The Last Hour of Gann (157 page)

She still had no answer.

“If we get to this temple and there’s a ship there and someone can fly it and we can go back to Earth, are you coming with me?”

Amber’s mouth moved. No sound came out.

“If there isn’t a ship,” said Nicci, “are you going to take care of me?”

“Nicci—”

“Or do you think you’ve done enough? After you brought me here, after you made me come with you, are you just going to wash your hands and say you’ve done enough? You got your man who loves you and will take care of you and save you forever, so maybe you don’t care anymore, but I’m still here, Amber. I still need you.”

“I’m here,” said Amber, reaching out to touch her arm. There was no answering touch, not even a glance in that direction. It was like touching a corpse. “And I’ll always be here for you, Nicci. We’re sisters. Nothing’s going to change that. Look, I kn
ow it’s hard, but you can do it. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to sit around. I can teach you how to make hides and clothes and stuff.”

“You said you’d always take care of me.”

“I am.”

“Not like you used to.”

Amber nodded, accepting this, then shook her head, and then just sat there and stared at the cupboard ceiling. “I don’t think I did either of us any favors hovering over you like that back home,” she said at last. “Mama wasn’t much of a mother…and neither was I. I love you, Nicci, I do…” She sighed and rubbed her eyes, then made herself turn around and face her expressionless sister without flinching. “…but I’m not going to carry you for the rest of your life. The ship crashed and I’m sorry…but it’s time to move on.”

Nicci said nothing, did nothing, just let the minutes tick out. At last, she reached out and gently closed the cupboard door, leaving Amber in the dark to listen
as her baby sister walked away.

* * *

The remainder of the day passed in relative peace, although given the chaos surrounding his awakening, anything short of a direct attack could be considered relative peace. The humans kept their distance, wisely. Meoraq’s headache had lost its sharp edges over the course of the day, but it still sat heavy behind his eyes. He had drunk four pots of tea and his throat still felt scratchy and tasted like a long lick up Gann’s slit. He was aware that all these things made a light penance for the sin of chewing phesok, but it still made for a deeply unpleasant day.

He meditated as much of it away as possible, rousing only to attend his or his woman’s most basic bodily needs. When he wasn’t meditating, he sat at the table and stared at his humans, making a game of herding them from one wall to the other by his looks alone. He made no patrols, no hunts. When he decided he was hungry enough, he ate half of the previous day’s stew, cold. If Amber had asked, he would have stirred himself to heat the rest for her, but she claimed a weak belly and took nothing but tea all day. As for the other humans, they could eat cold stew or starve for all that Meoraq cared.

All days end, as he had reminded his wife that morning. In the last quiet hour before dark, his day’s idleness bit back at him in an entirely foreseeable manner: He was not in the least tired.

His humans were already settling in for the night, sharing out the remains of the stew and throwing sullen glances at him. That cheered him somewhat, but it really was a poor show of his true character and he’d ought to pray about it. In the meantime, however, there was Amber.

Although she had been dozing most of the day, she did not share his restlessness now. She was sleeping soundly when he woke her to tend her wound. The maggots had done their work well; the flesh looked pink and had a strong knit going where the beetle heads had been placed. He washed the wound twice with tea and licked it thoroughly, ignoring Amber’s informative mutterings as to how ‘gross’ he was.

But with this done and the wound wrapped again, he had nothing else to do. If he were in the city, Meoraq could simply light a lamp and read the Word or take the rooftop or find some other way to entertain himself, but he
was loathe to waste what little lamp oil he’d brought with him out of Chalh. In their winter’s camp, when he had spent days on end confined to a cave, he’d always had the option of rigorous sex to exhaust himself before bed. He didn’t know what he was going to do with himself tonight.

“Are you tired?” he asked, without much hope.

“Yeah. Why? What’s up?” She visibly rallied herself to appear alert. A good woman was always thinking of how to lessen her man’s burdens and see to his needs. Meoraq’s selfish heart burned a little, but not enough to keep him from undressing and crawling into the cupboard with her.

“We going to fool around?” she whispered when the door was shut. Her hands were brazen on his back. Her little teeth nipped at his shoulder.

“No,” he said. “That would be unforgiveable.”

“Oh.” She drew away and nestled herself into the bedding. “Good. Because in all honesty, I had maggots in me all day and I’m feeling about the most unsexy I’ve ever felt in my life. Want to talk?”

He did, but she was so obviously weary and he didn’t have anything to say anyway. “Just sleep.”

She
did—the only command he’d ever given that she’d followed without question—and he lay with her in the cupboard for a time, resting in the hopes that he might sleep as well, but it was not to be. He could hear the humans bedding down, their low chat giving way to grunts and shuffling, and then to the growling breaths of heavy sleep. Meoraq tried to meditate, but his mind was as restless as his clay and in the end, he rose and pulled his breeches on, then climbed to the surface where he couldn’t disturb anyone.

The night was warm and windy, but dry yet. He basked a short while in the pleasant sensa
tion of standing against the wind and what a fierce, masculine picture it must make, and then heard the clumsy tread of a human footfall on the stair behind him. Nicci, he saw. He reminded himself to be polite.

“How is she?” Nicci asked quietly.

“She rests in Sheul’s sight,” he replied, moving aside in case she wished to go past him and out to the fleshing pit to urinate.

She joined him at the doorway, but that was all. Her eyes went to the horizon, to the
distant black line before the mountains that was Praxas. She gazed on it in silence and without expression.

Meoraq groped for something to say as the moment stretched itself indefinitely outward. “What do you want?” he asked at last.

“Nothing. I can’t sleep.”

