The Last Hour of Gann (53 page)

According to Meoraq, wood was an extravagance. The real fuel of the wildlands was
dried poop.

Saoq poop was common and burned well when bundled with dried grass, but
corroki poop was the best, he told her, if the beasts themselves were not around. If they were, she was not to approach. They had poor sight and hearing and were very aggressive when they believed themselves surprised. When he described them further, she quickly realized that corrokis were the giant armadillos she’d stumbled across the day Scott made her take her walk.

“I don’t see any corrokis around here,” she said, scanning the plains
. “So why are you telling me all this?”

He sighed, gripping at his brow-ridges. Then he caught her head in both hands and aimed her eyes like a cannon. She stared, feeling hot and sick and frustrated, but saw nothing except grass, pale on the slope
s and dark in the valleys. At last, hissing into the back of her hair, he let go and pointed.

But at what? Amber searched all the way to the horizon and back, wind stinging at her eyes (yeah right
, the wind), but it was just…grass.

“Sheul, my
Father, give me patience,” he muttered, and gripped hard at the back of Amber’s neck. “Tell me what you see, human.”

“Grass.”

“What color is the grass?”

“I don’t…brown. Just brown!”

“All over?”

“Light brown, dark brown! It’s all brown!”

“What makes it dark?” he asked, sounding very testy.

“How the hell should I know? It’s a shadow!”

“A shadow?” He spun her around to stare at her directly. “Cast by what?”

She looked up at the cloud-shrouded sun and felt herself blushing. Of course it wasn’t a shadow. “It’s mud, then,” she mumbled.

“It is mud,” he agreed. “Made by?”

“Water?”

“Water would grow a greenbelt,” he told her, and she blushed hotter because she knew that, damn it. He’d lectured her most of the morning about what water looked like. “What else makes a path of mud so wide and so long as to be seen at this distance?”

She looked back at it helplessly, but there were no magic clues hovering in the air above it.

“A herd,” said Meoraq, biting off each word very clearly, “of corrokis. They have passed through. They have moved on. Go down and fetch dung.”

She went. Fetched. It took six trips there and back, lugging arml
oads of dry, crumbling, shit-patties as high as her chin before he told her to stop and start the fire.

Back she went to
Scott’s side of the camp for the second time that evening to beg for his lighter. This time, grinning, he refused.

“Don’t fuck with me tonight,” she snapped. “You know you’re going to want to eat, so just give me the stupid lighter and let me get started.”

“I really don’t think I want to eat anything you’ve touched tonight, Miss Bierce. Ask me sometime when you haven’t been wallowing in manure for several hours first.”

And back she had to go, empty-handed, to tell Meoraq she couldn’t get a lighter.

He was not sympathetic.

“If I wanted you to use tools, hum
an, I would have given you mine.”

“Meoraq, for crying out loud, I can’t start a fire without a lighter!”

His head cocked, not in the way that meant he was teasing, but on the side and a little forward—the annoyed way. “Fire is one of those things which mean life and death in the wildlands and by God and Gann, you are going to learn to make one. You won’t always have strikers, will you? No. So stop whining at me and pay attention.”

He wanted her to start with sticks, which
meant walking all the way to the nearest tree to break a branch down so that she could hunch over on her aching knees trying to spin one stick between her hands fast enough into the notch of another stick to make a fire. She couldn’t do it, and meanwhile the eel-thing was lying there, only getting deader, and the sun had finally stopped screwing around and was going down. She got a blister and a little smoke and a tiny red glint that went out as soon as she took the spinner away and that was it.

She stared into the fireless pit, breathing too hard and too fast, until she threw the sticks away in a swearing, furious fit.
Scott and everyone else watching erupted in applause and laughter. Meoraq didn’t look at them. He simply sat there and waited until the threat of tears had passed and she was back to feeling useless and exhausted. Then he stood up, recovered the sticks, knelt down, and built a fire almost as fast as she could have said, “He built a fire,” and he did not say one word to her.

Amber left him cutting up the eel and staggered over to where she’d left her pack. She wrapped herself in her blanket, trapping the distinctly unlovely smells of sweat and animal shit in with her, hid her face in her aching arms, and cried herself to slee
p as discreetly as possible. He’d left the eel’s head, roasted and grinning, by the fire when he woke her for her watch; she ate what she could off it and threw the rest in the fire. She wanted to throw up just to feel better, but she was still so hungry and there were no guarantees she’d eat again tomorrow. So she sat, fighting her stomach until the urge to purge had passed, and held her watch.

That was the first night. The next day, it began all over. And the day after that. And the day after that. Lying under her blanket at night, she often found herself revisiting that moment right after he took the knife from her neck: the feel of his arm like iron as he gripped her waist and pulled her roughly to him, his weirdly hard tongue licking at her, and the weight of his head when it had rested, just for a moment, on her shoulder. How could that moment, with all of its implied emotion, possibly lead to this string of hellish days in which he punished her over and over and over?

On the fifth night, she actually got the fire lit before Meoraq came back from his hunting trip and had to do it himself. He did not remark, just cut his dead thing up and started roasting the strips, but the next day, he stood over her at each of their rest stops long enough to watch her spin out a fire. When evening rolled around and he called an end to the day, he dumped two new objects in her lap along with the flasks. His strikers.

“Set them on my pack when you’ve finished with them,” he said, turning away.

“Wait!” She struggled to her feet, clutching the strikers in her fist. “I want to come with you!”

He kept walking and didn’t look at her. “When I judge you ready.”

“I’m ready!”

“But you are not the judge.”

“Oh, come on!” She lunged out and caught his arm.

