The Last Hour of Gann (115 page)

“This is easily the most bizarre thing I have ever seen,” he said.

The leader grunted—Meoraq’s grunt, the one that meant he acknowledged the comment but didn’t feel any strong need to converse.

“You mean to sell it?” the other man said once she was done. He was still touching her hair.

“Might.”

“To who?”

“To me!” Vek snapped. “Hear me, Zhuqa, if you put that thing on the block without telling me, I will put a hook on the wrist where my fucking hand used to be and put the hook in your fucking head!”

“If I
sell it, I’ll give you due warning and a cut of credit besides. Now calm down and remember who you are speaking to.”

“It’s mine
!” Vek spat, but he spat it without shouting. He came stomping around to the leader’s back to glare at her, holding the bandaged lump of his ruined hand. He flared his open mouth threateningly, then dove forward and cracked his forehead into hers. She heard him stalk off muttering as she swayed near the grey area of unconsciousness, and finally, with a mental sigh of defeat, she fell on through.

* * *

Just as the raiders had not been able to tell human from dumaq at any great distance by the full light of the fire, so Meoraq could not tell dumaq from human by moonlight at the hour of his return.

He
had been in a fair mood most of the evening, wandering far and observing the animals of Gedai that were ostensibly his reason for this patrol with only half an eye. He prayed as he walked, silently at first, then aloud, and soon was singing some of his favorite hymns at full voice. Amber wasn’t there to mutter in her throat or heave her pained sighs or slap at her face. He loved his wife—more and more, that word felt true and right and real—but they had spent too many days this winter riding about in one another’s pockets. He liked her company, but he missed his solitude and he meant to enjoy it as much as possible while he could.

At length, even as he saw the sun low to the mountains and knew his time was ending, he found a friendly jut of stone and sat himself to meditate, but his first moments in that welcome stillness were unquiet. He could do this back at camp, couldn’t he? And truth, he supposed he could, albeit with Amber pacing restlessly somewhere at the outside edge of his perceptions. She’d want to talk at him or involve him in some way in the domestic things she did or maybe just pull him into the tent for sex. Meoraq was opposed to none of these things, but once in a while, a man just liked to meditate.

Still, that vague sense of unease persisted. A tickle of wind, the rough edge of the rock he sat on, the distant call of some unknown beast—every little distraction woke him wholly to his clay until he resorted to a child’s trick, lying flat on his back with an arm crooked over his eyes, chanting the Prophet’s Prayer over and over until meaning bled away and it was all just sound. Sound and blackness, yes, but still not peace. In its pursuit, he not only failed to truly meditate, but also entirely lost track of time. He believed that he spent perhaps an hour in that fruitless endeavor, but when he finally cried surrender and opened his eyes, it was full dark.

Amber must be
terrified. No, strike that, she was furious. And in either case, she was just fool enough to come looking for him if she believed him lost or injured.

Cursing, he hurried back to camp, but ‘hurry’ w
as a relative term after dark. There was enough of a moon behind the clouds to show him his backtrail at first, but the wind which had been so calm all day now stirred itself up, soon erasing all sign of his passage until he followed nothing but a hope that this lesson in the cost of man’s pride would end at his camp and not in a nest of ravening tachuqis.

But
it had been his own camp in the end, although he glimpsed it from well to the east of where he’d thought it was, and he thought it was Amber sleeping there when he finally came to it. There was no tent and no fire and this he at first presumed with a mixture of resignation and annoyance was her way of telling him he was a scaly son of a bitch for leaving her so long, which was spiteful and childish, yet he would apologize because he was Sheulek and a Sheulek took the higher path.

Then
the clouds above him thinned so that the little light from the crescent moon grew stronger and all at once, what had been Amber became a dead man. It seemed Sheul gave him hours outside of Time to see this, to feel it, and only when he fully understood did the weight of the world crash back into his clay.

His feet took him forward without conscious thought. He reached only to stab the corpse—
he had drawn his kzung, it seemed, how curious—then staggered away, staring wildly in all directions for Amber—where was Amber?—and seeing nothing, only the night—why had he left her so long?—and the wind whipping at Gann’s back.

He cupped his mouth and howled for he
r. Not with words, but just a cry, a dumb animal baying that he had never before imagined any dumaq could make. The wind alone answered, changing its course to drive him back. His boot struck the body. He looked at it and, with a sudden savagery he did not feel until it was upon him, he wrenched his kzung from the corpse and hacked at it again.

The head came free at his first blow. The chest cracked apart at his fourth. He took the left arm. Bisected the rib. The right arm. He struck until it was meat and bone and two legs. He struck until he had no wind and
no moisture in his mouth but the clotted blood splashing up at him from the ground. He struck until he fell to his knees in splintery gore and leaned back, gasping.

He listened then, as he should have listened hours ago, but Sheul had nothing to say to him now.

Amber.

He dragged himself up, shaking on legs l
ike water, and pulled his blade free of the mess on the ground. How long? The blood that touched his tongue had cooled, but was yet warm. The raiders might be close still. He looked and saw nothing, no sign but dumaq blood in spatters across the trampled grass. An hour ago, he would have seen their trail leading away, before the light failed and the wind grew strong.

An hour ago, he might have been here to stop it.

They had not left her body behind, only that of their companion. Perhaps she was alive still…or perhaps they had taken her corpse away as trophy. No, he must believe she lived! Lived and fought, as fiercely as the evidence here proclaimed, knowing he would follow.

“Sheul,
O my Father, show me the way. Set me upon their path if she lives! Give me my right of vengeance if she does not!” He struggled with his fear and broke upon it, suddenly roaring, “
How could You have sent her to me just to take her from me now
?”

