The Last Hour of Gann (76 page)

She met this declaration with a huffing breath and went back to scraping at her hide with considerably more force and less precision than before
.

“You don’t believe me,” Meoraq realized.

“Actions speak louder than words, lizardman. Especially the ones you don’t say.”

“That ought to be my argument,” he shot back. “Who am I sitting with right now? Who am I teaching to cure a hide? What does a name matter? And if it
bothers you, why haven’t you said anything until now?”

“Because I thought it was all of us!” She yanked the hide, half-done, further over her knee and went to work on the bloodier side, her arm jerking and slashing. “And then when you started saying people’s names, I figured I’d be next eventually. But now I know that, thanks to your stupid God, I get to be
‘Hey, you,’ for the rest of my life and you don’t even think there’s anything wrong with that!”

“Mind your work. If it upsets you this much, I’ll give you a dumaqi name.” The offer was bitter in his mouth. Naming was the work of a father
; he didn’t always know exactly what he felt about Amber, but he knew none of those feelings were fatherly.

“I don’t want a new name! I have a perfectly good name! I want you to use it!”

“It is not a word,” he replied, stubbornly scraping at his hide and refusing to look at her. “It cannot be spoken.”

“
I speak it just fine! Amber! Say it with me, lizardman!”

“No.
Mind your work.”

“I am!” she snapped, but she put her glaring eyes
back on the hide. “You have the most ass-backwards religion I’ve ever heard of. You’re perfectly okay with killing people but
my name
is some huge sin.
My name
sends you straight to Hell.
That’s
where you draw the line.”

“
The line is not for me to draw.”

“Well, that’s just stupid.”

“There is no Word but the Prophet’s Word and I am done with this discussion. Mind your work!” he snapped, pointing, but it was too late.

The scraper slipped in Amber’s careless hands, narrowly missing her fingers, but cutting a gash right through the hide.
Embarrassment lent new fuel to anger and she let out easily the most vulgar variation on a timeless epithet he had ever heard in all the years of his warrior’s life.

“That had better not have been addressed to me,” he said blackly. “My mother was a virtuous woman.”

“It had nothing to do with you,” she snapped, inspecting the damage to the hide with deep disgust. “I’m just a foul-mouthed bitch. Damn it, it’s ruined!”

“
Hardly,” he said, taking it from her before she could finish shoving it off onto the ground. He arranged the hide across his own lap, going back over the places she had too hurriedly finished. “You should have stopped if you weren’t going to give it your full attention. It is better to do half a hide well than all of it poorly and teach yourself habits you will have to unlearn.”

She started to stand
, flush-faced and tight-lipped.

He caught her by her bloody wrist and seated her again, perhaps with more force than was necessary. He did not release her right away, at first because he could see that she was just going to get up again, then because he was busy counting off six breaths, and finally because he could look at her calmly and see that beneath her senseless anger was embarrassment and unhappiness and exhaustion and everything else he had been hoping the gift of his hide-making lesson might soothe away for just one night.

He opened his mouth to tell her she was acting like a child and heard himself say instead, softly, “Do you think I would not call you by your name if I could?”

She looked at him and away
, trying to pretend she was not attached to the arm that ended in his grip. “I guess you think it doesn’t matter. I guess you figure as long as I still answer to ‘insufferable human,’ it’s fine.”

“
It’s honest, at least.” He sighed, opened his hand and rubbed at his brow ridges instead. “There are three words I could call you that come close to the sound of your name. Taambret, a disease we have that causes festering sores of the mouth.”

She blinked, her brows puckering.

“Mb’z, a vulgar term for one weak of mind,” he continued. “Amyr, the name of a kind of swimming creature that lives and feeds in the mud. And I will not call you by these names.”

“You said…You said it didn’t matter what the word meant as long as—”

“Not for you.”

She looked at the fire.

Meoraq picked up the scraper and continued cleaning her hide. “Take this one I have finished and make ready with the brains,” he ordered. “Pour half of them out—like that, yes, in a line—and let them cool.”

She obeyed, silent.

“Now use your hands to rub them in. This is why it is so essential that the hide be completely cleaned. Any fat or blood left behind will prevent the cure from absorbing well. I despise S’kot and I don’t care what I call N’ki,” he said, still scraping. “I will not offend God, but I will not insult you either, whether or not you know it is an insult. Any pieces of lhichu that have not softened can be disposed of now.”

She picked up the chunk she had been trying to press into the hide and dropped it into the fire. She still did not look at him
as she went to work, but he could see her thinking. After a few false starts, she braced herself and said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

The apology was as embarrassing to hear as it had plainly been to say. Meoraq acknowledged it with an uncomfortable grunt and waved vaguely at the hide under her rubbing hands.

They worked in silence, he scraping and cleaning, she rocking back and forth while her hands made endless spirals over the wet and slippery surface of the hide. He did not watch her.

“Now fold it over. Flesh to flesh,” he told her, and was annoyed to feel a coiling warmth in his loins at those artless words. “By which I mean, the wet side
s should press together to form a kind of seal to itself.”

“Okay,” she said, kneeling on the folded hide to pat it down. “Like this?”

“Fair enough. Tonight, you sleep on them. The weight and warmth of a living body helps the cure to absorb. Tomorrow, we scrape away whatever did not. We should smoke them too, but we will need good green wood for that so we will do without. Here.”

She took the second finished hide and laid it out on the ground, pouring the rest of the warm brains over it without being told. “
What are we making out of them?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Oh.” Her eyes tapped at his and fell away. He could see her shoulders stiffening, armoring herself as if against a blow. “I…I don’t suppose maybe I could get a jacket or…you know…something?”

