The Last Hour of Gann (52 page)

“
What is it?” she asked dubiously, eyeing the pile of blood-streaked yellow mush and hoping it was not edible.

It was marrow, as he eventually managed to explain, and he wanted her to eat it.

“How do I cook it?” she asked.

He looked at her. “I have roasted it already. Eat.”

“I’ll just save it for later,” she hedged, easing it toward the ground behind her.

“Eat it!” he snapped.

She scooped a jiggly blob of it up in two fingers and sucked it squeamishly down. It tasted pretty much just like bland, vaguely blood-flavored jelly, which made it easily the most disgusting thing she’d ever had in her mouth and that included the time Bobby Wykes up the street knocked her down and made her eat a slug.

Meoraq reached over and helped himself to a heaping palmful, licked his fingers,
then went back to untangling intestines.

“I saw the spear,” said Amber after a while. “It’s nice.”

He grunted. “It belongs to you.”

“I figured.” And, inanely: “I’m glad you didn’t have to kill me.”

“So am I.” He glanced at her. “Where did you get the knife?”

It wasn’t an unexpected question. “I’m not going to answer that.”

“So be it.” He took more marrow. “He would be well-advised to be rid of it. If I see it in his hand or the fold of his clothes, I will kill him. That is not a threat, mark me. That is the vow of Uyane Meoraq and God hears me. I will kill him and I will not burn his body. It can lie there and rot. And I hope ghets scatter his fucking bones.”

“Hypothetically speaking, if someone did give me the knife, he wouldn’t have done it to get me killed.”

“Only because he didn’t know the law. If he had, he would have urged the knife on you the first day of our meeting because he is an evil little clay-born smear of shit.” He said this without inflection or any sign of interest, yet long patches of scales on either side of Meoraq’s throat were turning yellow. He was doing that a lot lately.

The yellowing intrigued her, especially as it seemed to go hand in hand with
high emotion. Maybe she’d been wrong about the ‘he’ thing this whole time. Maybe he really was a girl, and he was PMS-ing. It was something hormonal, plainly.

“Can I ask you a question?”

He grunted, put his empty pack aside and pulled out one of his many knives.

The knife gave her some pause, but now she felt mo
re or less obligated to finish. “You are a man, right?”

He stared at her. Then the double-row of spines on his head kind of flicked forward and he looked at the knife in his hand. “Ah,” he said. And looked at her again. “I am a man. I am
also Sheulek, born of the warrior’s caste to serve God as his Sword and his Striding Foot. Blades are not forbidden to me.”

“Oh.”
Amber waited, choking down marrow and watching the yellow patches on his throat fade back to black as he sliced the saoq’s intestines into long strips. She didn’t say anything until he was done, but once he had, she said, “So…what did I do to piss you off this morning?”

He frowned, glanced at her, and kept working.

“I thought we had an agreement and yeah, okay, I didn’t wake you up, but is that really a good enough reason to go at me like that?”

He ignored her.

Amber picked at the marrow, then put it aside. “Do I bother you?” she asked bluntly.

He made a few half-hearted passes at the stripped bowel, then leaned the blade of his knife against his boot and rubbed at his brow-ridges. He didn’t answer.

“That’s a yes,” said Amber. She made an effort to sound cheerful, or at least, the sarcasm-laden sort of cheer she usually dished out when she was in a good mood and her feelings weren’t hurt. “It’s okay, Meoraq. Believe it or not, I understand.”

“No,” he said quietly, still rubbing. “You do not.”

“Yeah, I do. I wouldn’t want to be stuck with us either. For what it’s worth, I appreciate everything you’ve done for us. I’ll try to give you your space. I know I’m in the way and I’m not the easiest person to live with even when I haven’t been stranded on an alien planet, that’s for damn s—”

“Enough
.” He moved his hand and looked at her with eyes that pierced but were impossible to read. His voice had not risen, but there was something new about it that she did not imagine because she could see people looking their way and wearing pretty much the same expressions they’d worn when they’d thought he was about to cut her head off.

