The Last Hour of Gann (146 page)

They peed, then climbed back to the top of the ravine and sat down. “Funny how girls can never go to the bathroom alone,” said Nicci, plucking absently at blades of grass.

“What did Crandall want you to tell me?”

“He wanted to know if you were pregnant.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“Are you?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

Nicci shrugged and tossed some grass away. There wasn’t enough wind to carry it far. Most of it landed on her leg.

“It isn’t funny,” said Amber.

“I told him you throw up a lot when you get upset. At least you used to.”

It was Amber’s turn to pick at the gras
s. “I didn’t know you knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“You don’t like it when people think you have…you know.”

“Problems?” Amber offered with a listless smile.

“Feelings.”

That was ugly. The wind stayed warm.

“I
used to figure that if you were bulimic, you’d be losing weight,” Nicci said after a little time had stretched itself out to the snapping point. “But you weren’t, so I figured you were fine. And then, at the end, when you
were
losing weight…I just didn’t care that much. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure it was.

The walls of the windbreak were coming down. Nicci twisted around to watch, plucking more grass. “Mom used to get morning-sick,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.” Most of the time, it was how she knew to go to the aborters.

“So did I.”

Amber closed
her eyes and pressed at them.

“Want to see where they took it out?”

She didn’t, but Nicci leaned back and opened up her tunic to show the raised pink dash of the scar over her belly. It was surprisingly neat.

“They had something
so I didn’t feel it,” Nicci said, rubbing at it. “And it kept me pretty high afterwards, too. It was nice, while it lasted. I don’t know how they knew I was pregnant. I wasn’t showing. But I guess they were doing these exams almost every day…and they’re not, you know, cavemen. They know what they’re doing. It’s amazing, really, what they can do without a real hospital. But when you stop and think about it…scalpels and needles and things…none of those are machines. Anyway, I guess they might have heard the heartbeat or something. I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry, Nicci.”

“I’m not. I didn’t want it. It was one of them.”

Amber watched her little sister close her tunic and tie up her belt again, trying to make that make some kind of sense. “What do you mean?” she asked at last. “That…That it would turn out like…like
Scott?”

“That would be pretty bad, too,” Nicci agreed with another careless shrug. “But I mean it was one of them. One of the dumaqs.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Whatever. I saw it come out of me.
I know what it was.”

“But…But they’re aliens!”

Nicci picked some more grass and dropped it.

“It’s not possible!” Amber said, louder.

“Commander Scott said it was probably the Vaccine.”

“What?”

“It mutates, remember? So that we don’t catch any alien viruses. We just sat there in the Sleeper for God knows how many years, soaking in that Vaccine, letting it change…whatever it felt like changing. You know the only thing that stops us from catching pregnant from any old…you know? Stuff? It’s that our bodies don’t know what it is, so it doesn’t take. Everything has to match up, you know? All these, I don’t know, millions and millions of connections.”

“But—”

“But we had the Vaccine,” said Nicci in a thoughtful way, “and here’s what I think. You know how regular vaccines work, right? They’re little teeny tiny pieces of the virus that makes you sick, just enough so that you make the, I don’t know, the anti-virus. But our Vaccine works on all of them. How is that possible, Amber? You went to the seminars. You remember all this. How can one shot be made up of billions and billions of different diseases, even alien ones?”

“Because it…it changes,” said Amber. “It finds the bug and it copies it so we can make our own cure before we ever get sick.”

“Right,” said Nicci, nodding. “It finds the bug. And it copies it. It takes our cells, with our DNA, and it changes them.”

Amber stared at her.

“Well…every new drug has unexpected side-effects, right? Headaches. Dizziness. Insomnia.” Nicci looked back into the sky to watch the sun climb higher. “Ours just may cause lizard-babies.”

Zhuqa. Zhuqa, over and over.
It was impossible and she didn’t believe it and she didn’t care what Nicci thought or what she said she’d seen, but oh God, not with Zhuqa.

She looked back and saw Meoraq standing at the edge of camp with his arms folded, watching them while all the other lizardmen rolled the windbreak into bundles and shouldered supplies. Her heart ached once, as sharply as a stabbing, and then bled down into her belly.

‘He is never going to want to touch me again,’ thought Amber, almost calmly.

Then she bent over without warning and threw up again.

“Yeah,” said Nicci, watching her. “You’re just upset. That’s what I told Mr. Crandall. Come on. We’d better go.”             

* * *
 

They walked the day out undisturbed either by men from Praxas or from Gann, not that there was much of a distinction. They had a stream to keep their flasks filled and good stony ground that would not show their tracks and always the cover of trees around them, so if that made a day good, it was a good day, but they made miserable distance.

Onahi’s men marched in pairs around the rest, relieving Meoraq’s burden considerably as he watched for the ambush that never came. The women were slow, still fearful of the open wilds and unused to so much walking, but they were obedient and not difficult to manage even so. The humans, now. Oh, the humans…

They walked as if they had only just learned how that morning, constantly staggering and catching at one another, constantly
out of breath, constantly whining at his back. Meoraq wasn’t completely insensitive to their condition. He knew they had been penned all winter, ill-fed and ill-used. He knew they were trying. He let them rest an hour for nearly every hour walked and never said a word against it. Some muttered thanks, but not many. Some clustered around Scott and whispered, but not all. It did his bitter heart good to see that the polish was finally dimming on that gilded lump of ghet-shit, but he could still feel color itching in his throat all that interminable day.

