The Last Hour of Gann (58 page)

“Um…I hate to admit this, but they’re not going to save you one.”

He snorted. “You think I need you to tell me this? Go on.”

She went. He watched her go, and when she was bent (
her shadow black against the firelit leather as she bent and stretched and then came crawling in to him
) and at work in the coals, he turned his knife back on all that was left of the saoq. Choice meats, they called this in the cities. The food of governors and lords. He remembered without warning being a child at Rasozul’s table—a rare privilege—being served cattle’s heart, and how terribly grown-up it had made him feel. These days, it was just an extra-tough cut of meat and he ate it as little as he could. But that would change when he went home, he supposed. If he was made steward of House Uyane, he would be eating heart nearly every day. Farm-raised, young cattle’s heart, minced with herbs and simmered slow or fried quick and served with roasted riak.

But today, he was
still Sheulek, and he was eating wildland stew.

Amber returned. He could hear her bare feet padding over the crushed grass, and he could hear them slow as she saw
him drop bits of saoq heart, black and dripping with blood, into the water. Meoraq tipped his head at her and nicked the end of the bitteret so he could squeeze out the crumbling mass of its protected organ, along with the tangy fluid that it floated in.

Amber put the back of her hand against her mouth and watched solemnly as it all went into the
stewing pouch. She said, “I don’t even know what that thing was.”

Meoraq glanced at the dangling tube of the empty
bitteret before tossing it into the fire. He told her the word, then flexed his spines and said, “It has something to do with digestion, they tell me.”

“Do you have one?”

“Of course not. Only grass-eaters, like saoq and cattle.”

“What does it taste like?”

“It tastes,” said Meoraq, now cutting up the liver, “like the food we are fortunate enough to have.”

“Which means it’s gross.
”

“I don’t ask you to enjoy it
.” He added the kidney and wiped his knife clean before sheathing it. “But I warn you, I’ve been pressed to eat far worse things in my time than stewed bitteret.”

She
laughed, stirring once at the contents of the pouch. “So have I, if it comes to that. Thanks for helping me with my boots, by the way. I know you don’t believe me, but I swear I’m not trying to make things even more difficult.”

He gr
unted, nudged at the still-warming bottle of glue, and then leaned back and looked at her. “Do you see those trees?”

“Huh?”

“The mganz trees. Do you see them?”

Amber looked over her shoulder at the trees. “Um…yeah?”

“Do you see any others?”

She looked at him again, frowning, but sat up a little taller and searched the plains around their hilltop camp. There were thickets here and there and, in the distance, shadows of what might be
zuol copses, but no other trees in sight. “No.”

“Sheul se
t them in my path.”

She rolled her eyes and settled back down. “
Of course he did.”

“Yes. As easily as He set you for me to find.” Meoraq leaned close, lowering his spines. “But even He cannot make you ask for help
when you need it.”

Color rose
pink in her cheeks. She looked down, picked at the unsealed seams of her boots, said nothing.

He could have said more, perhaps a word comparing a fall in the mud of the prairie to a fall in the mountains they would eventually have to cross, but couldn’t think how to phrase it
and it was very distracting to be this close to her. He leaned away instead, letting the matter go, to lift the cap of the sealing glue and show her the brush affixed to it. “This is ready. Just paint a thin skin along the edges where the sole joins the body of the boot. Take care to make a full seal.”

“Okay.” She started to get up. “Guess that means I’d better go get
Nicci’s.”

His spines came forward in surpris
e and then flattened. He waited and true enough, Amber returned to him with a second pair of boots, newly resoled.

“You taught her well,” said Meoraq darkly.

She sat down with the boots in her lap and just looked at him.

Meoraq traded out stones.
The bloody water in the stewing pouch was beginning to simmer, sending out tiny bubbles like beads to slide along the lumps of largely unidentifiable chunks of meat. It gave him something to look at while he mastered his rising temper and counted breaths. At last he said, “My mending supplies exist to be used. I do not begrudge their loss if they teach a useful lesson.”

“I think I did okay.”

“Yes. You learned to use a needle and an awl to mend your boots. N’ki learned to use you.” He slammed a wet stone down in the embers and glared at her.

Amber
applied resin to a boot. Nicci’s boot. “She’s doing the best she can.”

He had to look at her twice to be certain this absurd statement was not meant as some human joke, but she appeared to be serious. So he snorted at her, and if that were not enough to let her know what he thought, he added, “Sheul provides the raw stuff of our souls, human. The polish is left entirely to us.”

“I didn’t catch much of that.”

“It means we are responsible for our own character. N’ki is helpless because she wants to be helpless, and if that is what she wants,
that is what she deserves to be.”

“
Lighten up, lizardman. It’s not easy to hike through the damn wilderness when you’re not used to it. If I can make it a little easier for her, why shouldn’t I?”

“What a stupid thing to say!” he said disgustedly. “Do you think it helps your N’ki
to be coddled like that? Do you think it helps any of your people, who must all work that much harder to care for her?”

“I’m taking care of her. You don’t get to judge me for that.”

Meoraq leaned in aggressively close to say, quietly but with feeling, “I am Sheulek, human, and I get to judge everyone.” Straightening up, he added, “You were the one to tell me that feeding is not the same as saving, and it is just as true for N’ki as it is for you.”

“She shouldn’t be here,” said Amber, and immed
iately coughed out a sour laugh. “None of us should, but she really shouldn’t. She didn’t want to. I made her come with me. I made her come here.”

