The Last Hour of Gann (94 page)

“I didn’t see it,” someone said. It sounded like her, but she hadn’t felt her lips move. Her eyes were still fixed on the dying animal, and even though she could see it lying there, it was as if she could also see it rising up in front of her too—just rising and rising, a mountain of quills and hot breath and muscle—ready to kill. She hadn’t seen it? Really? How could anyone miss it?

“It was lying down,” someo
ne explained in her voice. Even Amber thought it was a weak excuse. “I thought it was a bush.”

Meoraq grunted and stomped into view. The porcu-bear took a swipe at him which he easily stepped over. He planted one boot on the animal’s side, gripped the hilt of the sword jutting from Mr. President’s neck, and shoved. There was no last kick, no grunt, no slump, but Amber knew the difference immediately. It had been alive; now it was dead. That was how quick it could happen.

Meoraq yanked twice and finally got his sword back. Drops of blood fell like beads from a broken necklace, scattering prettily over the animal’s stiff quills and rolling out of sight. Meoraq wiped it off and hung it back on his belt. “Kipwe already. We must be nearer to the mountains than I—Are you all right?”

“You could have been killed.
”

His spines flared and flattened. “By a kipwe
?” he demanded, sounding pissed. He knelt down to carve some meat out of the quill-covered carcass, and maybe he was talking to her while he did it, but she couldn’t hear him. His back was to her and on his back was a ragged tear in his tunic with the wet gleam of blood beneath.

“Oh my God, you’re
hurt!” she blurted.

“I realize that,” Meoraq said testily, prodding at another tear, this one on his side. And there was another on his arm. His stomach. His thigh.

“You’re bleeding everywhere!”

“
Calm yourself. You see here—” He opened the neck of his tunic for her, showing off a smattering of dark, wet smears over his chest. “—only scratches.”

“These are not just scratches!” Amber seized his tunic and pulled it out from his body, exposing an uneven line of dashes across his
side where the monster had slapped him. There was very little blood, but there were several jagged nubs sticking out through his scaly skin: the splintered tips of the creature’s spines, broken off and buried in Meoraq’s flesh.

He had not resisted her grip, but stood silent and very, very tense as she stared in dismay at the many points protruding from his chest, hip, back and thigh, and it wasn’t until she raised her eyes to ask how bad it was that she noticed he was looking at her and not the wounds at all.
His head tipped slowly to one side. He stared at her some more, this time with his spines forward and a frown on his face. “Are you all right?”

The question made no sense to her. None. The words danced around in her head, distracting and unintelligible, and flew away again. She looked back at his chest, because that still mattered, that still made sense, that was still everything.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “There’s blood everywhere.”

His frown deepened. He looked at the gory hunk of meat in his hand, then tossed it into the grass next to the dead porcu-bear and sheathed his knife. He took her firmly by the chin and tipped her head this way and that, checked her hair, turned her around, and finally took her arm and started walking back to camp.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He grunted.

“I didn’t see it.”

“I know.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I want you to stop saying that.”

“It almost killed you.”

“I really want you to stop saying
that
.”

He brought her over to her pack and sat her down, checked her hair one more time, and walked away again. She sort of lost track of him for a while, as impossible as that should have been. He came in and out of her awareness and somewhere along the way, he must have gone back down to the gully because when she finally noticed the fire, there was a piece of Mr. President cooking on it.

Meoraq was on the other side of the fire, heating water in his stewing bag, watching her. “Are you here now?” he asked when their eyes met.

“You’ve still got blood all over you.”

“It isn’t serious.” He put a wet rock in the fire and a hot one in the bag. “You looked much, much worse than this the night you threw yourself at a tachuqi.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“No one argues with a Sheulek, human.”

“I had a few bruises. You’re covered in blood. It almost k—
”

He cut his hand through the air and pointed it at her. “If you say that one more time, I’m going to muzzle you. No son of Uyane’s line has
ever
been killed by a kipwe.”

The porcu-bear sizzled enticingly while Amber’s stomach churned. Meoraq watched her and heated his water. The wind kept blowing and the world kept turning.

“Come here,” Meoraq said suddenly and stood up.

“Why?”

“Because I tell you to.”

She got up
, not sure what to expect, and he began to unbuckle his harness. “It scarcely tapped me, Soft-Skin,” he grumbled. “I’m not hurt. But if it will bring you back from wherever you’ve gone, tonight you will be my woman and tend to me.”

“How?
”

He shrugged out of his tunic, tossed it and his harness together to the ground and gestured vaguely at himself. “Find a wound and clean
it. I may have overlooked some quills. If you find one, take it out.”

Ignoring the arm he offered, Amber immediately moved around behind him to what she considered the worst of the injuries, or least, the one that had bled most profusely. High on his back, from just under the blade of his left shoulder to the deep valley of his spine, were at least two dozen stuttering dashes where the porcu-bear had slapped him. One of its quills remained, its broken stump as thick as her pinky-finger, stuck at the end of the bloody groove it had carved. She put her hand beside it, stupidly splayed so as to catch it if it tried to dart away.

She realized only after she’d done it that it was the first time she’d touched him, really touched him. Not his sleeve or even his wrist, but the real, solid, flesh-and-bone
him
. The feel of his scaly skin was thick and abrasive—much more so than it looked even—yet flexible over the swells of his muscular body, the way she imagined a crocodile might feel, or a dragon. And he was warm, the way she remembered from that day when he’d taken the knife away from her throat and pulled her roughly against his body. So warm.

“Now what?”
she stammered.

