The Last Hour of Gann (55 page)

Using the
tip of the awl, Amber scraped awkwardly at the wood and the torn fibers fluffed out a little. She scraped some more, trying to get it as plush as possible all over without digging too deeply through the wood, and just sort of hoped it didn’t have bugs. If there was any way at all this day could get worse, it would be with a screaming case of boot-bugs.

Meoraq had found a thin roll of leather, just scraps apparently, and was waiting for her to finish. At her lackluster nod, he covered the sole
and held out that small wooden case. “Find a strong needle and a thick thread,” he said, or at least that was how she filled in the blanks.

She’d never sewed anything in her life. She didn’t wear clothes with buttons and if she ripped a shirt, she threw it away.

She got one of the thickest needles and picked out some cord to thread it with. He took it from her once she had and began to stitch, pinching and tucking the leather as he worked around the sole to make a kind of crease. It looked pretty rustic, but at the same time, she knew hers was going to look like a total shit-cake, so she tried to pay attention to exactly how he was doing it.

“Keep it tight,” he muttered, sewing. “Do not allow folds or pockets to form. If you discover one, take it out, regardless of the effort it requires.
There is no hurry. Just keep a strong pull and take whatever time you need.”

“Thanks.”

He sewed, silent, until he had finished the sole. He handed it and her broken boot to her. “You will need to use the awl. Keep them at least a finger’s width up from the edging. The holes needn’t line up exactly. Keep the stitching even and tight. The seam will draw up this way, and form an overlap. Mend them both. I will have something to seal them in the morning.”

She nodded and got to work.

He sat and watched her. Not her hands, not the boot, not the tools she was borrowing. Her.

She struggled with the awl
and kept her head down, her eyes stubbornly on her work. She ignored him.

“Pride,” said Meoraq, very quietly, “has no place in this camp.”

The wind blasted its freezing breath into her face, and still she felt the blush heating up her cheeks. She kept her eyes fixed and her hands busy and did not answer.

“You have asked me for training. You have demanded it. I have agreed to give it, because you have shown me the necessity and I judge you fit enough to learn, but there is no place—” He caught her chin and made her look at him. “—for pride in this camp.”

I know. I’m sorry. Please stop. Please
.

His eyes shifted to a point beyond her. He
stood up and walked off without another word. Shortly afterwards, Nicci crept up and sat down.

And for a second, Amber was disappointed. She hunched over her boot again, forcing the awl the rest of the way throu
gh the leather. “Hey.”

“
I’m sorry,” said Nicci. “I really am, Amber. I’m sorry we fought.”

“I know. I’m sorry too.”

So that was okay. Almost.

Nicci turned her head to watch Meoraq move around the camp. “He went back
a few times. To check on you, I guess.”

“Yeah.” She hadn’t seen him, but she hadn’t done much looking at anything but the trail in front of her. And in all honesty, Meoraq probably could have been in arm’s reach of
her the whole way and if he didn’t want to be seen, she wouldn’t have seen him.

“I’d have gone back too,” said
Nicci after a moment.

“I know.”

“I just thought it was best if we were all together.”

Amber looked at her and
although she was okay and she really wasn’t even angry, it was right on the tip of her tongue to say that she’d have never left Nicci behind like that, never. But her sister’s eyes were the same anxious, lost and pleading eyes that they’d been pretty much since they got here and Amber couldn’t stand to see them wet again, not after the day she’d just had.

“I’m fine,” she said. She even
smiled a little, for Nicci. “It was nothing. I was acting like a bitch and I got a little spanking, that’s all. I’m fine.”

Nicci
nodded and picked at her laces. “Can you do my boots for me? They’ve got, um, holes.”

Amber kept smiling. “Yeah, sure.”

Nicci took her boots off and got up. One of the ladies sitting around the fire outside the women’s tent called her name, waving, then saw Amber and hesitated. Nicci waved back and stood there, looking awkward.

“Go on,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“
Beats sitting around and watching me do this all night. Go on,” Amber said again, just like she didn’t even care. “Have fun.”

Nicci
left and sat down with the other women, disappearing into their laughing, talking circle. Amber sewed.

The sun went down, and as the grey light dimmed rapidly to black, people began to shake out their blankets and clump up around the fires to sleep. As it got later and more people went down, Nicci finally wandered back. Amber set her boots aside, but Nicci just put herself to bed. And that was okay. They were all tired.

Meoraq’s scaly knuckle tapped at her shoulder. He crouched down and gestured vaguely at her duffel bag while staring over his shoulder at nothing. “Sleep.”

“I’m not done yet.”

“Finish in the morning.”

“I’ll finish now.
I always have the first watch, don’t I?”

He kept his head turned, his eyes moving as if he could see some hungry thing pacing back and forth beyond the edge of camp. And for all she knew, he could. At length, and without further argument, he simply stood up and walked away.

Amber resumed boring holes through her boots, but had managed only one more stitch before he was tapping at her shoulder again. He gave her a piece of cuuvash, acknowledged her thanks with a grunt, and moved to the other side of the fire where he crouched and watched people. The firelight threw orange stripes over his scales, broken by scars. They shifted as he breathed, as mesmerizing as the embers themselves could be. He did not respond at all to her stares, perhaps didn’t even notice them.

The awl was starting to hurt her hand. She put it down and ate her cuuvash, taking small bites, making it last.
Eric and Maria passed close by on their way to his tent. Amber raised a hand and said good night. Eric nodded at her or maybe at Meoraq, it was hard to tell. Then they were gone.

