The Last Hour of Gann (34 page)

The
stranger was watching, his long hands steepled beneath his chin. “This embarrassed you.”

Meoraq did not reply and did not look again.

“Is it not a lord’s responsibility to preserve his bloodline? To sire sons of his loyal woman?”

His loyal woman. Meoraq’s jaws clenched.

“Surely you do not question Yecedi’s loyalty?”

“I am sure she was ever faithful to
my father,” Meoraq said curtly. And he was. Yecedi had passed directly from her father’s own House to Rasozul’s and did not leave it until the day she died.

“She was a good woman.
”

“I suppose so.” Meoraq shrugged his spines, wishing the sounds of sex would stop or at least that his mother’s urgent
moaning would. “She was a perfect high-born wife, obedient and invisible and able to produce three strong sons upon command.”

The
exarch looked at him. “Do you think your father gave it as his command?”

The sounds died away suddenly, swallowed up by the lessons room wall. Meoraq glanced that way, saw dark stone and students, and shrugged again.

“Of course, when you bore that night your reluctant witness, your father had already done his siring,” the exarch mused. “What embarrasses you most, I wonder? That you saw your father in Sheul’s fires, or that you saw him with your pregnant mother instead of some pretty young servant?”

“My father had no business taking her to his bed!” Meoraq burst out.

“Is it not the duty of a loyal woman to answer all her man’s desires?” said the exarch with the faintest hint of sarcasm.

“No, it is the duty of a loyal woman to sit in her damned room and grow her son! What was she even doing in that part of the house that he saw her?”

“Perhaps she was invited,” the exarch murmured, steepling his fingers again.

“He could not have passed fewer than three other women if he went to f
etch her out. Any one of whom would have been honored to receive his fires!”

“Do you think so?”

“But, no! He had to have gone all the way to her room and back and for what? Sheul does not give a man sexual urges so that he can spend them with a woman already carrying his child!”

“The bond between man and woman is sacred even in the eye of Sheul. Nothing they took as their pleasure together offended Him.”

Meoraq snorted.

“When you take up the stewardship of House Uyane, will you not want a woman such as
Yecedi?”

Meoraq tried to snort again but it came out as a hiss. He rubbed at his snout, then his brow-ridges, and finally his throat, where he could feel anger throbbing.

“A good woman. A loyal woman.”

A
mewling little breed-pot, forever shackled to Meoraq’s wrist. He would have to live with her each and every day, unless he were away defending his House or his city’s honor, and he would not be permitted to send her out until after he had at least two grown sons to guarantee his continuance. Or unless she were barren, in which case he would have to replace her immediately with an entirely new mewling little breed-pot.

“Is it so impossible to imagine you could be happy with a woman?”

“I am frequently happy with women,” Meoraq snapped.

“With one woman.”

He rubbed his brow-ridges. “If that is Sheul’s will.”

“And
so you travel to Xi’Matezh.”

“Yes.”

“To pray for Sheul’s guidance.”

“Yes.”

“That He may lead you to a good woman to take into your House.”

Meoraq hissed again and shook his head. “Yes.”

“Perhaps you could find one here.”

“Here?” Meoraq looked around the lessons room, at dumaqs and humans side at side, all
the way to Master Tsazr, indiscriminately lecturing all. “There are no women allowed in the training halls!”

It was a dream, and his voice, which had gone unnoticed all this time, suddenly rang out like tribunal bells. Every head turned.

“Uyane!”

He snapped to his feet at once, dream or no dream, and Master Tsazr came swiftly forward to slap him deservedly across his snout. It did not hurt in the dream, but it still staggered him some. Master Tsazr had a wicked hand.

“No women in the training halls, eh? Have you come to work your mind?” Tsazr inquired caustically. “Or your clay?”

“My mind, sir.”

“I have my doubts. Amber.” The human name fell perfectly from Tsazr’s mouth.