Silence.

“Meoraq?” Hesitantly, she touched the tip of one finger to the rough edge of the protruding quill. “Do I…Do I just pull it out?”

His neck turned, not quite enough to let him actually look at her. “As
opposed to what?” he asked. “Hammering it further in?”

She pinched at it nervously and let go again almost at once. It felt very solidly caught. What if it was lodged in his bone? Or
his lung? What if she made it worse by pulling it out? What if he started bleeding and she couldn’t stop it?

“Take firm hold,” he prompted. “And pull in the direction it points. They aren’t barbed. It should come out cleanly.”

Amber pinched at the quill again and this time, tugged it free. She was horrified by its size: not quite as long as her thumb, which did not seem impressive until she saw it coming out of a living body. Meoraq’s blood rolled down its sides onto her thumb. Warm blood. She dropped the quill, fighting the urge to stomp on it too, and wiped her hand on her shirt half a dozen times, succeeding only in smearing the blood around.

“How does it look?” Meoraq asked. He didn’t sound very concerned. “Is it still flowing?”

Amber tore her eyes off the stain on her shirt and looked at his back. His scales, wedged aside when the quill had pierced him, had merely slipped back into place, sealing the wound almost bloodlessly, but the scrape preceding it, and all the other lesser ones, were so smeared by blood that it was impossible to tell if they were still leaking or not.

“A little. Should I…What do I use for a bandage?”

“Bandage? Stop trying to paint it out worse than it is! Just lick it.”

“What?”

“Lick it. To help it heal cleanly.”

“That may work with you lizard-people, but I’m pretty sure I remember hearing that human mouths are dirty. Here, wait.” She dashed over to her pack for her last Manifestor’s shirt. It took a little effort to get it going, but she soon tore one of the sleeves off and came running back to him.

“That was your good shirt,” he said, watching her dunk it in the hot water.

“It’s the only thing I have that I’m sure is clean,” she told him. “Turn around.”

He didn’t, just stood there, so she went behind him and dabbed at the blood on his back.

He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

“God, there’s another one.” Amber pulled a second quill, buried so deeply that it had snagged her wash-rag before she’d seen it, and immediately began searching for a third by sweeping her bare hand back and forth across his skin.

He stiffened so dramatically that it was like feeling a man turn to stone, just like a troll in those story-books she could so vaguely recall from her state-care days. When she’d been six. She’d been six and Nicci was being taken care of in the baby-wi
ng upstairs and Mama was gone. She’d been six and she got three meals every day plus snacks and the sheets were always clean and the dishes were always done and life was story-books and juice boxes and the hill in the yard that she rolled down just one time, just the once, tumbling fast and screaming and laughing and free past all the trees and broken bricks and trash that could have hit her but didn’t until she lay there at the bottom on her back thinking life was good, life was great, and it could never get any better. And it hadn’t. She’d been six.

Amber burst out crying, puking out tears fast and hard and very loud for the few mortifying seconds it took to swallow them down again. She took her hand off Meoraq’s unmoving back and stumbled away, swiping at her face.

The wind blew over them, stirring the grass and pushing smoke in a hot curtain between them. Meoraq’s eyes on her were unblinking, hot as live coals. She couldn’t look at them, had to look at his dark blood on the sleeve of her last clean shirt instead.

“I’m so sorry.”

He did not reply.

“I should have seen it.”

Still no answer.

“Please…”
don’t leave me
. Amber bit down on that until her lips stopped shaking, but as soon as she unlocked her jaws, it found another way out as a trembling, “Please don’t be mad at me.”

He broke his gaze at last, turning his terrible eyes and whatever furious emotion was in them on the sky. “I’m not
.”

“I didn’t see that thing or I never would have gotten so close.”

“I know.” He glanced at her, scowled, and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “A sleeping kipwe is well-hidden in the wildlands. I didn’t see it either. And you…”

She waited, twisting her wet, bloody sleeve between her fingers.

Meoraq hissed something under his breath impossible to catch. He rubbed at his brows again, then at his throat, then dropped his hand to his side and yanked a quill out. He glared it down, tossed it away in the grass, and looked at her again.

Without speaking, he unbuckled his swor
d-belt. It and the hooked sword he carried landed on the discarded heap of his tunic.

“What are you doing?” Amber asked, and hated the little whisper in which she asked it.

“I, nothing,” he said brusquely, sitting down in the grass to unfasten his boots. “You are tending my wounds. And you can bathe me while you’re about it.”

“Oh.”

“Such wounds,” he grumbled. “There will be songs sung of it one day, surely. Meoraq and the Kipwe.” He lay down and bucked his hips up (Amber felt a blush like a physical slap to both cheeks) to push his breeches down. He kicked them off indifferently, still muttering, and unbuckled his metal panty-panel.

Then he was naked. Completely naked. Wearing nothing but his scaly skin and his favorite knife on a cord around his neck, he
stood up again and beckoned her to him.

“I’ve never…
bathed anyone before,” she stammered.

He stared at her like he thought she was kidding. “Well,” he said finally. “I think as long as you don’t use mud, you’ll make a good effort of it.”

She hesitated forward a step and he turned around, raising his arms like a scarecrow, muttering under his breath about the absurdity of a land where women got paid to carry food but didn’t know how to bathe a man.

Amber dipped the rag in warm water and dabbed at his back, just under the scored place where the porcu-bear had scratched
him. “What was it? The thing you killed. You called it something.”

“Kipwe. They come over the mountains every year to winter in the plains. We must be close.”

“I didn’t do anything.”