The Last Hour of Gann (158 page)

She slipped away like a shadow on the grass. Meoraq did not watch her. He took six breaths and six more and then knelt on the wet bank to pray until peace found him. He stood, breathed, and knelt again, this time to ask for healing for his good woman and the strength and patience to tend the humans with whose care he had been charged. He stood, breathed, and knelt a final time, wetting his fingers with mud and painting his naked chest. He prayed, and in that silent prayer were thoughts of black gratitude that Sheul had held him fast against Nicci’s hand, because for a moment…

He stood, brushed the dried flakes of mud from his scales, then returned to the underlodge alone. He did not look for Nicci among the sleeping humans at the wall. He went to his cupboard. His woman roused halfway to raise the bedding and let him come beneath, then snuggled close and began to growl softly in her sleeping breaths, the way she claimed not to do. He held her, loving her, hating Nicci—Gann and Sheul each with a hand on his heart—and lay awake for hours.

7

B
eing hurt sucked.

It wasn’t the pain. The pain was extremely present, but Amber could handle pain. What she couldn’t handle, at least not with any good grace, was the boredom.

Amber knew how it felt to recover from whatever had bitten her that day back in the prairie. She remembered the weakness—needing to be carried, to be fed, to be tended like some…some sick person. But she also knew that it hadn’t lasted long. She’d been pretty out of it for a while, but once the fever broke, she was on her feet and walking in just five more days. Maybe not at her full speed, but walking.

But five days after Meoraq washed the maggots out of her side, Amber felt no better. She wasn’t walking, full speed or any speed; she still needed help just getting upstairs to pee. The pain gradually subsided, but she was always cold, always dizzy, always tired. She wasn’t getting better.

“Nothing’s happening!” she moaned as Meoraq carried her outside on Day Eighteen. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You lost a lot of blood,” he replied. “Sheul can heal your flesh, but blood takes time to renew.”

“It’s taking too long.”

“Stop whining. Try to see this as a time of leisure. Enjoy it.”

Enjoy it. Amber’s experience in the cave in the mountains should have prepared her for a lot of lying around doing nothing, but what she’d failed to consider was that, in the mountains, she’d hadn’t done much nothing at all. She and Meoraq had managed to keep busy most days, and on those rare occasions when they’d run out of busywork, there was always sex. These days, sex was as far out of the question as walking up the stairs.

All she could do was lie there.

Meoraq kept busy, because he was sadistic like that, but he refused to let her out of the cupboard. He got to bustle around the underlodge doing minor repairs and arranging things in their limited space until it was almost homey. He got to do all the cooking and cleaning and hunting. He got to scrounge up pieces of wood and carve them into various utensils, which he did in a yellow-striped state of high piss-off and which he would not allow her to do for him, even though there was no good reason why not, unless he thought she was going to maim herself some more. She told him as much in one of her surlier moods. He shut the cupboard door on her.

And that was how the time passed. Meoraq hunted, gathered, patrolled, prayed, built, repaired, replaced. Eric and Dag and Crandall had occasional spasms of productivity, doing whatever small tasks Meoraq assigned them without complaining, or at least complaining in a laughing way. Even Nicci, who did little and said less, wandered in and out whenever her odd moods took her. Amber lay in the cupboard and grew blood.

Meoraq washed and licked her wounds twice each day, and while he often told her she was healing well, he never said she was going to be as good as new. The kipwe’s claws had left three broad furrows in her side, which Meoraq’s bug-based first-aid had twisted into a godawful mess. The baby-new skin growing there was pink and shiny and unbelievably sensitive; the scar tissue knotted up in it, thick and white and dead. Sunk in the middle of this was a narrow depression, slightly askew, like a second, drunken belly-button.

She hated to look at herself under the blanket, so much so that every time Meoraq left the underlodge, she snuck out and put her tunic on. For Meoraq, wearing clothes in bed made about as much sense as wearing them in the bathtub—something which was not merely unnecessary but a little bit crazy. He’d come home and take them off her. She’d sneak out and put them on. After a few days of this, he made some ridiculously mild remark she couldn’t even remember now and she’d burst into tears and cried until she got a headache. He immediately handed over her clothes, which made her cry harder.

And that was something else, the emotional stuff. Like a playground seesaw with tears on one end and throwing up on the other, as her bouts of unplanned puking slacked off, the equally sudden crying jags picked up. She felt like a crazy person and she had no one to talk to about it.

“You’re pregnant,” said Nicci, the one time she’d tried to bring it up.

“Oh bullshit.”

“When was your last period?”

“I don’t know.” But she knew it had been in the cave where she and Meoraq had spent the winter. And she knew she’d finished not too terribly long before they’d left.

“When were you supposed to get it?”

“I don’t know! Quit talking like that!”

Nicci did, but now the thought was there, itching under her scales, as Meoraq would say. It had been thirty-two days already by that time. She knew because the interior walls of the cupboard were made of bricks, cut from some sort of chalky stone, aged to a dark grey, but which left nice white lines when chipped at with the sharp tip of Meoraq’s kzung. Thirty-two days
and change since Crandall had watched her bathing and decided she was ‘putting the belly back on’. Thirty-two days and change plus however long she’d been with Zhuqa, plus the six days it had taken to climb down out of the mountains, plus however many days it had been since she’d finished her period. And that was way too long.

Never mind. It didn’t mean anything. She’d get it when it was time to get it and she sure as hell wasn’t in any hurry for that to happen before she could at least walk herself out to clean up.

She waited. That was it. That was all she could do.

So she did it.