“Not without a fleshing pit and not with saoq in any case
, but there will surely be better hides in the mountains. And when we find them, you will already know what to do. You can make your own clothes.”

All of Amber’s face wrinkled around in ways that meant surprise, except for her smile, which was nothing like a dumaq woman’s smile and yet reminded him with great force and satisfaction of his mother receiving that little pot of jam or tin of
candied blossoms and how she had looked at his father. If Meoraq had draped Amber head to foot in jewelry, he doubted he would get half the smile she gave him now for being told she could do a smelly, messy, body-breaking chore. He glanced up to send his Father another silent thanks and noticed the heavy skies all over again. “I want you to sleep in my tent tonight,” he said, frowning at them.

She looked up, brains dripping down her raised arms. “What? You what?”

“It means to rain. The hides should be kept dry.”

“Oh. Put them in your tent. Right.” She
laughed a little. “I thought you told me to sleep in there.”

“I did,”
he said, puzzled. “If you can’t mark my words, tell me so that I can repeat them. You need to sleep on the hides so that your weight and warmth—”

“In your tent?” Her face was very pink. Drops of brains fell lightly on her blood-stained thighs. “With you?”

Some great invisible hammer came clubbing down on the whole of his body, leaving him to stare foolishly back at her as if asking a woman to share his bedchamber, even if it was just a tent, had no special significance at all. How could he even say that without realizing how it could be perceived? If he’d said this to a dumaq woman—any dumaq woman—she would be bowing herself there right this moment to receive his fires.

And with this unplanned thought, the warmth in his loins became flame.

‘I only want her out of the damn rain so the hides won’t get wet,’ he thought stubbornly. He wanted the hides to stay dry while they cured and he would admit to nothing more, but when Sheul wanted him to make leathers, He provided lhichu, and when He wanted His chosen to breed, He gave them women.

‘And she is a woman, no matter what else she is,’ he thought. ‘A stubborn woman, an insufferable woman, a
human
woman, but a woman and when I order a woman to my room, by God and Gann, she goes!’

His head tipped
warningly. “Do you not mark me?”

“I understand you just fine.”

“Then you will sleep in my tent.”

“Why?”

“What? Why do you think?”

She did not answer and the silence gradually stole both the edge from his voice and the urgency from his constrained member. He leaned back, scratching once, needlessly, at the side of his snout.

“Why
do
you think?” he asked finally, quietly.

“I think,” she said, not meeting his eyes, “you know you can sleep on these
things without me.”

He looked at her without really seeing her. His mind was like the clouds, heavy without
weight, in constant motion but unchanging. He did not think, exactly, but after a certain span of time, he said, “Come to my tent tonight.”

She stilled, but only for an instant. “No,” she said, and backed away to fold the hide over.

So. He’d not only ordered her to his tent, she had refused to go. Meoraq rubbed at the side of his snout several times, until it began to hurt. “Why not?”

She closed her eyes and just breathed. Meoraq found
himself counting her breaths; a slow-count of six. She opened her eyes and raised her head just enough to look at him. “Because if it was just to get me out of the rain, you’d ask for me and Nicci.”

He did not amend his offer, which was vaguely disturbing to him in the part of his mind which was still thinking.

She seemed to be waiting, and when he only sat there and said nothing more, she slowly leaned back and gathered up the saoq hide to hold loosely in her arms. “What do you want from me?” she whispered, color dull and dark in her cheeks.

“I don’t know,” he told her and it had to be truth, however much it felt like a lie.

“Is it…” She clapped one brain- and blood-smeared hand to her face and pushed at her eyes, then shook her head and looked right at him. “Is it sex?”

“No,” he said,
troubled.

The color in her cheeks deepened to an alarming s
hade and she looked away. “Okay.” She stood up, eyes averted and too bright. “I’m going to put these in your tent.”

Meoraq reached out and caught at her leg before she could flee. He rubbed his brow-ridges, cursing himself and all the words he could not make, because there was no way to tell her that it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t either that fierce eruptive will of Sheul or the shameful temptation of Gann, but
this
…this nameless
thing
that was neither fire nor clay but as constant as the wind, sometimes a storm and sometimes only a breeze, was
always
with him. No, it was not sex, but it had to be something that made him look for reasons to sit with her, to speak with her, even to fight with her if that was all there was, because even the most tedious and foul chore of curing a damned animal hide could become something to look forward to if he was with her. And it wasn’t sex, but he wished it was; it wasn’t sex, but if it had been, even that could be good, could even be
glorious
, just because it was with her.

He released her and said nothing as she carried the hides away. The wind gusted, throwing smoke into his eyes. He closed them and
began silently to pray.

5

H
e slept on the hides alone that night. When Amber woke him for his watch, he offered her his tent again, but she refused and he did not insist. The rain came and went, rattling noisily off the metal blankets of those humans unlucky enough to have no tent, then blowing away. By dawn, the wind had mostly dried things out and there was plenty of cold saoq to pass around, but it was a cold morning and it only grew colder as the day went on.

They walked into the biting wind, moving fast to keep warm. The extra effort exhausted the humans quickly, which meant longer rest periods than usual.
Amber lit a fire at each stopping place and Meoraq was generous with his reserves of tea, but still it was Scott they all clustered around—Scott with his endless talk of the ship awaiting them at Xi’Matezh and their lost Earth, as good as found once more.