It bothered her even more now that no one was doing anything to interrupt than it had then.

Meoraq tipped his head back and looked at the sky. He stayed that way as Amber picked at her bootlaces and rubbed traces of marrow off on her pants. She’d never been good at social stuff. She got the feeling he wasn’t, either. The silence sat between them like a cancer, squeezing everything else out as it grew.

“I don’t—
” he said, and then just sat there, watching the clouds roll by.

There were too many ways that sentence could end to walk away from it.

“You don’t what?”

Silence. And just when she’d decided he wasn’t going to answer, he said, quietly and without a shred of emotion either in his voice or anywhere on his body, “I don’t know what to do with you.”

“I thought…I thought you were taking us to this temple place.”

He grunted. It could have meant anything. Then he finally looked directly at her, if only for a second. It seemed to her that he flinched a little before he went back to staring at the sky. “I know you w
ant to learn things. It may even be that this is God’s will as well. But I don’t…I don’t think I can teach you. You…upset me.”

Her heart sank. She could actually feel it sinking.

“Meoraq, I know I haven’t given you a lot of reasons to believe me, but I swear I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I’ve just been in the city all my life. I can figure this out. Please, just give me a chance.”

“You do not mark me,” he said, but he didn’t say how and after another long stretch of cloud-watching, h
e abruptly changed the subject. “Did you kill the saoq I saw you roasting?”

She huffed out a little laughter. “Yeah. With my broken spear. Like the stubborn bitch that I am. And then I had to drag it all t
he way home. I was trying to be careful, but it still looked like I’d rolled it off a cliff by the time I got it back. Plus, it tasted like shit because all the blood was clotted inside. Some of the guys told me I should have drained it, but how the hell was I supposed to do that?”

He frowned, but didn’t
answer.

“Then you show up with two of them, already skinned and roasted, on a friggin’ sled…” She tried to smile, but the bitterness in her tone made the effort somewhat wasted and Meoraq was just looking at her, so she let i
t drop. “And I felt like a fool.”

He stared into the sky.

“For about three seconds. And then I felt like a walking dead woman. You are one scary son of a bitch when you want to be.”

“I know.”

He wasn’t in the mood to talk, clearly, and she was all out of things to say, except for the stuff she’d had seething through her head all day—
you made me run out of here like a fucking little girl you yelled at me for no good goddamn reason you broke my spear you made me cry no one’s begging you to stick around and I don’t like you either so there
—and the stuff she’d never say even if he stuck another knife to her throat—
I thought we were friends
—so she guessed they were done. Amber managed another wan smile for the road and started to get up again.

“Take the marrow.”

She hunted around for a tactful way to say what came next, then just said it: “It’s gross, Meoraq.”

“I don’t care what you think of it, human. Eat it
.” He rubbed at his brow-ridges, scowling, then crossly added, “Share it out with your N’ki if you must, but eat it.”

“Well okay, but she’s going to think it’s gross too.” She bent over to get it.

He reached up and brushed the back of his knuckles across her forehead.

It was the third time he’d done something like that and she never seemed to see it coming. She looked up, startled.

He looked back at her, frowning, silent.

She straightened up haltingly, fussing with the marrow until she had it folded again in the wide square of leather he’d used for its wrapping
. ‘That was a weird touch,’ she thought, tossing the words out defiantly into the recesses of her brain just like it was all there was.

And the thought came back, like some distorted echo: ‘He’s going to ask me to sleep with him.’

Her stomach flipped over, but not in a scared and pukey way. She wrapped up the marrow some more, thinking (
no he’s not don’t be stupid that’s just his half-assed way of saying he’s sorry for picking a fight this morning or even heck trying to kill you tonight except that was more of his god stuff and he probably doesn’t feel sorry about it but whatever he doesn’t want to sleep with you he’s a
lizard) nothing in particular.

