The Last Hour of Gann (93 page)

She leaned slightly
forward and searched his eyes while he held very still and kept them open for her. Wind shook the walls of the tent and carried smoke away. The tea, half-gone, cooled in his hand, but he didn’t notice. Her eyes were so green and all he could think as he stared into them was that moment when she had opened them from the thick of her dying sleep and seen him.

Amber drew back, frowning. “Okay
. But I’m sleeping out here from now on.”

He grunted assent, still thinking of her eyes, then abruptly snapped his spines up in surprise. “Why?”

Her jaw clenched. “Because.”

“
That’s a word, not a reason,” he said mechanically and smacked a hand over his snout. “I can’t listen to myself anymore. You’re turning me into my father.”

“Because I’m not your pack or your spare shi
rt or whatever it is that your god told you I was. I don’t belong in your tent!”

“You’re not two days yet out of a killing sleep, you lunatic! A strong rain would wash you away!”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve slept in the rain.”

Meoraq rubbed his
snout, his brow-ridges, his throat…but in the end, he had to laugh just a little. “I asked You to restore her,” he admitted. And to Amber: “I’m not going to sit here and argue with a sick woman. Drink. I have meat if you think you can eat. Rest as much as you can—wherever you like,” he added generously. “And we’ll talk again when it rains.”

He rose and took up his empty flask, already planning to turn the next pouch of heated water into a bath. They could both use one, although he already knew she wouldn’t want to share. He wasn’t sure he wanted to
, either. Amber naked and white with fever at his side was one thing; Amber naked and rubbing soap into his scales was quite another.

Meoraq
stopped at the edge of camp and looked back. Amber was still sitting in the mouth of his tent, holding his cup in both hands like a child. Her hair, like trampled grass, bent crazily in the wind. His shirt on her body was oversized, loose enough at the neck to show a dark, tapering line—like a guiding arrow, he thought vaguely—pointing down between her swelled teats to her belly.

The second thought that came to him was relief so profound as to be prayerful that she was here at all—awake, alive, and arguing with him. Weak yet, but with sleep and warmth and decent feeding, she would soon be
strong, he was sure of it, and when he made his prayers tonight, he would make them upon his belly in humility before the merciful God who had lifted her out of the ashes and set her again in his hands.

But that was his second thought. H
is first made it plain that he was not ready to share her bath.

3

S
o she rested and even if it was the right thing to do, she still hated it. The days took forever with nothing to do except eat and sleep and watch Scott’s trail fade away. The nights were even longer, lying alone next to the fire, often with Meoraq on the other side of it, staring at her. Two days. Three. Four, just to pace around the camp and work the stiffness out of her joints. And on the fifth, after she woke up to a few drops of rain tapping on her blanket, she rolled up her mat and packed her pack.

Meoraq, already awake and drinking his morning tea with his back to her, sighed and poured what was left into the flask he carried around
his neck. He gestured at the waterskin, lying empty next to the fire. She took it away to fill it, knowing he was watching her and looking for the slightest weakness—if she stumbled, if she panted, if she shivered a little in the rain that was already coming down like pellets—any excuse to make her stay another day. She didn’t give him one. He helped her take down his tent without speaking and they were on their way.

It rained all morning and they walked in it. Amber kept her head down, holding onto Meoraq’s pack like a baby elephant to its mama’s tail. She didn’t think. The cold had numbed her brain as much as her body, but her eyes were open and as long as
she could see the trampled path left by Scott and his pioneers under her feet (only trampled, the panicky part of her would cry, not muddy or tore-up, but only
trampled
), she felt okay. The rain finally stopped, but the wind kept blowing, chapping her face and stinging her eyes, but drying her clothes, so that was all right. Meoraq kept trying to make her rest and she didn’t argue with him, but she made sure she was always the first one back on her feet again and when he started in with his passive-aggressive observations on where she thought would be a good place to make camp, she managed to put him off three times with a casual, “Let’s try over the next hill.”

The fourth time she said it, however, he stopped, turned her roughly around, t
ook her pack and her spear, and dropped them both on the ground.

“I can keep going,” she said.

“Stubborn idiot!” he snapped, throwing his pack on top of hers. “This is not a contest to see who can go further!”

“Meoraq—”

“No! You will go over that hill and over the next and over the next until you can’t walk and can’t think and then the tachuqis will come or the ghets or a pack of raiders because there is
always
something to watch for, damn it! These are the wildlands and surviving here means stopping before you exhaust yourself!”

“Maybe you’re right, but—”

“
Maybe
?!”

“But we have to catch up!” she insisted. “We’re just getting further behind!”

“We will find them in God’s time, not yours. Now, you rest.”

“But—”

“Rest, I say! No one but you would argue with that!”

Amber bit at her lip and followed the trail the only way she could, with her eyes, through the plains and eastward out of sight. “Maybe—”

“No.”

“I didn’t even say anything!”

“And I am not going to hear anything! You are resting!”

“Maybe you should go without me.
”

He threw down a half-assembled tent pole and leapt up.

“I’ll rest right here and you can go find them!” she said, trying very hard to sound reasonable while speaking loud and fast to stave off his inevitable interruption. “I’m just slowing you down and we both know it!”

“And we both know my answer, so stop asking
!”

“You can find them and bring them b—”

He thumped her hard on the forehead with one knuckle and pointed severely at her trembling mouth to make her shut it. Those yellow stripes were coming out on his throat. “I am not leaving you,” he said, not shouting, not even hissing. Somehow, that was worse. “I am
never
leaving you. If it is our Father’s will that we take the hateful S’kot and his hateful servants back into my camp, so be it, I serve Him in faith. For now, it is
my
will, human, and I will have your obedience. How do you mark me?”

