The Last Hour of Gann (129 page)

“Almost.”

“Fuck Gann.” Iziz put the bowl aside and eyed his leader with a disturbed expression. “What did you do?”

“You mean after I fell over pissing myself?” Zhuqa snorted. “He got in a few more good shots. I could hear him calling them out. Leaping Drop. Prayer Block. Radiant Twist. No matter what I covered up, there was something else for him to hit. And then he stepped back and let me get up. I could hear him talking, lecturing the other boys, and that lightning struck. And I went at him.”

“Like piss you did.”

Zhuqa drank, shrugging his spines. “He saw me coming and hit me again, ready with some technique or another. I don’t remember what it was. I do remember that he hit me…but hitting didn’t stop me. It was just more lightning. There must have been a time we were grappling because I remember climbing him…not on him, but
climbing
him, like a drop-stair. Then he went down and I began to beat on him the way I have never beaten anyone since. I have killed men, Iziz, and taken several days to do it that I did less damage. It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. I hit him until I broke every bone in my right hand and even that couldn’t stop me hitting him. Have you ever been south as far as Kthuat?”

“Once or twice.”

“They have stands of trees around there. Dead trees, mostly. Full of beetles—”

“Oh, Gann’s fuck-stick, the yumont.” Iziz shuddered. “I heard about those. Saw scars men said came from them. Thought it was a lie to scare us boys from wandering.”

“They’re real. They live in the meat of those dead trees where it’s always warm and if a man should sleep up against one, they might come crawling out and bore in under his scales to live in his meat instead. Something in the bite keeps you from feeling it at first, but then they die. And they itch. If you’re quick about it, you can pry up your scales and dig the body out, but they melt away pretty fast and if that happens, that itch clings around for days upon days and there’s nothing anyone can do to help it. That’s what it was like for me. Hitting him was like scratching over my scales at the itch I could never reach under them. And when it was over, he was lying there on the ground, trying to crawl away. My whole body was on fire wanting to get at that goddamned itch…and my cock came out. Look at her.”

Iziz glanced around. Amber started to look at the baby, then gave up and looked back at them.

“Look at what? I can’t read that face,” Iziz said. “I don’t even know how you can look at it while you’re dipping in it.”

“Just the eyes, then.”

“I cry. What’s she thinking?”

“I don’t know,” said Zhuqa. “But there’s something in those eyes.”

Iziz looked back and forth between the two of them for a few seconds, then snorted and gave Zhuqa a sock to the chest. “Forget her. You’re just getting to the good part. Go on.”

“The good part.” Zhuqa checked his cup, but it was empty. He picked up a root and peeled it instead. “The only thing I knew about cocks at that time in my life was that I had one and I took that entirely on faith. Never seen it, mine or anyone else’s. I knew nothing about sex, other than Sheul gives a man the fire so that he could pass it into a woman and she could grow a baby. Go on and laugh, I know you want to.”

Iziz barked a few times, then rubbed at his eyes. “I was trying to hold it in.”

“You were never any good at that. So it came out for the first time in all my sheltered life and I felt air on it and the air was fire. There was this swaggering little shit of a boy, crawling on the ground in a puddle of his own piss and blood, more than half-naked because I had somehow torn most of his clothes away beating on him. At no time did I think it would feel good or that it would serve the slaveson right. I didn’t even hope it would hurt. I saw the pucker of Gann’s pipe and then I was in it.”

“Fourteen and didn’t know about fucking,” marveled Iziz. “How was it?”

“It didn’t feel right.”

“Noble Sheulek in training that you were.”

“Piss on that. It felt great, just didn’t feel
right
. It was that itch all over again, only six times worse. He was screaming and thrashing around worse than he’d done when I was beating on him, and all I could think was that this was close to whatever it was I needed and if I could just
get
there, everything would stop burning. Fucking helped, so fucking harder ought to help more, and that was what I did, without another thought in my head, until they pulled me off him. I don’t even know who. I fought, but whoever it was got me in a choke and when I woke up, the itch was gone and I was in the cell.”