So he halted them in the early evening after traveling less than two spans—less a call for camp than a cry of surrender—with plenty of good hours left in the day to hunt or patrol or just pray before night truly fell.
The walls went up. Fires were lit. The women went to work brewing tea and heating cold kipwe, all but Xzem, who knelt with Amber in the mouth of a tent with the infant singing in her arms and Nicci close by to watch. Most of the humans rested by their fool abbot, but Eric went out to gather deadfall for the fires and Dag actually helped the women with the cooking.

Around the small camp,
Onahi’s men—now men under Uyane, he supposed—kept watch. Their quiet talk eased him; not their words, which were exactly the sort of low garrison-talk one would expect, but just their speech. Dumaqi in male voices, relaxed and uncomplicated, with meanings he didn’t have to guess at. He didn’t think he was lonely and wouldn’t have believed it if someone told him he was, but the pleasure that came just to listen was almost enough to take even the ugliness of Praxas from his heart. How much better would it be, he wondered, to be home again in Xeqor, to hear not only familiar words but familiar voices? See his brothers’ faces? Sleep in his own bed?

He was ready, he realized. The fate that had been so damning when he first confronted it now seemed to him as welcome as Sheul’s own Halls. Home. Family. Rest.

Amber.

And there his gaze lay for some time, upon his wife and the infant she held to her heart. She sensed it, looked up. Their eyes met and Sheul’s fires, coole
d but never entirely gone, surged at once to greater life.

Meoraq turned away and beckoned
Onahi to him. He had to do it twice; the other man’s attention had been fixed and somewhat glazed upon Xzem. “Call your sentries in,” he ordered. “I want a private hour with my woman. No one is to leave this camp for any reason until my return.”

“I mark.”
Onahi’s eyes traveled the camp, counting his men…but came back to Xzem. And lingered.

“These are women of my House,” Meoraq reminded him, trying not to sound as if he were also warning him.

“I will not dishonor your camp, sir.”

Meoraq grunted, now studying
Onahi instead of Amber. The fires were insistent, but a Sheulek was the master of every impulse, even that one. “Have you seen women before?” he asked bluntly.

“At a distance.”
Onahi managed with effort to look at Meoraq. “But no mother…apart from my own.” He hesitated, clearly battling the urge to speak further, and ultimately defeated by it. “I have gone to Gann, sir. I submit myself to your judgment.”

Meoraq’s spines snapped up. “Eh?”

“I have gone to Gann,” Onahi said again, his words all but bleeding in the air. “I have tried to pray. I have begged our Father’s forgiveness all this day and all last night, but I…”

Meoraq waited, beginning to feel restless now that the first astonishment of this incredible confession was fading. The fires in his belly burned and Amber was watching him. “You?” he prompted impatiently.

“It is unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother,” Onahi said and seemed to break. Without moving, his strained body became soft as clay. “It is unforgiveable. The taint of my city is on me. I must submit to your sword.”

Meoraq took a moment to puzzle this out. “You want a woman,” he said at last.

Onahi closed his eyes.

So did Meoraq, before someone could see him rolling them. He rubbed at his brow-ridges, took six breaths (without sighing and that was nearly an ordeal in itself), and said, “I do not see Gann’s hand on you, watchman. It is the fires of our
Father you feel. Take a woman.”

“It is unforgiveable—
”

“Take another woman.” Meoraq beckoned to his own and started to turn away. Sheul’s hand fell on him at once; he turned b
ack and yes, Onahi was staring at Xzem.

There was something in this, he was certain, something he was meant to see…but whatever it was, it would have to wait. Intellectually, he knew no man had ever died of lust, but his belly felt as if it were filled with molten lead and his thoughts had begun to slip
toward the same killing black that took him in the arena. If he did not take his woman soon, he thought it very likely that Sheul would take her in his stead. As for Onahi—

“Go to my tent,” Meoraq ordered. “Make your prayers and b
e prepared to submit to my judgment upon my return.”

Onahi
saluted and went without question as Amber came near, looking back over her shoulder either at the baby or at Nicci. “I’m really worried—” she began.

“Come with me,” he said and left the camp.

Onahi’s watchmen raised their fists as he passed by, but he was beyond acknowledging them. He strode swiftly out between the walls and as soon as Amber had joined him, he took her roughly by the arm and walked as far as he could stand to go. He refused to rut with his woman on the ground where anyone could hear them. He could see a sturdy-looking tree twenty paces away, maybe thirty; it may as well be a thousand.

“Wait,” said Amber, pulling at him.

He grunted and kept going, dragging her with him, seeing nothing but that tree.

“I have to talk to you! Damn it!” And with a mighty yank, her hand was gone from his grip. “This is important!”

He turned on her, hearing the hiss that spat out of his throat, but unable to feel even a spark of shame for it. She was his woman, his wife! Why could she not give him her obedience for one fucking day?

Blackness took him for a heartbeat, no longer, but when it faded, he had his hand on her throat and his face biting-close to hers. Confusion swelled, overshadowing rage but not killing it. He shut his mouth, leaned back, and finally released her.

She stared at him, trembling and furious even with tears welling in her eyes. It made him think of Nicci, which made him think of the watchman in Praxas fucking her through the cage, which made him think of the tree he may not reach tonight. He had to turn around, facing into the chill spring wind, and took several minutes to breathe himself calm. One for the Prophet…two for his Brunt…three for Uyane…

He was Uyane.

“Speak,” he said at last.

“Aren’t you going to look at me?”

“No.”

There was quiet at his back. He did not hear her crying, not until she spoke again. The tears were in her voice and they cut at him, but he did not look at her.