The Last Hour of Gann (33 page)

Looking at her, he knocked on the ground in front of him like it was a door.

Amber stood there.

The lizard knocked again, this time with a few words and a flick of his spines.

She sat down where he wanted her.

He grunted and looked away
, watching all the people who were watching them. He muttered under his breath, glanced skyward, scratched his throat. If he had a reason for calling her over, he was in no hurry to tell her what it was.

“Meoraq,” said Amber.

He grunted, still without looking at her. Scott was at the head of the crowd now, just beyond the invisible boundary marked by the lizardman’s swords, listening to the complaints of the people who’d had their bags kicked.

“Meoraq,” said Amber again, reaching for his arm.

He caught her before she could touch him, but he looked at her.

Now what?

“Hand,” said Amber, feeling stupid and a little desperate. She pointed at her own, caught in his unbelievably strong, scaly grip. “Fingers.” She wiggled them.

Meoraq released her, frowning, and watched as she brought her arm up between them.

“Fingers. Look! One, two, three, four, five. Hand,” she said, now pointing at her other one. “And fingers. One, two, three, four, five.”

He said nothing.

“Head,” said Amber, pointing at herself. “Hair. Ear, see it? And this one. Ear. Two ears. Eyes. One, two. Two eyes. Nose. One nose. Mouth. All of it together? This is my
face
. My
face
is the front of my
head
. It…Damn it, will you
say
something?”

He did not, but after a long, frustrating silence, he slowly raised his hand.

“Hand,” said Amber, rubbing her eyes.

He splayed it.

She straightened up a little. “Fingers.”

He made a fist and brought them up one at a time, listening as she counted them off.
He began to point—at the fire, his tent, the trees, the grass, the sky—stopping only once, when one of the Manifestors broke the boundary-line of his camp. Other than that warning hiss, he never made a sound. He made no attempt to repeat the words she said for him.

But this was progress. This could work. She would make it work.

Amber talked, breaking things down into smaller and smaller words, talking until her throat went dry. Meoraq watched, listened, and was silent.

7

T
he longer he listened, the more certain Meoraq became that the strange chatter of the creatures who called themselves humans was indeed a true language, entirely separate from his own. This troubled him. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word. This was the first law of Sheul, repeated no less than twenty-three times throughout the book of His Word, and apart from the obvious, it had been interpreted to mean that there must be a single language so that all men might hear and understand the wisdoms of Sheul. Where once there had been countless tongues spoken over Gann, there was now only one: Dumaqi, the speech of men.

So. That the humans neither spoke nor even seemed to understand dumaqi was therefore an ominous sign of their true nature, but Meoraq had to admit that he had not emerged from his mother’s womb speaking it either. He would have to meditate on the matter. In the meantime, this left him struggling to make sense of a creature who thought all she had to do to talk was move her mouthparts around. And really, what else could they do? A human’s flat face had no snout, which meant no resonance chamber, and Sheul alone knew how hard it must be to make those wriggly little mouthparts shape the sounds those deformed tongues could not. Given their limitations, their
absurdly simplistic language was no more than sounds strung together, entirely lacking the subtle nuance and precision of dumaqi. By the end of that first day, Meoraq was already beginning to glean some understanding from the creatures’ jabber. Not much. A word here. A sound there. A name.

Amber. Her name was Amber.

She sat with him throughout the grey hours of the day when all the other creatures came, stared awhile,
then left again. Her hands moved as she spoke, gesturing here or there to add emphasis to her simple sounds, often returning to indicate just her, just him. Her gaze remained disturbingly direct; her eyes were so damned green.

When darkness fell, they lit
more fires—heaps of wood that gave out more smoke than heat—and sat around them to mutter and stare. They had no meat after their one failed hunt, but the one called Scott eventually brought out a satchel of something in small, wrapped portions for his people to eat. Meoraq was himself overlooked, but as the stuff appeared quite disgusting, he was happy to make do with cuuvash. And since Amber was sitting with him and had not been offered anything, he snapped her off a square too.

She took it. Not immediately
and not without a glance back at her people, but she took it. And after watching him bite into his, she gnawed off a piece of hers and sat, frowning with her entire malleable face, chewing it like cattle.

Scott
came back over, also frowning. He spoke at some short length, gesturing. Amber answered. Scott spoke again, louder. Amber took another bite of cuuvash and appeared to ignore him. Scott aimed his next roll of gibberish at Meoraq. Now Amber said something, but Meoraq pointed two fingers at her and she quieted. “No one speaks for a Sheulek,” he told her. To Scott, he said, “Go away,” making shooing sweeps of his arm so that his meaning could not be misinterpreted.

Scott
talked, not louder but much, much longer, before finally pointing aggressively at Meoraq’s cuuvash.

“Get your own,” said Meoraq, contentedly grinding his cuuvash against the roof of his mouth until it was soft enough to swallow.

Scott waited, moving his angry eyes back and forth between him and Amber, but eventually walked away. Meoraq watched him at the largest fire, speaking tirelessly and looking like nothing so much as a city governor holding court. He could see that Amber was listening, although she did not watch, and she did not appear easy with what she heard. She looked at the remaining portion of cuuvash in her hand and, after only one small bite, tried to give it back to him.

Meoraq turned his head to watch the clouds roll over the moon and pretended not to see. Eventually, she put the cuuvash in a fold of her clothes and he looked at her again. That freakish little nub of a nose. Those fat, purplish folds around her mouth. The rounded shells of her ears.

And her eyes. The living green fire of her eyes.