“Yes, sir.” The dumaqi words came perfectly from Amber’s.

“What is the day’s lesson? Remind Uyane.”

“We speak of the Ancients, sir.”

“Tell Uyane your lesson.”

Amber turned her soft, flat face toward him. The bad light of the lessons room made her pale skin seem wholly white, her dun-colored hair seem grey as ashes, and her nondescript training garments as black as the Abyss,
but her eyes were still green as new leaves and deep as wells. She said, “Our numbers swelled until our cities covered all the earth. When we had no more land to cover, we built our cities on top of themselves and milled in them all together, like yifu. We took the holy gifts of medicine and science and used them in frivolous and dangerous ways. We made machines to give us comfort and used them until we poisoned all our earth and water and air. We made trade of sex and suffering and war. We mocked Sheul and we corrupted Gann.”

“The Ancients corrupted Gann,” agreed Master Tsazr, striding along the rows of silent students and pausing often to run a speculative (and largely dismissive) eye over each face. “And Gann in turn corrupted them. The Ancients turned from Sheul, devastating the land to fuel their wickedness and making constant war upon themselves until at last She
ul rose up and smote them with His judgment. Uyane!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Name the three acts of the Fall of the Ancients.”

Thank Sheul in His heaven for an easy question. “The first act was the punishment of wrath, when every
man was consumed by rage and war enveloped all of Gann.”

“For how long?”

Meoraq stared for a moment, utterly thrown. Back came Master Tsazr’s hand, but it could not knock answers into him when there were none.

“Amber,” said Tsazr, turning around. “How long did the act of wrath last?”

“It is still among us,” she replied, which was the most nonsensical thing she could have said here, in Sheul’s world of peace.

But Master Tsazr grunted approvingly and walked away. “Speak on, Uyane. What was the second act?”

“The curse of blight,” he said at once, “when the land failed and the skies were filled with storms. The cities of the Ancients fell and famine and disease preyed upon the landless people.”

“For how long?” asked Tsazr, casting a cold eye back at Meoraq.

He looked at Amber, but she was bent over her slate, making human letters. In another moment, Meoraq was reeling from the dream-like painlessness of Master Tsazr’s blow. Amber’s voice drifted up from his side, the dumaqi words made haunting in her human mouth: “It is still among us.”

“Uyane.”

Meoraq straightened up and put his arms to his side, only to find that Master Tsazr had somehow been replaced by the strange exarch with the low hood.

“What was the third act of the Fall of the Ancients?” this figure asked in Tsazr’s voice.

He knew this one, thankfully. “It was the return of Sheul and the hope of His forgiveness. And it is still among us,” he added, anticipating the next question.

The
stranger did not reply, but the silence that swept the lessons room proved more disconcerting than his hooded stare. Meoraq looked away and saw the prairie all around him; he looked back and there was Amber before him and they were sitting, face to face, in the dark of the humans’ camp.

“We built a ship,” said Amber. She raised her hand to make a wedged shape and passed it between them. “And it flew through the sky, beyond the clouds that covered our world, into the
lights that shine forever.” Her arm arced up, graceful as the neck of a thuoch. Her eyes never left his and they were green, so green. “But the ship was hurt and it fell here, out of the storm. It broke open over Gann. It died and many died with it.” Her hand fell to earth and opened, her fingers flaring out and curling slowly back toward her palm. Her second hand lit upon this imagined carnage, made walking fingers, and stepped out onto the grass. “But some of us survived and now we’re here. We’re here and there’s no way home.” She looked back over her shoulder and let out a shaky breath, then turned back and caught his hand in both of hers. Her hands were soft and warm; her eyes were terrible in their beauty. “I need you.”

Something in him shivered right
down to the core of his soul. He tried to say her name, but the magic of the dream ended, it seemed, with his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, just as he always had, and shook his head with disgust. His next attempt was nothing but a hiss and a choke of meaningless sound.