He stopped cold, but didn’t look at her, not even at her hand. She let go, stepping in front of him instead. He tipped his head back to look stone-faced at the sky. People were watching, snickering.

“Damn it, Meoraq, there’s supposed to be some give and take here!” she exploded. “Would it kill you to throw me a bone?”

Bad choice of words. Someone, Crandall by the sound of it, let out a whoop of delighted laughter and quite a few others joined in. Blushing, flustered, she retreated a step and Meoraq immediately started walking.

The last thread of her pride trembled…but didn’t snap. She didn’t run after him, didn’t beg, didn’t stand there and bawl. She was tougher than that, and regardless of what that scaly son of a bitch might think, she was plenty tough enough.

He didn’t look back. Didn’t slow down. Didn’t care.

She would have given anything to have had a room she could have stormed off into or even just a door she could slam. Instead, she filled the flasks. Rolled saoq poop and grass into bundles for burning. Started a fire. And put herself defiantly to bed before he could come home and ignore her after she’d spent the whole day being his bitch.

Meoraq’s boots tromping up beside her woke her that night well after dark. She ignored them, pretending to be asleep while he paced around her in a full circle and finally came to a stop in front of her head.

Sadistic goddamn alien lizard. He could stand there all night for all she cared.

He sat down.

She could actually feel his stare, like two fingers pressing down on her head. Her body began to ache in the joints from holding so still, especially her clenched jaw. Real sleeping people were never this quiet or this still, she thought. She could hear them all around her: snoring, muttering, rolling over.

All but Meoraq, motionless, silent.
Waiting.

“Go away,” she said, keeping her eyes stubbornly shut tight.

“I am the sword and the striding foot of God and I don’t take orders from the refugees I allow to stay in my camp,” he replied. “Come stand your watch.”

“No.”

After a very long pause, he said, quite calmly, “You did not just defy me.”

“The hell I didn’t.” She rolled over, turning her back on him to prove it. “You want me to say I quit? Fine. I quit. I don’t need to bust my ass for you all day so you can treat me like shit.
I get enough of that from Scott.”

She heard the low rasp of scales on scales as he rubbed either his knobby brows or his snout. “Please yourself,” he said after another long pause. He got up and started to walk awa
y.

Started to.

Then he stopped.

She’d been able to feel his stare. Now she could hear him think.

He came back. Then he said something so baffling she simply could not believe she’d heard it right.

She fought the urge as long as her confusion let her, and then she had to sit up and stare at him. “Did…Did you just ask…if I was ever a baby?”

“You mark. Now answer.”

“Y-Yes…?”

He crouched down until their eyes were more or less on level. “Did you leap whole from your mother’s belly and stride out into the world?”

She waited, but he seemed to be serious.
Pissed off, but serious. “No.”

“No,” he agreed. “You learned to stand before you walked. You learned to crawl before you stood. You learned to roll onto your belly before you crawled. You learned which way was up before you rolled. So. You want to learn how to survive here, you say, but to teach you those things, I have to begin at the beginning.
I am teaching you exactly how I was taught, with far, far less slapping than either I received or you deserve.”

“It doesn’t feel like you’re teaching me anything. It just feels like you’re mad at me.” She rolled her eyes, hating herself for the stupid goddamn
girly
thing she was about to say, and said it anyway. “We never just talk anymore.”

He didn’t say anything at first,
only frowned. Then he stood up, very suddenly, as if throwing his height like a wedge between them. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. Don’t get up!” he snapped, and she settled back into her blanket and stared at the ground. “I’m not angry with you, damn it! I just…can’t have you around me all the time!”

A little ways off, Nicci rolled noisily over and mumbled, “Come on, it’s the middle of the night!” and a few other voices sleepily agreed.

Meoraq hissed at them and rubbed his snout. “Stand your watch,” he said finally, walking away.

He was gone. Amber got up, carrying her blanket with her, and trudged over to sit by what was left of the fire. There was a scrap of leather there, folded around an unappetizing lump of marrow and a
few charred roots. She wrapped them up again and set them aside. Later, if her stomach settled, she’d have to try and eat them. She was going to need her strength for tomorrow. When she had to do it all again.

6

I
t was on a chill, gray morning, early enough that everyone was still in a line (a thick line, since people tended to group up on these walks), when it occurred to Amber to wonder if Scott just might be crazy. Not in the hearing-voices sense, or the kill-people-and-keep-body-parts-in-a-jelly-jar sense, but in some real and tangibly crazy way beyond the mere what-is-wrong-with-this-guy sense.

She didn’t
think she was wondering just because she was feeling bitchy, although she supposed she might be. She knew she didn’t like him. It had been another cold, wet, miserable night and she wasn’t in the best mood. And she also knew he really wasn’t doing anything different today as opposed to every other day, so objectively, she had no reason to suddenly call his sanity into question.

But once that question popped out there, it couldn’t be ignored. You couldn’t put toothpaste back in the tube; once you’d seen Waldo, you might as well throw the book away. So if it couldn’t be unseen, it had to be answered: Was she or was she not looking at a crazy man?

It started benignly enough, with everyone hiking up a rocky, thorn-covered hill in what was almost rain, and when Scott, who was in the lead just behind Meoraq, reached the top, he turned around and started his speech. She was used to that. He liked to begin every day with a speech, and since Meoraq wouldn’t wait for him to make them at camp, he had to find the time and the breath to make them on the trail, and it was a rare day that he didn’t make at least three of them in his constant effort to keep morale up. The fact that it actually did keep morale up instead of piss people off continued to surprise and annoy her, but it took his, “This is just like the westward expansion of the 1850s,” to finally put the word ‘crazy’ in Amber’s head, because for the first time it occurred to her that he might not just be talking them up. He might really believe it.