“No one man can ever comprehend all the wonders of She
ul’s making,” he said, speaking to himself more than to her. “So it says in the Word and I always thought that I believed it. But how could I believe it when I never truly understood until now how much further the wonders of His making could surpass a man’s comprehension?”

“Mee’or
akk,” she replied and reached to touch his chest.

This time, he allowed it, frowning down at her hand where it pressed on his
bare flesh. “No man could have imagined a hand like that,” he mused. “Five fingers and those round, flat, useless little claws. Scaleless. Hairless. Soft. And yet what have you done with that hand but touch a Sheulek?”

“Amber.” She patted
herself just above the twinned swellings of her chest.

“I hear you,” he said, studying them. “Are those really teats or do I just think so because I suspect you to be female and am looking for proof? If they are teats, where is the baby? It would have to be a suckling to swell you so. Or babies, I suppose; you have two teats, you must bear two babies.”

Amber said her name. Meoraq replied with his. He watched her slap her hands to her face and hide behind them, rubbing just as though she had brow-ridges to rub.

That was kind of cute.

“I have to pray,” Meoraq told her, told them both, really. He retreated to his tent to do it and meditated there for some time, fruitlessly, before commending himself to his Father’s divine hands, here in the camp of these creatures, and lying down upon his mat to sleep. He did not undress. He kept his kzung drawn beside him. He feared no creature-assassins but was ready for them. He breathed the way he had been taught, counting six steps over and over, and stopping to listen each time the creatures approached his tent.

As he waited for
Sheul’s peace to overtake his restless mind, he found himself wondering what the young of these creatures might look like. He could almost imagine them—twin monsters in miniature—small hands and greedy mouths at work at the fullness of their mother’s teats (Amber’s, for no other reason than that she was the human he’d been sitting with all day), perhaps one at each.

Outside, the wind gusted, moaning like a woman lost to fire
. Scott’s voice briefly overtook it and Amber answered, her tone as fearless as her hand had been upon his body. Meoraq listened, smiling, then rolled onto his side and closed his eyes to sleep.

* * *

He dreamt.

Dreams, by their very nature, frequently touched at strangeness and he was not a man who attached much importance to them, even when he recalled them upon waking, which was not often. But this…

When he became aware of it (he could not say ‘at its beginning’ for, like so many dreams, it seemed to have much more history than he could recall upon waking), he found himself seated in the lessons room at the training hall in Tilev. Many others were with him, paying rapt attention to Master Tsazr at the head of the hall, who was going on in his terse, impatient way about something. None of this yet seemed odd. It had been twelve years and some since his ascension, but Meoraq still dreamed of his training days upon occasion. At least he was wearing clothes in this one.

But when he turned his head, he saw that half the students around him were humans. Amber sat at his side, a lessons slate in her lap and a stylus in her five-fingered hand, scratching out notes in alien markings. At his other side sat a dumaq, a stranger, wearing the garments of an
exarch with the hood pulled so low over his face that Meoraq could see nothing but his painted snout. His was rather a plain robe, sparsely trimmed and not entirely clean, nothing at all like the fine dress of Exarch Ylsathoc.

Without looking at him, this stranger said, “What
is it you seek in Xi’Matezh?”

Wasn’t that just like a
n exarch, to involve himself in someone else’s personal business?

But Meoraq found himself answering, and answering with both honesty and respect: “I seek communion with Sheul.”

“A man need not travel to the end of the world to seek what can be found upon his knees in his own courtyard. Your House is empty,” the hooded figure said before Meoraq could reply, not that any reply came to his dreaming mind. “Should not a son see to the continuance of his physical father’s honor rather than undergoing lengthy journeys in his spiritual Father’s name?”

Meoraq rarely felt emotion in dreams, but shame stung at him now. Shame, oddly, and not annoyance at the presumption of this stranger. “I never said that I would not take stewardship of Uyane!”

“You certainly seem eager to postpone it.”

“No!”

“No? Then why—” The exarch’s head cocked, still revealing nothing but paint and shadow and now the pinpoint gleam of one eye. “—do you seek Xi’Matezh? What would you ask of Sheul that requires so arduous a journey?”

And rather than tell this man his prayers were for Sheul alone, Meoraq said, “If it is Sheul’s will that I am retired to Uyane, so I will serve Him.”

The exarch dipped his head once, acknowledging, expectant.

“But I do not wish to spend all the years of my remaining life bound to stewardship if it is not His will!”

“Is the House so hateful?”

“The House?” Meoraq looked over his shoulder where, as only seemed right and natural, the lessons room had opened into the rooftop courtyard at the fore of House Uyane. He could see the stone couch his father favored beneath the drooping branches of a ribbonleaf tree, and the wide steps where he himself used to sit when he was at lessons (or when he was hoping to steal a glance at the servant girl who scrubbed the courtyard tiles). “No,” he said now, puzzled. “It is my father’s House and has all my love.”

“Not all, it would seem, if you would travel to the end of the very world to escape it.”

“It is not the House I wish to escape.”

“No?”

Meoraq looked again, but now the courtyard had become his father’s innermost chamber, as seen through the eyes of the young boy he had been on the only occasion he had seen it. And just why he had gone to such a forbidden room, he could not recall, but he could perfectly remember how it had been: the light of lamps behind the screen casting shadows on every wall, the scent of some flowery incense heavy in the air, and the cupboard of his father’s bed standing open so that he could see the broad, scarred field of his father’s back as it bunched and heaved and arched.

Meoraq averted his eyes fast, but the sounds persisted. His father’s deep, steady breaths. His mother’s feeble, mewling cries. The stealthy rasp of scales moving together. The wet pull and suck of sex in its second round.