“
I’ll do what I can with you,” he said finally. “For as long as I can stand it.”

“You won’t be sorry.”

He grunted in a way that suggested he already was, and rubbed at his knobby forehead again. “Go. Now. I…I need to pray.”

She backed away, clutching the leather with its jiggly blobs of marrow to her churning stomach and watching as he bent over and put his hands flat against the ground. His eyes closed. His breathing evened out.

He did not ask her to sleep with him.

‘Jesus Christ, you really are a fool,’ she thought disgustedly and picked her way back to Nicci, peppering herself with silent and scathing recriminations until she excused herself on the pretext of visiting the bushes, where she
threw up and had a record-breaking second crying jag in one day and then went back and fell miserably asleep.

5

T
hings changed after that, but Amber found it difficult to say whether they were good changes or not. They should have been good. Sitting up for a few extra hours at night didn’t win her any prizes with Scott and his loyal Manifestors (although sometimes the Fleetmen might come over to sit with her for a while if they were awake. Crandall, mostly, whose profanity-thick banter was surprisingly welcome provided he kept his hands to himself, or Mr. Yao, who rarely said or did anything at all, but was still oddly good company), but she seemed to have come back from her near-execution with a smidgeon more of Meoraq’s respect.

He still hadn’t taken her
hunting with him, but every morning, as soon as dawn and his footsteps woke her, he took her out into the world beyond their camp and tried to do something with her. Finding water always came first, because “water is life in the wildlands.” He could spend hours hunkered down over a mudbank, trying to make her see animal tracks in what her city-bred eyes stubbornly kept telling her was just a tore-up mess. If it was dry, which wasn’t often, he might attempt to teach her to crawl, which she would never have thought was a skill anyone over the age of two would need to have. Belly-down in the grass, she kicked and elbowed her way through thornbreaks and over rocks, while Meoraq snaked silently over the ground beside her to prove it could be done, hissing at her when she got too noisy or smacking her butt whenever it popped up too high. If it rained, crawling lessons were cancelled and he instead stood over her and made her throw the spear and fetch it back several billion times, so that she inevitably started the day’s hike exhausted. He never gave her so much as a “Nice try,” not even on those rare occasions when she thought she’d actually done pretty good, and on the really bad days, he wouldn’t even look at her when he grunted out his commands. Those were the days she was likeliest to find herself trudging back to camp just a few minutes after leaving it, with nothing to do except wonder what she’d done wrong until Meoraq came back and ordered everyone to start walking.

And then he ignored her. Throughout the day, he circled them, freely doling out cuffs and hisses if he thought people were talking too loud or straying too far from the group, but he never so much as glanced her way when he chanced to stalk by and wouldn’t offer even a grunt in return if she spoke. The only time he ever interacted with her was to use her to yell at
Scott and those moments were mercifully few. He kept his distance, and the miserable planet they’d crashed on made sure there was plenty of cold whistling wind to fill it.

Once he gave up for the day and let them set up camp, she seemed to be worth noticing again, but only to work. The very first night after he’d put a knife to her throat, before she’d even had the chance to dig the rocks out of her boots, he was standing over her with his empty and almost-empty flasks. “Fill these,” he’d said, dumping them unceremoniously in her lap. “And start a fire.”

And off he’d gone to hunt.

She’d filled them, although it meant another meandering hike ba
ck and forth between promising greenbelts before she found an actual creek, but there weren’t more than a handful of trees around her, and all the dead branches she’d been able to drag back to camp burned up in less than an hour. There she’d sat, beside a clumsy ring of stones and a heap of cold ash, until Meoraq returned with an enormous, crab-mouthed eel-thing and nothing to cook it over. He let her get just three words into her excuse—“There’s no wood”—and then threw down his eel, grabbed her by the scruff of her shirt and dragged her out into the plains with him.