“Cell? Did you kill him?”

“No. He was even at the tribunal, although he had to sit in a special litter and his face was mashed out of knowing.”

“Tribunal?” Iziz laughed, but quizzically, as if he suspected Zhuqa were having him on. “For throwing a poke into some bullying sprat?”

“No, for throwing a poke into some
high-born
bullying sprat after I’d beaten him into paste. They had it posted on the gate before the hour was out and they were ringing it to order at sunset.”

“Was that what you…?”

“No.” Zhuqa finished off the root and beckoned Amber back to him. Once she was again uncomfortably straddling his thigh, he went on. “No, that wasn’t what they had me for, although that might have been cause enough if they’d found anything in him. Fortunately, I hadn’t cum yet, so in the end, they let me go. I took a public whipping the next morning and I never heard another word about it, except I know they must have sent a message to my father because when I went home for the cold season, I found the little poke my father kept to scrub the floors waiting in my room without a stitch sewn on her.”

“Pretty?” asked Iziz, perking up.

“If you like the sort.” Zhuqa’s hand drifted over Amber’s belly and lightly rubbed. “A little too grey yet for my taste and her eyes were sloped funny, but Gann knows I could sell her here for more coin than I could easily hold. She put her hand on my slit and out came my cock and before the hour turned, I knew indisputably that God looked down from His heaven and loved me.”

“How many times?” asked Iziz. He was watching Zhuqa rub Amber’s stomach with sleepy, slightly glazed eyes.

“Twice.”

“Twice? You fucking waste of meat! Talk to me about God in His heaven when it’s ten times a poke! I fucked my
mother
more than twice a night!”

“Three is the sacred number of creation and belongs to God alone, you ignorant heathen.” Zhuqa’s hand dropped, pushing two fingers along her folds once or twice before crooking up inside her. Iziz watched that, too. “Piss like that used to matter to me,” he mused.

“Is that her making that sound?” Iziz asked abruptly. “Is she…oiling up at you?”

“No. I was in her once already tonight. Before you killed the mood and got me too drunk to care.” Zhuqa glanced over at the baby, which now lay quiet and perhaps sleeping at Xzem’s breast. “Got any teat-biters out there, Iziz?”

“Probably,” he said without much interest. “You want the rest of this?”

Zhuqa waved the hand that wasn’t working methodically at Amber’s pussy.

Iziz picked up the cup and drank it off. “I want to fuck now. I’m taking one of your slaves for the night.”

Zhuqa grunted and shut his eyes.

“Thought I’d mention. Manners are important to city-born scuff like you. Up, Xzem. Let Eshiqi give the sprat a tap and let’s go.”

Xzem crept forward and presented the wrapped baby from a servile crouch.

Amber looked at Zhuqa.

He grunted without opening his eyes or interrupting the rhythm of his fingers.

Amber reached out and brushed the back of her knuckles lightly across the baby’s snout. It roused at once, sucking sleepily, but began to drift away again almost immediately.

“And that was all it wanted, all this time,” said Iziz. “A smooth blanket.”

“Doesn’t care about the blanket.” Zhuqa fanned his spines forward with deep, drunken pleasure. “Wanted his mother’s touch. Something you would never understand.”

“Piss on that. My mother touched me plenty!” Iziz declared and, giving Xzem a light smack to the back of the head, herded her out and shut the door behind them.

“I’m sure she did,” Zhuqa murmured. “And I’m sure it felt like love. But you’ll never touch my child like that, will you, Eshiqi? Because you love it. And you just may be the only other person in this camp who knows that when you love someone, sometimes you don’t touch.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out slow, patting Amber’s thigh. “Put yourself to bed,” he told her, and gave her a nudge off his lap. He made no effort to follow, only sat there with his eyes closed and one hand resting on the table near his empty cup.