He grunted, thinking she might manage a better effort were she lying down with her eyes closed.
Of course, so could he.

“I’m sorry I,
um, attacked you. Earlier.”

H
e glanced at her, then back into the trees. “I forgive you.”

He waited for her to leave. She didn’t.

“Am I bothering you?” she asked.

Meoraq tipped a brooding eye upwards at the heavens where Sheul sat in judgment over every lie and told one anyway. “No.”

“Can I stand with you?”

He grunted again.

She moved a little closer to him. There was no polite way to step back, so he stood there and did his best to ignore her. After a very long, suffocating silence, she said, “You saved our lives. All of us. I thought I was going to die in that cage.”

He was uncomfortable responding to this in any way—to agree was to take the credit for Sheul’s hand upon him, to deny seemed to dismiss her suffering in that place—and so he
said, “Sheul’s judgment shall fall upon Praxas in His own time,” and tried to leave it at that.

“I know.”

There was an answer he had never anticipated. “Do you?”

“If He hadn’t been with me, I never would have survived at all,” she told him, and watched his face closely.

He turned into the wind, aware that he was frowning, unsure exactly why. It had certainly been a good answer…but he could not shake the feeling that it had not been an honest one.

“Will you take a walk with me?” sh
e asked after another grueling silence.

“Why?”

“I’m restless and I don’t want to go anywhere alone.”

Sensible answer. He did not want to agree, but this was Amber’s blood-kin, and if blood ran true in no other manner, doubtless it would do so now and she would stride out into the wild without him upon his refusal.

“A short walk,” he said, and set a course for the stream.

She followed obediently, beside and a little behind him, with head bent and hands meekly clasped before her. It was deeply disturbing to him, and after a moment’s thought, he
knew why: It was the respectful walk of a well-bred dumaq woman at the side of her man. Realizing that, he tried to put some distance between them. She reached out and caught his hand. It took all his will not to pull out of that flimsy human grip, but only to walk, staring straight ahead and leaving his hand limp and unfeeling in hers.

It had never been so long a distance to the water. He had actually begun to think he had somehow lost his way when he heard it ahead of him in the same place it had always been. He checked for tracks out of habit, but no sooner had he hunkered beside the muddy bank than she was kneeling next to him, resting her hand upon his thigh. A light touch, surely. A thoughtless touch, perhaps. He could think of no good way to throw it off and so he stared fixedly into the ground with his damned thigh on fire under her unwelcome hand and wished he knew what the hell she was on about.

Of all his wishes, that was the one Sheul chose to grant.

Nicci kept her hand
where it was, then turned toward him and placed the other with deliberate intent into his breeches and beneath his loin-plate. The tip of her wind-chilled finger slipped along his slit, seeking entry, but only for a moment. The world crashed back into focus; Meoraq shoved her violently away, slapping one hand to his groin and actually rubbing, as if her touch came with some polluted grease. Such was his horror in that moment that if she’d come at him again, he would have drawn and stabbed her.

But she didn’t. She sprawled across the bank of the stream and began to run water out of her eyes.
“It’s okay,” she wept, trying to smile at him. “It’s okay. I won’t tell. I know you want to. It’s fine.”

He took two swift backwards steps,
well out of her reach. “I don’t want this! I don’t want you!”

“I’m just the same as she is!” she pleaded, wiping mud onto her face with every swipe of her hand. “We look the same! We sound the same! You can
do anything you want to me and you can…you can take care of me!”

And there it was. Shock died at once, crushed by the weight of his su
dden disgust. “Take care of you.”

She crawled
toward him in the muck, fumbling at her clothes, the shadows of her face in the moonlight such that it seemed a skull leered at him and it took every measure of his will not to draw his father’s blade and ram it through her throat. “I can be good,” she was saying. She might have been weeping or laughing as she said it, he could not tell which. “You can do everything you like that you’d never ask Amber. You can hurt me if you want to. You can—”

“
Get away from me
!” he roared, and that at last stopped her. She huddled at his feet, poised upon her knees with her bare chest exposed to him, motionless and watchful while he paced the urge to slap out of his body. When he wheeled abruptly and came back to her, she did not cringe, only lifted her head a little higher and reached out her hands.

He caught her by the wrists before she could touch him an
d pulled her roughly up before shoving her back. He eyed the growths on her chest with disgust and turned away. “Cover yourself.”

She did, silent and small.

“She is my wife and your blood-kin,” he said tightly, facing furiously into the wind. “This is incest! Blasphemy before Sheul!”

She uttered a high, shivery sound. He was fairly certain it was a laugh, but a laugh such as the damned must use, once death and eternity had driven them mad.

“Do you think you’re any different from them?” she asked, scorn like knives in her querulous words. “Do you really? God makes it happen, remember? It’s not a sin because God made them want me, right? So if it’s God’s will, what are you afraid of?” She came toward him, her mouth a black and ghastly crescent of a smile, to put her hands on him again. “What does
Sheul
want you to do with me?”

“Kill you
.”

She flinche
d back, her smile lost at once. The wind smeared water across her cheeks. “I’m just the same as she is,” she said in her fragile voice.

“No,” said Meoraq. “You are not.
And if you ever touch me again, I will see you judged for it. Hear me, N’ki, and mark the word of a Sheulek. It is for her sake alone that I do not cut you down right here. When she hears of this—”

“Don’t tell,” she whispered. “Please, don’t. She’ll hate me.”

“She should!” Meoraq spat, but then took a slow count of six and cleared his heart of Gann’s grip. “This once. Because she is weakened…and so happy to be with you again,” he added in a bitter rush. He breathed some more. “Go.”