“Please, Meoraq,” she said. “I need your help. And you need mine.”

He did not remember getting up, but they were standing suddenly, the two of them together before a dark structure he somehow knew was Xi’Matezh. They were standing, yes, and his arms were going around her just as if that were not a perfectly appalling thing to do. He could feel her heat against his body and her horrible face was right before him and her name, ah, her name was like wine in his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, bending close. “Mm—”

* * *

“…mbr,” he mumbled, and the sound of his own voice jolted him awake.

Meoraq opened his eyes and was, for one disorienting moment, shocked to see that Amber’s own were not before him. He
found his lamp and lit it, but saw only the interior of his shelter.

What did he expect? Meoraq clapped a hand to his head and rubbed roughly at his scales, then rolled over and sat up. His cock was out, he noticed,
pinched between his belly and his loin-plate and still dully throbbing with Gann’s lusts. He retracted it with great distaste and pressed a hand over his slit to hold it in while he tightened his belt, meditating on the dream. Already, it was so tangled in his mind that he could not say what the message had been.

Dreams. Only fools and
priests believed they had messages.

He
put on his breeches and opened his tent.

The creatures slept in heaps all around him, cocooned in more of those silvery bedsheets. They looked like fat, metal maggots. A deeply disturbing sight.

And there was Amber.

He could see the twin lump of herself and the other human that clung at her,
together in the grass at the very edge of his camp. At the edge of Scott’s camp as well, far from any fire. The sight of her sleeping in the open air like an animal did something unpleasant to his emotions and gave him back disturbing fragments of his dream…particularly there at the end, when he’d been holding her.

D
ream-nonsense, he told himself brutally. If he hadn’t awakened when he had, he probably would have bitten her or something.

The image his mind sent out at that thought was not that of a monstrous dumaq devouring Amber neck-first, however, but of a mark of conquest upon her naked shoulder. His cock, safely constrained behind his loin-plate, throbbed with Gann’s senseless need.

Meoraq shuddered, started to retreat within his tent, and then rose resolutely and tromped over to where Amber lay. She roused at the noise, pushing back her damp cover and squinting up at him through sleep-dazed eyes. “Get up,” he said, and beckoned, knowing she would not understand him. “To your feet, soft-skinned creature.”

More humans stirred. “Wzzee wnt?” someone called, and Amber answered, “Elleff’ai’no,” in a puzzled fashion, but she got up.

“I dreamed of you.” Meoraq led her to his firepit and pushed on her shoulder until she sat. He crouched to knuckle through the ash until he found a bit of branch only half-burnt, then woke the embers to a flame bright enough to see by. “And while dreams are largely foolish things, Sheul often hides some shard of insight there. So do I recall one thing I think to be His wisdom. Take this.”

She let him thrust the charred branch into her hands. She frowned at it, and then her brows raised and she gave him a startled sort of look. She dropped to her knees at once before him, intent and eager as she patted her hand across the ash to flatten it.

And she began to draw. Not the strange markings she had made across her lessons slate in his dream, but an image of some rounded shape (
we built a ship
), amplified by sweeping motions of her arm, which she made fall by drawing a line just beneath it (
it broke open over Gann
). She started drawing line-men to spill out of it, chattering explanations, and Meoraq leaned back on his heels to listen. He did not try to mimic her words, but he did interrupt now and then with questions of his own, raised with gestures and drawings in the ash.

The story he was able to glean through this crude communication was a confusing one. She seemed to be trying to tell him that the creatures he saw before him now were all there were, not just here, but in all of Gann. He tried many times to get her to tell him where the ship had sailed from and how they had come inland so far without being seen, but kept getting the same baffling response: The ship did not move on water, but through the sky. She seemed to want him to believe they had not come from Gann at all, but from some other world. She illustrated this by drawing two circles in the ash and the rounded shape of the ship between them, sketching the line of their travel over and over and jabbing at the sky above them with her stick.