He looked like he was sleeping already, but she thought that would change in a hurry if she so much as touched one of the knives he kept strapped to his arms or took even one step toward the door. Amber
went over and climbed into the cupboard. Sliding the door shut made the bells jingle; she looked out to see if they’d disturbed him and found him already gazing back at her through slitted, cat-content eyes.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he murmured. “The things you find to love in this life…so you don’t hate yourself so much for living it.”

She shut the door on him.

9

T
here was no real sense of time, but Amber thought three more days passed because she slept three times. Zhuqa fed her when they woke up—whatever they had left over from the night before, cold and greasy. He fed her when he brought her home from the workpit—mostly meat with baked roots, and once, some unknown animal’s head with roasted marrow bones. He had a bath brought on the second night and let her bathe herself, after she’d bathed him, of course. He made her talk to him, sometimes in her language, sometimes in his. He had sex with her every night. For hours.             

She worked. Busy hands make
a light heart, as Hruuzk was fond of saying. She learned to make bowls, plates and pitchers as well as lamps. She mended shifts, shirts and breeches, using anything beyond repair as patches. She pounded thousands of xuseth stalks through a sieve with a heavy wooden mallet for hour after hour to get one lousy jar of oil. And of course, at the end of each back-breaking day, there was plenty of lifting, packing, sweeping and scrubbing.

Three days.

On the fourth, things changed.

It was subtle at first
. Hruuzk had been coming at mid-morning to take the children and some of the older slaves off to work in the gardens, kitchens or canals, but not today. This was just unusual enough that Amber noticed, but she hadn’t been there long enough to know what was routine and what wasn’t, so she thought nothing of it except how much more crowded the workpit was. What she noticed next was activity out in the halls, not the crash and roar of a violent rescue, but merely a clamor of boots and voices that grew steadily louder and more raucous throughout the day—the sound of a stadium crowd…or a mob working up for a riot.

The veteran slaves simply kept their heads down and their hands busy, and if they were at all anxious about what was going on outside, they did not show it. Amber tried to follow their example, but when the unseen crowd began to clap, shout and stomp their feet in unison, she threw whatever wicks she’d cut in the oil to soak and retreated to the back room to sit with Xzem and hold the baby. The
y were making so much noise it was impossible to be sure, but she thought they were chanting, “Meat.”

She didn’t have long to wonder what it meant.
The shouting came to a sudden swell of cheers and then Hruuzk opened the door. The children ran to him at once, infected by the unruly energy out in the halls, but he turned them back after just a few words and clapped his hands to stop work.

“
The bidding is about to start,” he called. “All my unstabled ladies, line up. Everyone else, keep working. No fussing,” he added, pointing sternly at Shivers, who had begun to tear up. “Until I have coin in my hand, you all belong to me and my ladies do not what?”

“Piss out of their eyes,” Shivers whispered.

“My ladies do not piss out of their eyes.” He gave her a forgiving pat on the head, using the gesture to put her in the forming line. “Gold-Eyes, Crook-Toe, you go last. They want you, they’ll have to pay for the rest of this lot first.” He glanced through the open door, assessing something in the crowd outside, then beckoned to Amber. “Eshiqi, come.”

She heard her name, saw him looking at her when he said it, and still it made no immediate sense to her. He couldn’t sell her, she was Zhuqa’s!

‘Oh sure,
now
you’re Zhuqa’s,’ the ghost of her dead mother said with a caustic laugh. ‘If you wanted to hide behind his skirts, you should have played his game, little girl. You didn’t, so suck it up.’

But
Meoraq was coming. He was supposed to find her, kill Zhuqa and get her out of here.

‘Well, he didn’t,’ Bo Peep said simply. ‘And this is exactly what you deserve for sitting on your ass and waiting for someone else to save you.’

Hruuzk, making a last inspection of his ladies before they passed out of his keeping, finally noticed she was still sitting next to Xzem. His head cocked. He turned around to fully face her and hooked his thumb behind the buckle of his belt.