“If you c
an do that, making her fetch water once in a while should be easy.”

But she didn’t smile and her stiff-backed silence as she sat proofing her Nicci’s boots made the echoes of his own words seem fanged, which of course they had been. Meoraq hissed almost soundlessly through his teeth, rubbed crossly at the end of his snout, and changed out the heating stones. The wet stone hissed; the hot one spat.
 
   

“Who is she, then?” he demanded suddenly. “W
hat is she to you?”

“My s
ister.” Her mouthparts faintly turned up even though anger was still in every hard line of her. “You honestly can’t tell?”

“
Are you saying you’re kin?”

“We’re family. You know. Sisters.” She touched her hand to her chest and moved it rapidly out and back again, tracing an invisible line between hearts.

“You come of the same father?” he guessed, and swiftly sketched two badly-drawn humans in the ash around the fire, on their knees in female fashion. After a moment’s thought, he added the swoop of human hair above them, then drew in the governing figure of a father. “You were sired of one man?”

Her smooth brows knitted. She hesitated, then shook her head. “Our mother,” she said
, and leaned forward to draw curves on the father-shape—not head-hair, but an embarrassingly accurate suggestion of twinned teats. He did not look at her when she was done. “But we had different fathers,” she said, indicating them vaguely, one to either side of the mother. “Different men.”

He twitched his spines to show he understood, and if he had successfully translated her words, a great many things had just become clear.

When a Sheulek came to the House of conquest and the steward had no daughters to offer for his fires, the accepted alternative was to give one’s wife. Any sons who came of this union were for the Sheulek to raise, but if a man’s wife bore a daughter, what harm could come of raising it in its mother’s household with the other children of her marriage? So it seemed obvious that Amber was one of these—sired of Sheulek, or whoever took that role in their human cities—while Nicci came of their mother’s wedded man. They were not true sisters, only blood-kin, like he and Nkosa. Blood-kin through the maternal line, but blood-kin all the same.

“Who was he?” Meoraq asked. “Your father.”

“I don’t know. I never knew him.”

“Your mother’s man, then. What man did she marry?”

“What did she…what?”

“Marry.” Meoraq held up his hands and clasped them. “How was she bound?”

“I’m not…sure I’m getting you, but if you’re asking who she lived with, she lived alone. Well, with us, but not with a man.”

“How is that possible?”

“What do you mean?” Her mouthparts were curling up again, as if she found his suspicion humorous. “Why would she have to?”

“Who raised her children?”

Amber’s human smile faded. She went back to work on Nicci’s other boot. “I guess the polite answer is, she did.”

“Say truth.
Who raised her children?”

“She did. It
was her house. In her name, paid for with her money, filled with her things. Hers. Women don’t have to get married where I’m from if they don’t want to.”

Meoraq leaned back, staring at her.
He tried to picture the land she described, a land of milling humans, like yifu in some great undiscovered nest, but the images his mind presented were those of the ancient ruins, and the people he saw inhabiting them, his own. It had been that way for dumaqs once, before the Fall. Men and women, living together, walking freely about in the streets, open to any man’s eyes; it remained a shocking prospect. Meoraq flexed his spines, then shook that off and frowned at her. “What did she do? Your mother?”

Amber’s thin smile broke
and she refocused her attention on Nicci’s boots, although they were entirely sealed. “She died. I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”

Meora
q watched her fuss with the boots. Eventually, she realized she was done with them and set them aside. She took up her own and finally got to work on them.

“Were you married?” he asked, and when she gave him that puzzled frown again, clasped h
is hands together. “Were you bound to a man?”

Understan
ding smoothed out her clay-soft features, but she didn’t answer right away. She only looked at him, her thoughts moving like stormclouds behind her eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

Why
did
he want to know? He scratched irritably at his throat, but his scales still felt cool. “I’m trying to understand you,” he said. That much was truth. He wanted very much to understand this creature who crawled into his tent uninvited and left without dismissal, and more than that, he wanted to understand which of the many males in her pack had a claim over her. Because…?

Meoraq hissed suddenly through his teeth and sn
apped, “I don’t need a reason!” which Amber not-surprisingly believed to be directed at her.

“No,
” she said. Her head bent. She dipped out proofing resin and painted her boots. “I was never married.”

“Did you…” He wasn’t even certain how to as
k this. “Did you keep your own household?”

“No. We lived with our mother.”

She did not look at him when she answered. Her voice was tight and the silence that followed it, even tighter.

“Did you take labors?” he asked at last.

“Yeah, of course I did. Me and Nicci both.”

“What did you do?”

She slid him a glance and laughed without much humor. “I built machines.”

He recoiled.

“Well, I didn’t build them. I stood next to the machines that built the other machines and made sure they ran smoothly. I couldn’t even fix them if they broke. Just a button-pusher, really.”

He wasn’t sure if that was better or not.

“N’ki did this also?”

“Oh hell no.
Nicci was a waitress.” Amber glanced at him, read the confused slant of his head perfectly and said, “Do you have places where people go just to eat?”

“Yes, of course.” Surprised, he sat up straighter. “N’ki kept such a place? She never
cooks!”

“
No, I know. She showed people where to sit when they came and they’d tell her what they wanted to eat and she’d bring it.” She set her boots down, capped the resin, and held the bottle out.

“Is that all?”
He pointed at the ground, away from the fire. “She carried food?”