to the pole and turned around. “I told her,” he said, speaking slowly, “to stand a watch.”

Scott
stared at him and, after Meoraq had ample time to prepare a defense of this admittedly outrageous order, said, “What?”

“Go away!” snapped Meoraq and
stomped past him to fetch up his pack and bedroll. “Why do you throw questions around when you cannot catch the answers? Swaggering idiot,” he muttered, ducking into his tent. “Sheul, my Father, grant me Your divine patience, and if You cannot grant me that, grant me the strength to knock his head off with one blow so that I don’t have to listen to him squeal.”

“What
did he say?” called Scott, retreating.

Meoraq
tied his tent shut and spread out his mat. He had the liberty to undress now, if he wished; if he opened his loin-plate the smallest degree, he would be out of it. He took his boots off, but left his clothes on and lay down. Eventually, Scott went away. The night was quiet. The wind was low. Amber was close and impossibly fierce with her pointed stick in her little hand. Meoraq prayed drowsily, indulged a few lustful thoughts of Gann’s devising, prayed some more, and slept.

* * *

He woke in his father’s room and did not, for some reason, think this was at all strange. He could smell breakfast in the making—bread baking, nai brewing, and something being fried in salty fat—which made the notion of going back to sleep considerably less attractive than it ordinarily might. His father’s cupboard-bed abutted the interior window, so he could see even without flicking the curtain aside that it was still early, not yet dawn.

He rolled over, rubbing
the sleep out of his scales, and nudged the door open with his foot. The daughter of House Saluuk was there, her slender body broken into strange new alignment, but this was not strange to him either. She was pouring him a bath and she did it well, despite holding her silent, bloodied baby in one arm. Meoraq dismissed her with a wave and she went without speaking.

After washing, Meoraq opened his bedroom door and brought the first servant he saw to him. It was
Shuiv, Sheulteb to House Arug in Tothax, dressed now in livery rather than a warrior’s harness, immaculate save for the small stain over his heart where his mortal wound yet bled. Meoraq gave the order for his morning meal to be brought and closed the door again, taking his father’s private stair to the roof.