It was not for men to demand answers of God, no more than it was the recalcitrant son’s right to demand
forgiveness of his father. Meoraq knew this. He bent his back beneath the weight of guilt and silence, one hand splayed open in cooling blood, and knew—for the first time in all his life—no love for God.

The moment passed away eventually, but the Meoraq who rose from his knees at the end of that bad time would forever be changed from the man he had been and he knew it. He collected his weapons, cleaned and sheathed them. He gave what fuel remained to the fire so that he could count his remaining provisions by its light and make them ready for the next day’s travel. Then he lay down and closed his eyes.

There was nothing he could do until morning.

4

A
mber woke up to the sound of what she thought was an engine stuttering. In that moment, before she opened her eyes or even really had a chance to process sound or smell or anything lucid, she felt the overwhelming rush of relief that she had dreamed the whole damn thing. They’d said there would be no dreams in the Sleepers, but they’d been wrong, because she felt as though she’d been locked in that one for years. But she was awake now, which meant she was on Plymouth with Nicci right in the room beside her. There had been no crash. There were no lizardpeople. There was no Meoraq…

That hurt and it was the hurt that pierced her enough to drag her eyes open and see for herself what was real.

The first thing she saw was the wall. A leather wall, dyed black and stretched between some rough-cut poles, not so much to keep the weather out as to keep the light of their fire in. The crudity of this enclosure assured her at once that, for good or ill, she was still marooned on an alien planet with a race full of lizardmen.

Only after this fact sank in did she
recognize that she was still bound—wrists to elbows, ankles to each other—and tethered to one of the poles holding the wall up. The belt that had gagged her had been loosened but not removed; it hung around her neck like a dog collar. The next thing she saw, what she probably should have seen first, was a small, slender lizardman—a lizardlady, maybe—hunched over with its wrists tied to a length of pole along with several other lizards, stuttering hoarsely without words.

Crying.
All this time, she’d thought Meoraq had never seen anyone else cry but her. The sight of the lizard in a posture of such helpless, terrified surrender, coughing out its sobs as quietly as possible while the raiders (a lot more raiders, she noticed) talked around a campfire close by, pulled at Amber’s heart in a way only Nicci’s crying jags had ever been able to do before.

“Hey,” she said before she stopped to think that nothing she said was going to make any kind of sense to these people. “Hey, don’t cry. It’s…well, it’s
not okay, but it will be. It might be.”

The lizardlady (
she was positive now that was what the captives were. They had smoother, more delicate features and, more to the point, they appeared to have a breast. Only one. It wasn’t much—just a slight swelling in the center of each slender chest, more like a broad wedge than the round bubbles Amber had, but plainly a breast) gave her a fearful, shivering stare and began to stutter harder.

“What in
the grip of God’s loving arms did I just hear?” The leader rose from his place at the fire, silencing his men with a wave of one hand before aiming it at Amber like a gun. “Did you just talk?”

She clamped her
bloody lips together and said nothing. Her jaws still ached and the taste of blood was still bitter in her mouth. She could be as defiant as she wanted in her heart, but the rest of her didn’t want the gag again.

The
raider’s leader was not deterred. He crossed the small camp in just a few steps to hunker beside her and prodded at her shoulder with one blunt finger. “Say something.”

“Fuck off,” she said. Stupid thing to say. She could have wished him a Merry Christmas for all the good it did her.

“God blows blessings up my ass,” someone else said, standing up. “It
can
talk!”

“You’re both imagining things,” said a third lizardman. “It’s just making sounds, those aren’t words.”

“Those aren’t dumaqi words,” the leader corrected. He drew a knife—he wore a pair high on his arms, like Meoraq—and showed it to her. “I think it’s time I had a better look at you, little one. Hold still and this won’t hurt. Toss around and I guarantee nothing.”

He did not untie her. He left her hands behind her back and her legs cinched t
ogether and simply cut along the seam of her tunic, severing each clumsy stitch she’d sewed on herself, until it just fell open. He grunted, flicking at strands of her hair with the tip of his knife, then stabbed it into the ground for safe-keeping and cupped her chin in his hand. He turned her head this way, then that, nudged at her lips, her ear, the ticklish flesh around some healing scratch on her cheek. Then he let go and dropped his gaze.

He touched her breast, then gripped it, kneaded it. His scales and the cold popped a nipple out for him; his thumb rolled over it thoughtfully, gave it a pluck, a careful pinch. He stopped when she winced, eyed her, then moved on to finger her bellybutton. He seemed to be trying to push his finger into it and when he finally decided that wasn’t going to happen, he leaned back on his heels and just grunted again.

“Where do you suppose it came from?” someone asked.

“Washed in on some storm.” He flexed the spines on the back of his head in a shrugging motion. “
If you’d ever read the Prophet’s Word, you’d know that the first years after the Fall brought all manner of new and terrible life out of Gann.”

More than one raider cast his eyes skyward or hid them entirely behind a rubbing hand, but only
the one called Vek, with a bandaged arm and a glazed look in his eye, was reckless enough to actually say, “Zhuqa, my missing hand is screaming at me in ways you can’t imagine. I can’t hear that piss-talk tonight and stay sane.”

“
You go north far enough, you will find monsters. Hairy beasts as tall as three men standing on each other’s shoulders, swinging tails that can knock a man dead without even knowing he was there. Legless things in the rocky cracks that come up and bite, steal the feeling from a man’s body, and while he lies there unable to move, they crawl up into his slit and make a den in his guts. Even the trees have teeth there and will eat a man if he stumbles too close. I have been to the northlands,” he went on as his men murmured uneasily at each other. “I have seen all these things. This—” He gave Amber’s breast another rough, almost petting squeeze. “—is new to my eyes, but if they have monsters in the north, they must have them elsewhere as well.”