* * *

Amber woke up to the cupboard door sliding open. She kept her eyes shut until she heard the familiar sound of his strikers scraping together, but after he got the lamp lit, she raised her head to watch Meoraq go through his usual morning stretches with her usual morning depression. He caught her looking, paused mid-flex, then abruptly stopped and got dressed.

“Are you awake?” he asked, meaning, ‘Are you going back to sleep or do I have to carry you upstairs now?’

“Yeah, probably. You go ahead, though.”

He grunted and left without a goodbye or a backwards glance.

Amber reached out and groped until she found Meoraq’s sword-belt hanging on the cupboard door. She unclipped his kzung and made the day’s mark.

“Do you guys have to talk so much?” Crandall muttered behind the curtain.

“What do you want us to do, pass each other notes?” Amber replaced the kzung and rolled onto her back, staring at the familiar and hated sight of the cupboard ceiling.

She could hear Eric muttering, probably telling Crandall not to be such a dick first thing in the morning, because the next thing she heard was an angry sigh and Crandall saying, “How you feeling, Bierce?”

“Got a stitch in my side,” she replied flatly. She said that every time someone asked her that. One of these days, it was going to be funny.

“See? She’s fine.”

Now it was Dag muttering, but
it was Eric who got up. He pulled back the curtain to open up the room, folded his blanket, packed his pack—a Fleetman still, after all this time—and came over to the cupboard. “Let me see it,” he said.

Amber’s hand clenched on the blanket over her side. “Fuck you! Why?”

“Because it’s making you miserable to keep it a secret. Let me see.”

Amber stared at the ceiling for a few more seconds, hoping he’d go away, not enough to a
ctually tell him to go away, then finally threw back the blanket and lifted her tunic to the waist.

“Wow.” Eric’s
eyebrows rose appreciatively. “That’s pretty gruesome.”

She felt herself relax without ever feeling herself tighten up. She’d been so sure she was about to hear him tell her all the ways it wasn’t so bad when it plainly was. “Yeah,” she said and looked at it herself.
It was just as ugly as it had been yesterday, but for some reason, with Eric standing there, it also looked rounder. Her stomach clenched; the scars buckled.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore. Sometimes, if I move just right, it kinda stretches and feels tight, you know? And sometimes the new skin hurts if you touch it.” She prodded at the dimple, resisting the urge to shudder. It felt firm, if alien and horrible. She was not getting fat. “Feels like wax.”

Eric
touched her stomach. She could feel the heat of his hand, but not the texture. Looking at her scars, Eric said, “I don’t think anyone’s said this yet, but you really showed your stuff out there.”

She frowned, ready to be offended if that was the insult it sounded like.
“Is that a joke?”

“I don’t mean just the porcupine-thing
. I mean how you went after it. For us. After everything…” He looked her in the eye at last, his hand heavy over her unfeeling scars. “You even stood up for Scott and I know you don’t like him. I guess…I guess you deserve to hear someone say thanks.”

She hadn’t realized how completely she’d given up on that until she felt how shocked she was to finally hear it. Her mouth was actually open. She was gaping.

“I’d really like it if we could start over,” said Eric. “I realize that’s asking a lot, but…Do you remember when I told you how friends matter?”

“Yeah.”

“I was trying to tell you how important it was for you to get along with us.” Eric smiled crookedly. “We really should have been making more of an effort to get along with you. It’s not too late, is it?”

Eric’s direct stare was getting hard to meet. Amber looked away and, like a ghost
in a bad movie, Meoraq’s head was there, floating in the shadows just over Eric’s left shoulder.

Eric saw something in her face. He turned around and promptly tried to jump back, banging his shoulders into the cupboard frame and his hand into the door in his hurry to take it off her. “Oh, you’re back. That was quick,” he said, trying to laugh.

Meoraq did not respond, unless you counted a very slight tilting of his head.

Obviously,
Eric knew what that meant now. “We were just talking,” he said, holding up his hands.

Meoraq didn’t answer, even with a grunt. He also didn’t step back, forcing Eric to retreat by sidling along the cupboard door until he had enough room to make a dive for the stairs. Meoraq watched him go, then glanced back at the others.

Dag and Nicci got up immediately and left the underlodge. Crandall followed at his own deliberate pace, laughing.

When they were gone, Meoraq unexpectedly flared his mouth open in a
lizardish grin and coughed laughter of his own.

“Tell me you didn’t scare the crap of him just because you could,” Amber said.

“He put his hand on you,” Meoraq replied with a casual shrug. He went to light a fire in the hearth. “How did it feel?”

“His hand? What kind of question—
”

“His words. His…” Meoraq snorted with extra-special sarcasm. “…gratitude.”

“Don’t say it like that,” said Amber, annoyed. “At least he’s making an effort.”

“He certainly is,” Meoraq murmured, smiling.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Meoraq set the heat stones in the fire to warm up, fill
ed his stewing pouch with water and hung the half-emptied flask back on the wall. He was still smiling.

At last, exasperated beyond belief, she got it. “You think he was coming on to me, don’t you?”

“I suspect that is just what I think.”

Amber slammed the cupboard door on him.

He opened it and leaned inside, spines relaxed, smirking. “How long would you say we’ve been here?”

Amber moved the blanket and checked her notches. “Fifty-three days,” she said
and heard, like a ghost of a ghost, Nicci whisper,
When was your last period
? She shivered.

Meoraq
didn’t notice. His spines were at full attention as he leaned into the cupboard to look at her calendar. “Why are you defacing my bed?”

“It’s how prisoners keep track of time where I’m from,” she told him, making sure there was an extra emphasis on ‘prisoners’. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I don’t have a subject. I merely observe that a man doesn’t take fifty-three days to say things he feels strongly about. He had another motive.”