“My sister is out there,” she whispered.

He broke the hold his hot, red eyes had on hers and stared over her left shoulder for a long time. Then he stepped back, rubbing at his throat until it cooled to black again, and went back to assembling poles without speaking.

She stayed quiet and out of his way
, knowing she could fight all night if she wanted and never change his mind. “Can I help?” she asked finally, defeated.

“No.”

She looked around at the wind-blown plains, but saw no game and no sign that anything had passed through recently. There were no streams, no green swath of promise where water might be hiding, not even a swampy piece of lowland, just more dead hills rolling away on every side of them. The closest tree was easily fifty meters away and all alone—a huge, cancerous-looking thing with a squat, lumpy body trailing parasitical vines like hair from its few remaining branches.

“I’ll get a fire going,” Amber offered, heading
toward the tree. It had clearly been dead for some time, which she hoped meant she’d find some branches around the bottom. She could see some kind of spiky bush at the dead tree’s base, so if nothing else, she could always burn that.

“We don’t need one yet. Just r
est.”

“You rest. I’m fine,” she said, still walking.

“Insufferable human.”

“Scaly son of a bitch.”

He grunted without looking at her and went on putting his tent together.

The gully was deeper than it looked. The grass was hip-high
and hard to walk through, with plenty of creepers wound through to try and trip her up. Amber went slow, muttering and swearing, keeping her eyes on her feet and determined to go one day, just one, without falling on her stupid face and giving Meoraq yet another reason to think—

“
Stop!” he shouted behind her. “Stop now! Here to me!”

Amber rolled her eyes an
d turned around to see him running down into the gully after her. “I feel fine, damn it, would you relax?”

Meoraq yanked
the hooked sword from his belt and no matter how pissed off he was, he would never pull a sword on her.

‘Don’t turn around,’ Amber thought with such clarity and in such a reasonable inner voice that she nodded along in agreement. ‘If you don’t turn around, nothing will be there.’

Very true. Very good advice.

Amber turned around and watched the spiky bush at the base of the dead tree raise its head and turn magically into an enormous, quill
-covered monster, oh, about a meter and a half away.

It saw Meoraq first. Its sleepy eyes squinted, assessing this danger, as it raised one massive, claw-tipped paw—it had no fingers or toes that she could see, just a leathery pad for a palm and four huge hooked claws—to scratch at its neck. The quills that covered its entire body turned to fine hair over its flat face and chin, but kept growing along its jawline in a dead-on evolutionary imitation of a muttonchop beard. That, combined with its severe frown as it watched the sword-swinging lizardman tear across the plains toward it, made it look hilariously like President Martin Van Buren. There had been a row of presidential portraits all around the tops of the walls in her seventh-grade world-history class. She had not realized until this moment that she knew any of them and that was kind of hilarious too.

“Ha,” said Amber. She didn’t mean to. It just came burping out of her.

The creature’s head swung left and right, then down. It saw her. It had eyebrows, of a sort. It raised them. Now he was a surprised Martin Van Buren.
Mr. President, it appears William Harrison has just won the election. Pack up your shit and leave
.

“Ha ha,” burped Amber.

The creature thumped its paw into the ground and stood up. And up. And up.

Even as a bush, it had been a pretty big bush, the kind that might burn maybe an hour. She had thought, following its magical transformation into an animal, that it was the size of a bear, because even though she’d never been to a zoo or seen a bear close-up, she’d seen them on TV and figured she knew how big they were, and yeah, big had a way of being subjective the closer a person came to a real live bear, but whatever this thing was, it was no more a bear than it had been a bush. It stood up on all fours and its ass was already
taller than Amber, and then it stood up on its hind legs, doubling its height in a slow-motion second. It drew back its arm with a severe, presidential frown and swung.

Something hit her. It wasn’t Mr. President the Porcu-bear because she was looking at him. It wasn’t a car either because they had none on this planet, or at least, none that worked anymore. It felt a little like a car, though. She’d been hit once when she was little. Mama had gone running across the road so little Amber went running after and the cars had mostly stopped, but one of them hadn’t quite and although Amber didn’t remember it hurting, she remembered that whole-body double-WHUMP of the car hitting her and then her hitting the pavement. Then, she’d gotten herself a scraped elbow and maybe a bloody lip, she couldn’t recall exactly. Now, she tumbled over the grass and thorns and looked up dazedly to see grey skies and rolling clouds and Meoraq hacking at Mr. President’s neck. The porcu-bear turned away from Amber at once and slapped with his other paw, aiming at Meoraq this time.

It must have connected, because it seemed from Amber’s vantage that Meoraq flew back, but he landed and pivoted and lunged again with such effortless and brutal grace that it might have been choreographed. The sword went in, not bouncing off the quills this time but stabbing through them, slashing deep into the porcu-bear’s neck. It bellowed and dropped to all fours, shaking its head and slapping Meoraq away. Again, Meoraq rebounded, pulling his other sword from his back even before he hit the ground. His boots kicked a clod of grassy dirt onto Amber’s chest. She tried to pick it up, but it broke apart in her hand.

The porcu-bear stood up again, fanning its fingerless claws with both hands and bobbing its head as it roared, which made it sound a lot like Martin Van Buren during some fairly intense
coitus, but when Meoraq came at it again, it dropped and tried to run.

It managed surprising speed for the first dozen steps and staggered for a dozen more before collapsing carefully onto its knees. Glaring at Amber, who it clearly blamed for its predicament, the porcu-bear rolled onto its side and lay panting.