She ran out of cuuvash and had to pick up the awl again. Her hand still hurt. Meoraq watched her make one hole and then went back to staring at nothing. Everyone else was in bed. They were alone.

“Are you still mad at me?” she asked finally.

He thought about it. “No.”

“I wish you’d talk to me.”

He ran his red eyes over the camp, over every blanket-wrapped lump, every tent and bivy, every person. Except her.

“Say something, then,” he said suddenly. He was frowning.

“About what?”

“I don’t care. Talk to me.”

Amber opened her mouth without any idea of what she was going to say and out popped, “My mom had to go to rehab when I was six and I had to go to state-care. They had a yard with a big hill that had a few big trees and a chain fence at the bottom and the game all us kids used to play was to climb up that hill and roll down it with your eyes closed.
There were trees and broken bricks and stuff. You mostly didn’t hit them, but you could have. That was part of the game. I only did it once. Because I loved it so much. If it had been scary, I’d have done it every day.”

He said nothing. What the hell was there to say
to that even if he knew what she was saying? God, she was an idiot.

“It’s your turn,” she said, thinking he wouldn’t say anything.

And he didn’t, at first. She had enough time to punch the last hole through her boot and stitch the new sole on, making it whole again, and then he said, “In my ninth year at Tilev, I had trouble with one of the brunts. I had trouble with most of the brunts until I became one. That’s what brunts do. But it was my first year in the middle classes and I wasn’t used to it. I tried fighting back and he beat me. I tried avoiding him and he hunted me down and beat me. So one night, I threw a blanket over him from behind as he came back from the pisser and I went at him with a practice sword. I beat him until I broke, oh, seventeen bones all together, I think they said.”

She looked up from her work, frowning.
“Good God, Meoraq.”

He grunted and rubbed at his throat, then at his knobby brows. “I didn’t know how badly I’d hurt him at the ti
me. I just hit him until he quit moving and moaning and I ran back to the billets. I didn’t even take the blanket off him. They found him in the morning on the way to watch, but by then there wasn’t much they could do. He slept six days and died.”

“Jesus!”

“The masters called us to assembly and commanded the guilty boy to come forward. I did. They had a trial and God moved for me, so that was all right, but I still think about it sometimes. I shouldn’t, but I do.”

“God moved…? You didn’t get in trouble?”

“No.”

“Not at all? Not even detention?”

He shrugged his spines.

“Jesus,” she said again, because there was just nothing else to say. She knew Meoraq had killed people, in the same indisputable yet off-screen way she knew her mom had fucked men for
money, but this was different. “How many—” she began, but faltered to a stop. She didn’t really want to know, just like she didn’t want to know how many men there had been.

“
Three hundred and some. I don’t keep an exact count anymore.” He was quiet for a while, staring straight ahead and thinking his own thoughts. When he spoke again, it was in a low, almost halting manner utterly unlike him. “The Word tells us that there is no sin in the lives we take as Sheulek, but I was not Sheulek for that one and I think about it. God moved for me when it came to trial, but in my heart I know He was not proud of me. Not then.” He paused, his spines flexing and flattening. “And not today.”

She dropped her eyes back to her boot and resumed sewing.
“I was fine.”

“You walked in our
Father’s sight.”

“N
icci said I walked in yours too.”

He glanced at her and away into the night. “You are determined to stand a watch?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”

“You look tired.”

“You hear me whining about it, lizardman? I’m not falling-over tired. I’m fine.”

“Please yourself,” he said, almost exactly the same way he’d said it before
he left her out in the plains. He reached into his belt and took out a small, cloth-wrapped bundle. He peeled it partway open to show her a grayish, thoroughly unpleasant-looking blob she naturally assumed was some sort of food until he said, “If you want to bathe.”

Soap? She stared at it and him, the awl poked halfway through the side of her new sole, in the kind of astonishment that she had only ever known as
a child, when Bo Peep might occasionally announce a trip out for ice cream. Half the time (more than half, to be honest), it was really just an excuse to pick up her fucking drugs and little Amber would end up sitting on one side of a booth, watching her mom nod off and finally just shoveling melted ice cream into her mouth as fast as she could so they could go home. But sometimes she really meant it, so there was always that first cautious swoop of hope that something good might really happen.

He covered up the lump again and set it down in front of her. “Return it to me,” he told her. “And don’t allow S’kot to claim it for his own.”
He stood up and went to his tent, resting his hand briefly on the top of her head as he passed her.

Alone again. Amber picked up the awl and the first of Nicci’s boots, then put them down again. She’d told Nicci she’d fix her boots and she would
, but having honest-to-God soap in front of her made thinking about anything else impossible. Hearing about some kid getting beaten to death by the man sleeping in the tent just a few meters away should have ranked a little higher, but it didn’t. For the moment, the only thing that mattered was that everyone else appeared to be asleep, so if she wanted to clean up at all beyond just changing her clothes, this was the perfect opportunity. On the other hand, no matter how quietly she tried to go about it, taking a bath in a bag was easily awkward enough to wake someone up and it wasn’t like she had a wall to put between her and anyone else.

She pretended to debate the matter, but pretending was all it was. Even as she weighed risk against reward in her mind, her hands were busy building up the fire around Meoraq’s heat-stones. While they got hot, she found the leather sack he used for cooking, still with a little cold tea in it. She drank it off—bitter as it was, she hated to waste it—then filled it with fresh water from one of his big flasks and hung it from its tripod.

All of this moving back and forth was bound to catch some attention and it did, but only Nicci roused herself enough to actually lift her head and look at her.